Twitter joins the battle against sexual harassment

Twitter joins the battle against sexual harassment

The partnership with WAM will give female Twitter users the ability to report other individuals who harass them on the social network.

Online harassers and misogynists could soon face their own special kind of judgment day. According to a report from USA Today, Twitter is teaming up with Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) to fight against the online sexual harassment of women. WAM! is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advocating for women’s rights and equal treatment.

The partnership between Twitter and WAM! will give female users the ability to report otherĀ individuals who harass them on the social network. A form on WAM!’s website will allow women to report other Twitter users in bulk if those users participate in some sort of “gendered harassment.” The form is designed to help Twitter users report the types of gendered abuse or harassment that are most common, such as hate speech, violent threats, and revenge porn.

While legislation in many states has established strict punishments for revenge porn, violent threats, hate speech, and other types of gendered harassment have been allowed to run rampant on the internet. WAM! will do its best to fight these types of abuse and sexism, and the new reporting form should help with that mission.

Twitter has allowed users to report abuse and harassment in the past, but the reporting form was not nearly as focused as the document provided by WAM! The previous form also only allowed for the reporting of one user at a time, while the WAM! reporting page allows users to list multiple different Twitter handles, to report harassers in bulk.

As WAM! has stated though, this is merely a pilot project, and there is not really any protocol set in stone for how harassers will be punished. “We’re not Twitter, and we can’t make decisions for them,” the introduction to the WAM! reporting form says. Instead, WAM! is going to advocate for abused women online and, in all likelihood, push Twitter to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward gender-related abuse or harassment.

Ultimately, WAM! is hoping to learn “which kind of cases Twitter is prepared (and less prepared) to respond to.”

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