Twitter User Safety Features

In December, Twitter announced several product updates that were aimed at improving the safety of users. Here are the latest round of updates that are part of Twitter's long term plan.

The company has streamlined the process of reporting harassment on Twitter recently; now making similar improvements around reporting other content issues including impersonation, self-harm and the sharing of private and confidential information. These changes have begun rolling out today and should reach all users in the coming weeks.

Over the last six months, in addition to the product changes, Twitter has overhauled how they review user reports about abuse. As an example, allowing bystanders to report abuse – which can now be done for reports of private information and impersonation as well – involved not only an update to in-product reporting process, but significant changes to tools, processes and staffing behind the scenes. Overall, Twitter now reviews five times as many user reports as they did previously, and have tripled the size of the support team focused on handling abuse reports.

These investments in tools and people allow them to handle more reports of abuse with greater efficiency. So while they review many more reports than ever before, they been able to significantly reduce the average response time to a fraction of what it was, and see this number continuing to drop.

They are also beginning to add several new enforcement actions for use against accounts that violate their rules. These new actions will not be visible to the vast majority of rule-abiding Twitter users – but they give Twitter new options for acting against the accounts that don’t follow the rules and serve to discourage behavior that goes against policies.

"The safety of our users is extremely important to us. It’s something we continue to work hard to improve. This week’s changes are the latest steps in our long-term approach, and we look forward to bringing you additional developments soon," Twitter told us.