Twitter announced a new abuse and bullying policy on Tuesday that focuses on three areas: Controls, Reporting, and Enforcement. In their blog, Twitter said, “Twitter happens in public and in real-time, we’ve had some challenges keeping up with and curbing abusive conduct. We took a step back to reset and take a new approach, find and focus on the most critical needs, and rapidly improve.”
Controls
Twitter’s “mute” feature has been in existence for a while now, but now more functionality is coming. Twitter will now let users mute keywords, phrases, and even entire conversations you don’t want to see notifications about. This feature will be rolling out in a few days.
Reporting
Twitter is also giving users a better way to report specific conduct that targets people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease. Their “Hateful Conduct Policy” is laid out here. They did not outline how to report someone, but I would expect that further instructions will be rolling out soon too.
Enforcement
Twitter’s staff has all been retrained all of their support teams on the new policies and have improved internal tools and systems to handle reported abuses cases in a more efficient manner.
Twitter has had a rough couple months – with everything from a failed sale, >to big layoffs, and dropping stock prices. This is something our podcast has talked about frequently on our show. Most recently, we talked about this in our podcast with Rand Fishkin of Moz. Here is a segment from our podcast where we compared the differences between Moz Community and Twitter:
