Facebook has today announced new tools to prevent harassment on its site and Messenger platform. The tools have been created based on feedback both from users and organizations for groups that experience higher levels of harassment online, like women and journalists.
The new tools will proactively recognise when a blocked contact tries to send friend requests and messages to someone on Facebook through a new account. It will provide the user with an option of ignoring the unwanted conversations on the Messenger App without having to block the sender.
These automated features will identify fake accounts more quickly and block millions of them at registration every day. It uses various signals such as IP address to proactively recognize fake accounts more quickly in order to prevent its owner from sending a message or friend request to a person who has previously blocked them.
Facebook also offers special help to survivors of domestic violence who may suffer additional harassment, particularly offline, by blocking the abusers. In order to ignore the messages, you can tap on a message to ignore the conversation which will disable notifications and moves the conversation from your inbox to your Filtered Messages folder. You can read the messages without letting the sender know that you have read the message. This feature is currently available to one on one messages, but will soon be open to group messages as well.
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Meanwhile, in a related story, Facebook has announced another new tool on its platform, known as the Photo Review. The feature is based on the facial recognition technology, which let users know that they are spotted in friends picture or video, but the person has not tagged them.