Twitter has plans to help you filter out unwelcome tweets

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Twitter has plans to tackle abuse.

There's a lot of abuse and harassment dished out on Twitter - check out the mentions for most celebrities and politicians if you don't believe us - and the platform has come in for plenty of criticism for not dealing with its troll problem sooner.

Now Bloomberg says help is on the way, with a new keyword-filtering tool to allow users to remain blissfully unaware of the vitriol being sent in their direction. Swearwords and racial slurs could be blocked from a user's notifications screen, for example.

This is according to "people familiar with the matter" rather than Twitter itself, so there's nothing official yet, but we know the social network has been working on improving its anti-harassment features for some time. The fruits of those labours are apparently almost ready.

Word on the tweet

Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones was one of the latest high-profile celebrities to be targeted by trolls on Twitter and she briefly quit the platform in response. Many other stars from all walks of life have also been forced off the network because of the abuse coming their way.

That's obviously not a good look for Twitter and CEO Jack Dorsey is said to have made tackling abuse one of his top priorities. The keyword filtering tool has been around a year in the making, Bloomberg says.

It could also potentially be used to filter out any kind of comments or hashtags you're not keen on seeing, if it goes live - maybe you could use it to try and avoid Game of Thrones spoilers on the web too.

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David Nield
Freelance Contributor

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.