Twitter to introduce 'report abuse' button after petition

Caroline Criado-Perez had appeared in the media as part of her campaign to ensure that women feature on UK banknotes, but was subsequently bombarded with messages of abuse from Twitter "trolls".

Criado-Perez criticised Twitter over its response to the abuse,. She said: "It’s infuriating that the price you pay for standing up for women is 24 hours of rape threats. We are showing that by standing together we can make a real difference. We made the Bank of England change its mind, we can do the same with Twitter."

Over a 48-hour period, more than 50,000 people signed up to a petition campaigning for Twitter to simplify its method for reporting abuse with a "report abuse button".

Over the weekend, Tony Wang, Twitter UK general manager, tweeted, "We take online abuse seriously and provide advice and guidance to our users."

He said: "We’re testing ways to simplify reporting, e.g. within a Tweet by using the 'Report Tweet' button in our iPhone app and on mobile web.

"We will suspend accounts that, once reported to us, are found to be in breach of our rules.

A Twitter spokeswoman added: "The ability to report individual Tweets for abuse is currently available on Twitter for iPhone, and we plan to bring this functionality to other platforms, including Android and the web.

"We don't comment on individual accounts. However, we have rules which people agree to abide by when they sign up to Twitter. We will suspend accounts that once reported to us, are found to be in breach of our rules. We encourage users to report an account for violation of the Twitter rules by using one of our report forms: https://support.twitter.com/forms"

This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk