London - Twitter has been accused of putting profits before safety in the case of a feminist campaigner inundated with hundreds of rape and death threats.
Caroline Criado-Perez was targeted because she helped persuade the Bank of England to put the novelist Jane Austen on a new £10 note.
The tweets included death threats, suggestions of horrific sexual abuse and the apparent identification of her home.
Miss Criado-Perez, 29, said Twitter initially ignored her complaints – forcing her to report the messages to the Metropolitan Police whose officers are investigating.
Twitter allows users to report individual offensive messages on a form – but Miss Criado-Perez said this was inadequate for a concerted campaign. More than 13 000 people have now signed an online petition for the social networking service to introduce an electronic button for the reporting of abuse.
Miss Criado-Perez, who lives in London, said: “Twitter needs to be on the side of the victims. The messages I received threatening to find me, rape me and kill me were horrific.
“It’s infuriating that the price you pay for standing up for women is 24 hours of rape threats. We are showing that by standing together we can make a real difference.
“Twitter needs a culture change. When we first tried to contact its management, they blocked their profiles so we could not reach them.
“It is a big organisation and making so much money that they need to protect the safety of their users. A report abuse button will mean hiring monitors to investigate and it will affect their profits.
“But this is a move they need to take. We made the Bank of England change its mind, we can do the same with Twitter.”
Miss Criado-Perez, a freelance journalist, organised the Jane Austen campaign which included a petition signed by more than 35 500 people after the Bank of England decided to replace Elizabeth Fry with Winston Churchill on new £5 notes. That left the Queen as the only woman on sterling bank notes.
Her campaign was a success, with an announcement by the Bank last week that Jane Austen will feature on the new £10 when it is introduced in 2017. But minutes after speaking to the media on Thursday, Miss Criado-Perez started receiving the first of dozens of abusive messages from the Twitter accounts of men.
She reported around 50 of the most offensive to her local police station in London.
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has written to Twitter saying its response was unacceptable.
But Tony Wang, general manager of Twitter UK, said the company takes online abuse seriously.
He tweeted: “We encourage users to report an account for violation of the Twitter rules by using one of our report forms.
“Also, we’re testing ways to simplify reporting, e.g. within a tweet by using the Report Tweet button in our iPhone app and on mobile web. We will suspend accounts that, once reported to us, are found to be in breach of our rules.” - Daily Mail