Ever since Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was alleged to have turned up the internal heat on his site’s issues with abuse, harassment, and trolling, the company has been on a tear to improve its reporting and response mechanisms. Its latest announcement, while brief, is the first since that Costolo story to mention “local authorities” and offer a nicely packaged way to efficiently get bad tweets into cops’ hands.
The Tuesday announcement, which gave a nod to the National Network to End Domestic Violence for its feedback, included screenshots of an updated abuse-report process on Twitter’s desktop Web interface. After a report has been filed to Twitter, users can ask for an e-mailed copy “for your records or to bring to your local authorities.” That will trigger an automated e-mail with the text of the offending tweet, its original URL and timestamp, and information about who generated the report and at what time.
Twitter’s choice of phrase makes it pretty clear that the site is not about to start passively handing over such reports to the authorities. Thankfully, any generated report includes a link to Twitter’s handy guide to law enforcement; with that, even a tech-ignorant police department can get a grip on what the social network site is about and how non-public information can be more quickly requested.
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