Twitter India and Centre for Social Research launch a public education initiative #Tweesurfing to counter online abuse

Twitter's head of policy in India, Mahima Kaul wrote in a blog post: "One of our most important goals at Twitter is to ensure our service remains safe for all users. At our core, we stand for freedom of expression and showing every side of a story. However, these principles mean nothing if abuse and harassment stifle and silence those who want to use our platform to make their voices heard. We launched #Tweesurfing to raise awareness on online safety."

Twitter recently introduced updates that leverage the platform’s technology to reduce abusive content by stopping the creation of new abusive accounts, aiming to bring forward safer search results, and collapsing potentially abusive or low-quality Tweets.

#Twitter can be used to build a couner narrative to the negative gender norms doing the rounds today #Tweesurfing

— TweeSurfing (@TweeSurfing) June 29, 2017

This is Twitter's attempt to rebrand itself into a more responsible disbursement of news platform. It also combined with Facebook and YouTube for anti-terror pact.

Earlier, Twitter found itself at odds with the EU after Brussels declared that both internet firms failed to meet continent-wide standards on hate speech removal – despite signing up to the European Commission’s code of conduct on the issue last year.

Dr Ranjana Kumar, director of Centre for Social Research and president of WomenPowerConnect at the Centre for Social Research, said in a blog: "#TweeSurfing is the result of a year of working closely with Twitter and youth and digital influencers on online safety workshops across the country. It aims to foster a culture of positive Twitter engagement by promoting the use of counter speech, issue specific campaigns, and developing and sharing user-created best practices."