We know Twitter has a trolling problem, but save from making humans not mean, or altering the privacy settings on Twitter and removing the heart of what makes it unique and useful (anyone who has seen news breaking on Twitter will know what we're on about) it's difficult to know how to combat it. How do you stop outpourings of hate? How do you stop targeted abuse and misogyny and racism on a social media platform that's hinged on free speech and a lack of censorship?
Twitter's CEO has gone about it by tripling the number of staff working on its abuse reports, after revealing it receives around five times more abuse reports than it did six months ago. 'These new actions will not be visible to the vast majority of rule-abiding Twitter users, but they give us new options for acting against the accounts that don’t follow the rules, and serve to discourage behavior that goes against our policies,' it said in a blog post on Thursday night.
This comes after CEO Dick Costolo spoke quite candidly in a memo leaked earlier last month about how they 'suck' when it comes to dealing with abuse. 'We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years. It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.
I'm frankly ashamed of how poorly we've dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It's absurd. There's no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It's nobody else's fault but mine, and it's embarrassing. We're going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them. Everybody on the leadership team knows this is vital.'
Later on, and speaking about the memo, Dick went on to tell the New York Times that he's going to start implementing real change when it comes to trolling: 'One of the reasons I was so blunt about it was that I wanted to really send a wake-up call to the company that we’re going to get a lot more aggressive about it, and it’s going to start right now.'
Good, because with stuff like Gamergate and people quitting Twitter left right and centre for astonishing levels of abuse (remember when trolls attacked Matt Lucas about his former partner who had died? Great) it's about time the company started taking this seriously. While they haven't gone into detail as to what exactly will be done, it looks like something is finally changing. We hope.
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Follow Stevie on Twitter: @5tevieM
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.