Twitter is scaling its staff and increasing its options for reporting harassment on, and abuse of, its service.
More specifically, Twitter is adding greater functionality to report tweets and profiles for revealing personal or confidential information of others (“doxing“), impersonation (including allowing reports by those responsible for a child who may be impersonated), and potential self-harm. This last follows a similar announcement by Facebook this week about its work with the University of Washington.
The changes for Twitter users began Thursday and will be rolled out over the next several weeks.
In announcing the expansion, Twitter’s Vice President of User Services Tina Bhatnagar noted that it’s similarly expanded its ability to deal with reports. “We now review five times as many user reports as we did previously, and we have tripled the size of the support team focused on handling abuse reports,” Bhatnagar said in an update on the Twitter blog.
Twitter promises to keep reducing its average response time, now at what Bhatnagar says is, “a fraction of what it was, and we see this number continuing to drop.”
The new reporting forms and options are posted in the Twitter Help Center. One example:
