Twitter has been making some moves to help clean up some of the hateful and offensive tweets on the platform.

The company's chief executive Jack Dorsey has unveiled plans for a new mute button that will let users hide tweets directed towards them.

That action will hide the entry unless readers choose to click and view it. Twitter users can already mute a conversation they're tagged in if they don't want to be notified of the replies.

New approach

In a new blog post made by Donald Hicks and David Gasca, vice-president and senior director of product of Twitter respectively, commented on the companies new approach to harmful and offensive content.

“This encompasses a number of policies, such as abusive behaviour, hateful conduct, encouraging self-harm, and threats, including those that may be violent,"

"The same technology we use to track spam, platform manipulation and other rule violations is helping us flag abusive tweets to our team for review. With our focus on reviewing this type of content, we’ve also expanded our teams in key areas and geographies so we can stay ahead and work quickly to keep people safe.

Reports give us valuable context and a strong signal that we should review content, but we’ve needed to do more and though still early on, this work is showing promise."

Many reports and reactions online to Twitter’s actions have cited that the company is trying to make their platform more appealing to advertisers and other investors. The company also wants to offer transparency when it comes to bands, with case studies that detail why a user has been removed.