Within Twitter’s walls CEO Dick Costolo has admitted that the social platform isn’t all that effective at handling abuse. What he actually said “we suck at dealing with abuse.” Now Twitter is looking to tackle abuse by issuing temporary bans to accounts and a couple of improvements in its approach to user safety.
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One of the main elements of this approach is that the offending member to have to confirm their email address or phone number to return to the platform.
While the company doesn’t require users to provide a phone number, Twitter will request that they verify both an email and phone number if the troll continues to offend. If the contact information happens to be on a ban list then that user is suspended permanently.
Also being implemented is allowing for bystanders to report offenses such as harassment, impersonation, etc. Speaking of those offenses, the platform will make things easier to report by eliminating a few steps. These features were largely centered on the mobile version of Twitter back in December.
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Tina Bhatnagar, VP of user services further discussed the investments In user safety saying that Twitter has seen a large increase in user reports and that they have “tripled the size of the support team focused on handling abuse reports.”
The overall goal to protect those who Twitter without the intent of harassing others is a noble one as any company would seek to protect its customer base. The new approach is a good step towards handling a problem that has been called out for some time now, but there’s still loopholes in the form of trolls being able to just start a new account when prompted to confirm their account. Expect that Twitter is looking at ways to tackle this particular problem.
