Twitter is stepping up its battle against user abuse and harassment with new rules that prohibit the posting of revenge porn i.e. images of nudity or sexual acts posted without the subject’s permission. Twitter has updated its privacy policy with new language that forbids users from posting so-called revenge porn. The new rules read, “You may not post intimate photos or videos that were taken or distributed without the subject’s consent.”
“Users who wish to report tweets under the guidelines will need to verify their identity and that they are the subject of the photo or video”, a Twitter spokesperson said. Twitter will then review the post to see if it violates their policy. If it does, the tweet will be hidden and the user who posted it will be locked out of their account until they delete it. Twitter says the Trust and Safety team, who is in charge of handling these cases, will be online 24/7 to oversee these requests.
The changes come as Twitter and other social networks try to crack down on the amount of harassment happening on social networks. Twitter has been struggling with containing harassment on its platform for years.
In a series of memos to employees in February which got leaked, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo took personal responsibility for what he called an inadequate response to the chronic abuse and harassment that occurs daily on the social network and vowed to take stronger action to eliminate the activity from the microblogging platform.
“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” Costolo wrote in one of the internal memos. “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.”
There have been many cases. Robin Williams’ death in August led some Twitter users to sending vicious messages to his daughter, prompting her to delete the app from her phone. That same month, Anita Sarkeesian, an academic highlighting how women are portrayed in video games, was so disturbed by the tweets she received that she fled her home for fear of safety.
The California Department of Justice has also recently cracked down on cases of revenge porn and last month it convicted one website owner of 27 felony counts, the first time the state criminally prosecuted such a case.
This was a much needed step, which Twitter finally took and It is definitely going to help millions of its Users.
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