The company has said that it will do more to tackle abuse and harassment on the platform, as it rolls out new safety councils made up of a slate of new anti-harassment features that will be introduced through 2016.
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Twitter CEO and founder Jack Dorsey.
The primary job of the council, Cartes explained, will be to help make sure that users “can continue to express themselves freely and safely on Twitter“. At a time when blogging was hitting its stride, bloggers appreciated the way Twitter simplified the way it updates followers and users, of course, appreciated the ability to get several updates in the same feed coupled with the freedom to pursue stories at their leisure.
Cartes continues: “With hundreds of millions of Tweets sent per day, the volume of content on Twitter is massive, which makes it extraordinarily complex to strike the right balance between fighting abuse and speaking trurth to power”.
But with the formation of the Trust & Safety Council, Twitter is clearly taking a more assertive stance in limiting expression in the digital 21st century.
The new Twitter task force comes on the heels of safety policies implemented past year and the creation of the Twitter Safety Center that also aimed to address the extensive trolling that led many users – especially female celebrities whose accounts helped propel Twitter’s growth – to abandon the platform. Everyone from safety advocates to academics to researchers will advise Twitter on how to establish “greater compassion and empathy on the Internet”, as will “grassroots advocacy organizations that rely on Twitter to build movements and momentum”.
“ADL has been tracking, exposing, and responding to hate online since 1985, and we’re honored to be one of the inaugural members of the Twitter Trust & Safety Council announced today”.
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For a full list of participating organizations, check out Twitter’s blog post here.
