Twitter has come under fire recently for not giving all its users enough adequate tools to filter out tweets from other users who are harassing them, but it appears the social network is now beginning to address those concerns.

Twitter published a blog post on 18 August to announce two features/settings designed to give users more control over their experience on the site. Here's everything you need to know about the features, including how they work.

What is Twitter doing to stop harassment?

Twitter now offers all its users a couple different ways to ensure they won't be harassed on the social network.

Notification settings

The first feature/setting is the ability to limit notifications they see to only the people they follow, which essentially hides any tweets from strangers (aka trolls) who may be using Twitter to abuse or threaten.

Quality filter

The second feature/setting is a quality filter. It's meant to "improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior". In other words, suspicious accounts, new accounts, or spam accounts with irregular or dubious activity will now be automatically filtered from your timeline and notification tab. 

Has Twitter offered anything like this before?

None of these features are technically new.

Twitter has long tested the ability to hide tweets from strangers as well as a quality filter to high-profile users with blue checkmarks. The difference now is that its entire user base will finally have access to the same set of tools. With these settings now widely available and easily accessible, the idea is that Twitter's harassment problem might soon be made a thing of the past (or at least drastically diminished).

How do these features work?

Twitter published the following video to help you figure out how to enable these new features: