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Twitter Promises It's Doing Way Better With Harassment These Days

Twitter says it's taking 10 times as many actions against abusive accounts as it was last year.

Twitter Promises It's Doing Way Better With Harassment These Days
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Article by Matt Picht
SMS
July 20, 2017

Twitter says its ongoing fight with harassment is proving fruitful — but you'll have to take its word for it.

In a new blog post, Twitter says it's acting against 10 times more abusive accounts now than it was at this time last year. 

Those actions range from placing temporary limiters on flagged accounts to outright suspension. The company says this slap on the wrist is often enough to break bad behavior — 65 percent of limited accounts are only limited once.

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On the other end of the spectrum, Twitter says it's cracking down on serial abusers who make new accounts after being banned. Over the last four months, Twitter says it has doubled the number of duplicate accounts it has removed.

Those numbers all come from Twitter's internal data. The company hasn't shared that info, so there's not really a good way to verify those claims. 

And anecdotally, Twitter users are still frustrated with the level of abuse on the site. A recent BuzzFeed report about Twitter harassment suggested the company is "slow or unresponsive to harassment reports until they're picked up by the media."