Twitter vows to strengthen self-policing efforts to combat trolls
Twitter has vowed to strengthen its self-policing efforts following a number of recent online abuse cases by making it easier for its users to report such instances.
This follows the high profile cases of feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez and Labour MP Stella Creasy who received abusive messages via the micro blogging service.
Speaking to BBC Newsnight, Del Harvey, head of trust and safety for Twitter, said “I think there is a misperception about how we’ve responded. When we were made aware of the issue over the weekend we reached out privately to both parties and law enforcement and we’ve continued that dialogue.
“These sorts of threats are against the rules, we suspend accounts when they’re reported to us and we’re working to make it easier to report those accounts.
“Part of the problem is that we have a really wide variety of use cases on Twitter, from someone following someone to see tweets to trying to raise awareness of human rights issues. Whilst we want to make it easier for people to report abuse we also want to make it easier to build in protections to prevent people being silenced.
“It’s worth remembering that Twitter is a case where the company got superceded by the brand and the use of it. The way it took off like a rocket ship we’re still trying to make sure that we’ve got everything right that we need to to make people feel safe on that rocket ship.
“We launched a few weeks ago the ability to report a tweet directly from the tweet itself on iOS and mobile and this has underscored to us the need to get that out to all platforms.”