Over the last year, Twitter has been making more robust efforts to help users deal with harassment on its platform.
From this week, recipients of abusive tweets can report multiple messages at once to the company’s so-called “safety team.” Before now, you could only report one abusive tweet at a time, so the new system should offer a clearer picture to investigators of a particular situation where harassment has become a serious issue for a user.
“This update makes it easier for you to provide us with more information about the extent of abuse and reduces the time it takes to do so,” Twitter’s Hao Tang explained in a blog post. “That added context often helps us investigate issues and get them resolved faster.”
The new system is being rolled out now to iOS, Android, and twitter.com in the U.S., while users worldwide should have access to the new feature in the coming weeks.
A short animation posted by Twitter (below) on Monday explains how its safety team – depicted by four people in blue outfits – investigates incidents of abuse whenever you report them. The same animation also shows a police officer sidling up beside the safety team, indicating the company’s willingness to call in the cops if it deems a case serious enough.
Report abuse on Twitter more easily than ever. Find out how to protect yourself and others.https://t.co/1MEfTzkfFL
— Safety (@safety) April 25, 2016
Twitter has been working steadily to deal with abuse on its platform in a more determined manner. The push began in earnest last year after former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo admitted in an internal email that the company “sucks at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.”
He said the lack of effective measures to deal with trolls and harassment was driving away “core user after core user,” and promised tougher action to tackle the issue.
Since then, a number of measures have been rolled out, including the launch of a quality filter, a Safety Center, and, more recently, the establishment of a Trust & Safety Council, all geared toward ensuring users “feel safe expressing themselves on Twitter.”
