Over a year ago, Twitter’s former CEO, Dick Costolo, made it clear that Twitter is not great at dealing with user on user abuse. Many quite vocal critics over the years have echoed that stance on Twitter’s attitude toward mediation in user interactions to prevent personal attacks. The site has, for quite some time, required users who felt that somebody had crossed the line to individually flag each of their abusive Tweets to be checked out by Twitter’s safety team. An update rolling out now for iOS, Android and the desktop version of Twitter seeks to change that, allowing users to select multiple Tweets in a single report. In most cases, this will trigger an investigation into the responsible account to determine if disciplinary action, such as account deletion or an IP ban may be in order.
According to Twitter’s official announcement, this update will actually make life a bit easier for Twitter’s safety team and for all users affected by the abuse in a number of ways. For starters, investigating will take less time. Safety team members will no longer have to scour a user’s profile for abusive Tweets if just one is reported, and users will no longer have to send multiple reports that clog up the queues and may even end up handled by different members of staff. Reporting multiple Tweets at once will also allow the safety team to review them in context and more accurately determine exactly what happened, who is to blame, where things went wrong and what action should be taken.
The official announcement also pointed out that more safety and security features will be coming in updates down the line, with no details given at this time for what those updates may be or when they could roll out. Users are simply advised to keep an eye on Twitter’s official safety center to check out current policies and tools, since that’s where new safety updates will be detailed and explained when they hit. The multiple Tweet reporting update should be rolled out to all users on iOS, Android and web versions of Twitter worldwide “in the coming weeks”. No other OSes or versions of the app were announced, but it’s to be assumed that the update should be hitting all users on all platforms.