Twitter is expanding its Safety Mode feature, which lets users temporarily block accounts that send harmful or abusive tweets.

Several countries including the UK and the United States are preparing legislation to force all social media sites to act swiftly on hate speech or face fines.

Twitter has struggled to deal with abuse and harassment on its platform and now faces closer scrutiny from regulators.

What is Hate Speech?

Hate speech is abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, skin color sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin.

Victims of hate crimes can include institutions, religious organizations and government entities as well as individuals.

Twitter Is Expanding Its Crackdown on Trolling and Hate

The social media giant is expanding its Safety Mode feature, which lets users temporarily block accounts that send harmful or abusive tweets.

Half of the platform's users in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland will now have access.

Can Twitter Really Tackle Hate Speech?

Twitter has been called to account in numerous Congressional hearings.

In avoiding the gatekeeper role, Twitter established itself as being no more liable for messages conveyed than telephone companies were liable for conversations traveling over their phone lines.

There is enormous concern that false or misleading information is being conveyed by social media, and the solution there is for them to exercise more editorial control.

For years, social media firms have done relatively little to keep hate speech off of their platforms, often accepting racist, homophobic, islamophobic, sexist comments, anti-semitic screeds and comments as the cost of doing business

Calls for blocking certain kinds of speech on social media have grown in recent months.