"If someone is being harassed, blocking the abuser sometimes prompts additional harassment, particularly offline," Ms Davis said.
The social media giant will act more quickly to stop fake accounts approaching people on its site
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
"We've also heard from groups that work with survivors of domestic violence that being able to see messages is often a valuable tool to assess if there is risk of additional abuse.
"Now, you can tap on a message to ignore the conversation. This disables notifications and moves the conversation from your inbox to your Filtered Messages folder. You can read messages in the conversation without the sender seeing if they've been read.
"This feature is now available for one-on-one conversations and will soon be available broadly for group messages too."
Katie Ghose, chief executive of charity Women's Aid, said she hoped other social media platforms would implement similar tools.
"We have long been calling for technology companies to consider how new platforms or features can be exploited by perpetrators to abuse and control their victims," she said.
"These are welcome steps forward to improve online safety, and we hope that other online platforms and technology companies follow suit to protect survivors and tackle perpetrators of domestic abuse head on."
The announcement came as executives from the social network, as well as Twitter and Google, were heavily criticised by MPs on the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee.
The technology firms were accused of profiting from hateful content on their platforms, and failing to effectively act in the removal of abusive content.
