Twitter boosts efforts to stop abuse, spoofing and data leaks

Twitter said Thursday it was ramping up efforts to crack down on impersonation on the messaging platform as well as the leaking of personal, private data. The announcement came as an update to Twitter’s online safety push announced in December. “We streamlined the process of reporting harassment on Twitter recently; now we’re making similar improvements around reporting other content issues including impersonation, self-harm and the sharing of private and confidential information,” Twitter vice president Tina Bhatnagar said in a blog post. “These changes will begin rolling out today and should reach all users in the coming weeks.” Bhatnagar said Twitter is devoting more resources to curbing harassment and other safety issues. “Overall, we now review five times as many user reports as we did previously, and we have tripled the size of the support team focused on handling abuse reports,” she said. “We are also beginning to add several new enforcement actions for use against accounts that violate our rules. 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.” Twitter, which has been growing more slowly than rival social networks, has been making effort to boost confidence and engagement in the one-to-many messaging platform. The number of active monthly users of the San Francisco-based firm grew to 288 million at the end of the past quarter just four million more than in the previous quarter. AFP