After a petition brought over 66,000 people to Twitter’s virtual doorstep, the company says it will be expanding its abuse reporting processes.
The company’s UK-arm explained in a blog post titled “We hear you,” that it already rolled out a way to report individual tweets from the tweet itself three weeks ago. This feature, however, is only available on the social network’s iOS apps. Twitter promises to add the option to its Android and Web presences, though no time table for this release was given.
The Change.org petition was created after a Caroline Criado-Perez lobbied the Bank of England to include more women on its bank notes. She succeeded in getting Jane Austin on the ten pound note, but a number of people were not happy with her efforts. After news of the ten pound note design got out, people tweeted rape threats and other abusive messages to her. She found that there was little way to escape the tweets and it was difficult to report them.
Digital bystander Kim Graham saw the issue and decided to start the petition saying, “It is time Twitter took a zero-tolerance policy on abuse and learns to tell the difference between abuse and defense.”
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Twitter further explained in the blog post that the sheer number of tweets across the globe makes it difficult for the company to manually review every single tweet, so it has automated and manual processes in place.