Washington - Twitter is rolling out the first of several changes to its service to combat online harassment, the company announced on Tuesday.
The social network has simplified the way that users can report abusive behaviour online. It has enabled observers to report coordinated harassment attacks, such as the Gamergate controversy that rocked the videogame world this summer, against an individual user.
Overall, the changes give users more options to describe the kinds of harassment they are seeing online — such as name-calling and violent threats — and those options have been designed to look more like the rest of the site to make the process feel more intuitive.
Twitter also has introduced a page to let users see which followers they blocked in the past. The “blocked accounts” page makes it easier not only to unblock someone, but also to be able to provide a reference point for reporting abuse.
Previously, users had no way of referring back to the accounts they had blocked. If a user blocked someone in the heat of the moment and then wanted to report abuse later, the user had to remember the harasser's username — not always an easy task, particularly if the user was a target of a coordinated abuse campaign.
The page will continue to evolve over time, the company said in a blog post.
In fact, this is the first batch of many changes that Twitter will be making to give users more control over the safety of their accounts, said Del Harvey, Twitter's head of trust and safety. “This is not us saying, 'Well, we've done these things, so nothing bad will happen on the Internet now.' And this is not us trying to sprain our arms while trying to pat ourselves on the back,” Harvey said. “We want to say to people that we are working to improve on this stuff.”
Twitter has been criticised heavily in the past for the prevalence of abuse on its free-flowing social network. The company added a “report abuse” button to its network shortly after British journalist and activist Caroline Criado-Perez faced a flood of abuse over her campaign to get an image of Jane Austen featured on the 10-pound note.
Since then,there has been concern over the harassment of women on Twitter — such as Zelda Williams, the daughter of late comedian Robin Williams, and several people on both sides of the Gamergate controversy.
But in considering how to stop such harassment on the network, Twitter has come up against its own hard-line stance on protecting freedom of expression as it tries to navigate what qualifies as harassment and what doesn't.
Harvey said the company has been working for years on how to balance the thing that makes Twitter tick — users' ability to say whatever they want to the world — with the very serious issues of stopping abuse to ensure that the network is a safe place for its users.
“We must make sure it's not so easy to engage in abuse, but also not cross the line to make it so that you can't post any content,” Harvey said. She said Twitter will look for ways to “de-incentivize bad behaviour” on the site by studying user behaviour, with the aim of better identifying trolls and discouraging them from engaging in harassment — though she did not specify how that might work.
It is unlikely that Twitter will implement suggestions from some anti-harassment advocates, such as blocking the IP addresses of Twitter users who engage in regular abuse.
That method is imprecise, free-speech advocates have said, and could lead to accidentally blocking whole companies or even libraries from the social network. Instead, Harvey said, Twitter wants to provide more tools for users to customise their safety settings.
“I think one of the biggest components of our philosophy around that is we want users to have control over their experience,” Harvey said. “The whole idea of having a blocked-accounts page means you can go back and make changes if you want to. You have control as the user.” - The Washington Post