Twitter partnered with a women's rights advocacy group to introduce a new tool aimed at preventing gender harassment and abuse against women on Twitter.
Twitter launched the tool on the social media platform last Thursday, Nov.6 that allows users to report harassment, or to report abuse in behalf of others. The tool will allow them to specify details and describe the who, what, when, where and how of the harassment/abuse, whether or not the victim fears for their own personal safety, the exact sort of abuse experienced and whether the abuse is coming from one person or many.
The details of the abuse are then forwarded to Women, Action & the Media (WAM!), an organization created in 2004 that aims to develop "gender justice in media." WAM will mediate between the complainant and Twitter.
The move comes after Twitter was slammed with #GamerGate hashtag that led to abuse towards women, making female users concerned about their own personal safety.
"We feel that [Twitter's] current reporting tool doesn't capture enough of the context of the way different women are targeted on Twitter," Jaclyn Friedman, executive director of WAM! said in a statement, noting that the tool has already been present even before the heated debate about the #GamerGate came about.
Twitter likewise said that the WAM Twitter Harassment Reporting Tool is just the latest in a series of partnerships that Twitter has joined to combat different forms of abuse on its platform. The tool is hosted on WAM!'s page, rather than within Twitter itself.
Twitter, however, already has its own tool that users can go to to report abuse. That tool allows people to choose the sort of harassment they're experiencing from a menu that includes options like "specific violent threats," but does not offer the same level of detail -- "revenge porn," for example -- that WAM! does.
WAM!'s job in this case is solely data collection, as it is ultimately Twitter's decision on what to do with the reports.
