Twitter is taking a stand against Internet trolls and it’s awesome
If you’ve ever been the victim of Twitter trolls, unfortunately you are far alone. For a long time, it’s seemed like the public outcry for Twitter to take responsibility for the outpouring of Twitter hate, including cyber-bullying, harassment, and even death threats has been minimally addressed by the company, if at all. Only now has Twitter released a blog post saying they’ve tripled the number of people on staff responsible for handling abuse reports, and it’s not coming a day too soon.
Although Twitter harassment is pretty common, last year we watched a few especially brutal cases of it blow up in the public eye, including the unfortunate incidence of hate sent toward Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda after his death and the reporter who received death threats from Twitter trolls after innocuously asking if anyone knew of any countries where tampons were subsidized.
“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in a memo in January.
Twitter announced at the end of 2014 that the staff had plans to increase the safety of Twitter, but this round of hirings is the first real step that they’ve taken toward that goal.
— Twitter Support (@Support) December 2, 2014
In addition to upping their staff, Twitter has put stricter guidelines on unacceptable user behavior, giving victimized users the ability to report a broadened umbrella of offenses, including private information leaks and impersonation. With the new team in place, Twitter says it will be able to address five times as many abuse reports as they did in the previous year. The staff also claims that it has put more “enforcement actions” in place to discourage rule violators on the site, although they are not public knowledge at this time.
The memo continues: “The safety of our users is extremely important to us. It’s something we continue to work hard to improve.” Here’s hoping that this is one giant step toward eradicating troll-topia once and for all.
(Image from here.)
