Twitter Moves to Suck Less at Dealing With Abusive Trolls
Twitter Moves to Suck Less at Dealing With Abusive Trolls
Twitter might still “suck” at dealing with abusive trolls, but it’s getting a little better.
The micro-blogging platform on Thursday outlined several product updates it’s making to improve user safety.
After recently streamlining the process ofreporting harassment on Twitter, the company is now making similar improvements for reporting other problems — like impersonation, self-harm, and breaches of private and confidential information. The changes started rolling out yesterday and should reach all users “in the coming weeks,” Twitter said.
Over the last six months, the company has also “overhauled” how it reviews reports of abuse. Allowing bystanders to report abuse required that Twitter make “significant” changes to its tools, processes, and workforce. The company has tripled the size of its support team focusing on handling abuse reports, and now reviews “five times” as many user reports than it did before.
“These investments in tools and people allow us to handle more reports of abuse with greater efficiency,” Twitter’s Vice President of User Services, Tina Bhatnagar, wrote in a blog post Thursday. “So while we review many more reports than ever before, we’ve been able to significantly reduce the average response time to a fraction of what it was, and we see this number continuing to drop.”
Bhatnagar said that Twitter has also begun adding several “new enforcement actions” for those who violate the rules, but did not go into detail about the punishments. The Verge reported that Twitter has started tracking the phone numbers of known trolls to block them from creating new accounts.
“These new actions will not be visible to the vast majority of rule-abiding Twitter users — but they give us new options for acting against the accounts that don’t follow the rules and serve to discourage behavior that goes against our policies,” Bhatnagar said.
The changes come after Twitter CEO Dick Costolo earlier this month pledged to do something about the abusive trolls plaguing the social network.
“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” Costolo said in a private memo at the time. “I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It’s nobody else’s fault but mine, and it’s embarrassing.”
malikmuddser