Amidst growing concerns of online harassments in Facebook, which of late has seen a drastic increase, some action from the social media giant was always expected. In a new moved to curb such incidents, Facebook recently announced a set of anti-harassment tools for its Messenger platform.
With almost 1.3 billion active users, Messenger is now a favorite of those, who specialize in this sort of activity. The move is aimed towards safeguarding the interest of vulnerable individuals and groups, who are often the target of much malice and ridicule.
What anti-harassment tools are meant for?
The anti-harassment tools are conceived to identify and restrict blocked contacts from reaching the aggrieved party, by creating a new or separate account.
Moreover, people who are abused online through the Messenger now have an opportunity to filter out conversations, that are completely off-the-hook. In short, without having to block the sender, the messages could be viewed and the sender will never know about it.
Already, the liberal and human rights groups have welcomed this move and are terming it as “concrete steps that in the long runs improves online safety”. Surely, these are good signs and there might be more. Especially in the context of survivors of domestic violence, this new security arrangement offers them some much-needed respite.
How do these tools work?
In a bid to identify the repeated offenders, Facebook will trace the IP address, so as to keep an eye on fake accounts and that of the owner. This is done to prevent the new account owners from contacting someone, who has already blocked them on Messenger.
Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, speaking on the new harassment tools said:”We’ve come across stories of people, who have blocked some users only to find them with a different account. To stop such incidents in the near future, we’re currently working on enhancing the existing security protocols that make it difficult for users to come up fake and inauthentic accounts.”
Unless the person who blocked the original account initiates contact with the new account, the conversation will be a one-way traffic. This, by and large, gives some amount of control to the victim of harassment.
Facebook has also released a feature that allows the user to ignore conversations. The new feature prominently stands out, because not only it disables conversations, but will also move the same into a filtered message folder.
As of now, the new feature is being extended only for one-on-one messages. However, a more enhanced version will be made available soon for group messages.
Bottom-Line
Facebook is also working closely with experts from diverse fields, in order to provide the Facebook users with safety resources. The company has even teamed up with the National Network to End Domestic Violence and is looking at the various threat perceptions and experiences, faced by journalists on Facebook.
The new anti-harassment tools are simple, yet effective. For people, who have been a victim of online abuse, these measures are bound to have a positive impact. Although there is a limit to how much Facebook can control, at least, the new security mechanism will key the online predators at bay, to an extent.
Have any Queries :
For those, who are victims of online abuse, they can contact our Facebook security experts for more information.
