Twitter Ups its Fight Against Online Harassment

To streamline the effort it takes users to report cases of abuse or harassment experienced on the micro-blogging platform, Twitter has engineered a way for users to report multiple abusive tweets at the same time. Prior to the April 25th announcement, users could only report on one tweet at a time. While the new method can showcase a history of abusive comments to Twitter’s Trust and Security team members, users will not be able to flag multiple accounts in the same report.

The new mechanism will clearly benefit users as well as Twitter employees tasked with locating and evaluating reported accounts. When users could only report on individual tweets, the safety team was required to spend more time soliciting further information from the reporting user, or to put together the harassment trail on its own.

Nonetheless, other obstacles remain. For instance, ISIS users are known to operate multiple accounts or to quickly reestablish new accounts if one of their’s is removed. The need to write up multiple reports, quickly, and thoroughly may deter users to report all that they know or experience in this realm.