Twitter is adopting a more transparent approach to handling online abuse, the company’s Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey announced on Tuesday. Dorsey took to Twitter earlier today to promise how the San Francisco-based social media giant will now attempt to solve cases of online abuse by promoting real-time dialogue with its affected users. Dorsey’s announcement was posted in response to Ed Ho, Twitter’s Vice President of Engineering, who admitted that the company didn’t handle abuse quickly enough last year and is now looking to make amends. The company’s primary focus is making Twitter as safe as possible, Ho said on Tuesday.
Twitter’s new strategy for handling abuse will entail a number of product changes that will start rolling out in the coming days, Ho revealed. Some of these changes have already been announced in the past and include a system for preventing repeated offenders from constantly making new accounts. A number of other additions and improvements will be less direct and visible, but all of them will be designed to work together and ultimately turn Twitter into a social network that handles abuse in a manner that’s both quick and transparent. Ho pointed out how all upcoming product changes are prone to be modified in the future based on community feedback, which is why he asked users to send their suggestions and criticism whenever possible.
The San Francisco-based company had issues with handling abuse in the past and was often criticized for being too slow to act. The firm established a special council tasked with handling abuse back in early 2016, but without much success. Nonetheless, Twitter seemingly isn’t discouraged by previous developments and is adamant to continue making attempts to handle abuse until it comes up with a solution that’s efficient enough. The announcement of new product changes comes shortly after Twitter announced major cost-cutting efforts as the firm is currently in the process of streamlining its operations with the goal of focusing on profitability. This new strategy recently resulted with the company announcing significant layoffs and shutting down a number of its products like Vine. It remains to be seen whether Twitter will manage to regain some of its lost value over the course of this year.