With about 500 million tweets sent per day worldwide, harassment and abusive comments are bound to hit the microblogging website.
It s a problem that Twitter s executives, including Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, have admitted they could do a better job of combating.
Even when we have recognized that harassment is taking place, our response times have been inexcusably slow and the substance of our responses too meager, wrote Vijaya Gadde, Twitter s general counsel, in a column published in The Washington Post Thursday.
So what is Twitter doing about it?
The company has tripled the size of the team tasked with combating abuse, allowing Twitter to respond to five times the amount of user complaints more quickly, Gadde wrote. It rolled out new tools this year such as a filter to screen out threats and offensive language.
Twitter has also updated its safety policies, barring revenge porn and broadening its definition of abuse to include indirect threats of violence.
Twitter is not alone when it comes to grappling with how to deal with abusive content, which isn t always black and white because of free speech issues. Other social networking companies such as Facebook have also been updating their user guidelines.
That s exactly what Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, did this week, clarifying what is and isn t allowed on the website.
Nudity, for example, isn t allowed on the photo-sharing website but there are exceptions. Photos of post-mastectomy scarring and women actively breastfeeding are allowed and so is nudity in photos in paintings and sculptures.
Photo Credit: Laura A. Oda/Bay Area News Group
