Twitter, facing pressure for not doing enough to curb abusive behavior on its platform, said on Tuesday it would upgrade some features to better combat cyber-bullying and harassment. Twitter has long had a feature called "mute" which enables users to mute accounts they don’t want to see Tweets from. Now Twitter is expanding mute to notifications. Users can mute keywords, phrases, and even entire conversations they don’t want to see notifications about, rolling out to everyone in the coming days.

Twitter's hateful conduct policy prohibits specific conduct that targets people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease. Today Twitter is giving users a more direct way to report this type of conduct for themselves, or for others, whenever they see it happening. This will improve Twitter's ability to process these reports, which helps reduce the burden on the person experiencing the abuse.

And finally, on enforcement, Twitter has retrained all of its support teams on its policies, including special sessions on cultural and historical contextualization of hateful conduct, and implemented an ongoing refresher program. The compny has also improved our internal tools and systems in order to deal more effectively with this conduct when it’s reported to Twitter.

Twitter, which has struggled to strike a balance between free expression and blocking violent and hateful speech, has come under increasing criticism following complaints from users that they have been the target of abuse.

In July, Twitter permanently banned some user accounts for harassment after Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones left the site, saying she had faced severe harassment.