Twitter's plan to crack down on trolls and online abuse

Twitter has announced details of a new, hardened approach to dealing with trolls and online abuse in order to improve the safety of its users.

The social media giant has come under mounting pressure to deal with the soaring levels of abuse on its site. Earlier this month, an internal memo revealed CEO Dick Costolo admitting that Twitter "sucks at dealing with trolls".

The company says it has already overhauled how it reviews reports of abuse, which involved "significant changes" to its tools, processes and staffing. "These investments allow us to handle more reports of abuse with greater efficiency," it added.

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Since improving reporting policies in December, Twitter says it now receives five times as many abuse reports and has tripled the size of its support team tasked with handling them.

New measures will include forcing users who receive temporary bans to verify a telephone number before they are allowed back on the site. This will make it easier for Twitter to cross-check phone numbers against repeat offenders and ban them permanently.

The company has also pledged to introduce further improvements to its abuse reporting tools, and make it easier for users to filter abusive messages out of their replies.

It also plans to shift "the cost of dealing with harassment" on to the abusers, rather than the victims, Costolo told the New York Times. However, he gave no details on how the company plans to accomplish this.

Costolo claimed the leaked memo showed his determination to deal with the problem. "I wanted to really send a wake-up call to the company that we're going to get a lot more aggressive about it, and it’s going to start right now," he said.

"Some people believe that Twitter hasn't taken the issue seriously because harassment isn't a form of physical harm – they're just tweets. No, that's not true at all. We've always taken it seriously," he added.

"This move doesn't resolve Twitter's whack-a-mole troll problem entirely," says The Verge. But it does "add a layer of friction to the lives of the most dedicated trolls, and in that sense it could at least begin to address the issue".