Twitter to Reduce Visibility of Disruptive, Negative Accounts

Twitter Inc. is taking another step to reduce the amount of harmful content on its site, this time expanding the effort beyond users who explicitly break the social network’s rules.

The company says there is a small number of Twitter accounts with a highly negative effect on other users’ experience on the app. These accounts may be spreading spam messages, commenting in abusive or disruptive ways, or trying to game the formula for search results, promoting irrelevant content. These people -- or bots -- don’t necessarily merit outright banning from the site, but this week Twitter plans to start reducing their visibility in comment threads and search results, or any part of the app where an algorithm determines the order of people’s posts.