Twitter says its anti-abuse efforts are working

PanARMENIAN.Net - A sustained push to reduce abuse on Twitter has shown promising results, the company said, citing internal data suggesting the company is taking action on significantly more hostile accounts while reducing the amount of vitriol seen by users. The majority of disciplined user accounts do not commit a second infraction, Twitter said, suggesting it has had success in reshaping some users’ behavior. But Twitter did not share the hard numbers behind its data, and users continue to post accounts of the company appearing to ignore physical threats, The Verge reports.

In a meeting with reporters, Twitter executives laid out the following results of their anti-abuse efforts. The company:

- is taking action against 10 times more accounts this year than it did last year, amounting to “thousands more” every day. has discovered twice as many accounts created by users who were previously banned.

- saw a 25 percent decline in abuse reports linked to accounts that were disciplined by making their tweets visible only to their followers for a period of time.

- found that 65 percent of accounts that were disciplined have not offended a second time.

- saw a 40 percent reduction in blocks received from accounts that recently received mentions from an account that doesn’t follow them. (This suggests that replies from non-followers that contained abuse were never surfaced to the user, thanks to improved muting controls Twitter says.)

Twitter declined to release the raw data behind any of its observations, although it will consider doing so in the future, said Del Harvey, the company’s vice president of trust and safety. (Among other things, Twitter is concerned that releasing the data could subject it to new requests from governments and law enforcement agencies, a spokeswoman said.)

Twitter’s announcements follows a series of product changes designed to reduce abuse, following years of neglect. Over the past year or so, the company has begun collapsing abusive or low-quality tweets in replies, created more notification filters to block mentions from new and unverified accounts, and built a separate inbox for direct messages from accounts that a user does not follow. It also redesigned its reporting tools in an effort to make them easier.