Twitter is aiming to make significant improvements to its platform over the course of this year, designed to tackle online harassment and set to take effect later this week. The company's VP of engineering, Ed Ho, confirmed so earlier today.  

Making Twitter a safer place is our primary focus and we are now moving with more urgency than ever.

— Ed Ho (@mrdonut) January 31, 2017

The changes will include fixes to the mute/block features on Twitter, as well as putting in added measures to prohibit serial abusers from creating new accounts on the social media platform.

Ho did not get into the specifics involved with the changes, but did mention that making the platform safer for its users was the company's primary focus. Furthermore, he acknowledged that Twitter has been slow to act in addressing abuse, and that they'll be more active in receiving and acting upon feedback from its users.

These improvements to the platform are long overdue, but how much safer it will make Twitter remains to be seen.