Twitter has been a haven for all sorts of activity. While there has been a lot of social good on the microblogging site, much ill has been done on there as well. For example, Twitter was used to attack a number of feminist activists in 2014, when a number of hackers revealed their private data. Many have criticized Twitter for not offering sufficient tools for punishing them. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo recently admitted in a leaked memo that "we suck at dealing with abuse" and promised to do better. The latest update to Twitter may provide that.
Ars Technica reported that Twitter has added a "report dox" function to the site that will help protect victims from doxxing and revealing personal information. If a user posts private information about an individual, or "doxes" them, that individual can report the user and eventually have the user's account locked down.
The announcement, posted by Twitter Vice President of User Services Tina Bhatnagar, revealed that Twitter has also tripled their abuse-report staff since December, which has created a significant speed increase on Twitter's average time per report. The team still has a large backlog to work through, but Twitter says that the time required to work through each report is significantly smaller.
The post also mentioned "several new enforcement actions for use against accounts that violate our rules." While Bhatnagar doesn't reveal specifically what that will entail, sources told Ars Technica that one of the enforcement actions will include a "contact-information verification system" that will require users who were either warned or temporarily banned to provide the company with either a phone number or email in order to start using the service again. This won't be the only tool, but it will be a significant one.
