Twitter stepping up efforts to make blocking online users easier

Social media service Twitter is to make it easier to report abusive users and keep track of accounts you have blocked.

Updates are already live with a few users but will roll out across the whole service in the coming weeks.

In our continuing effort to make your Twitter experience safer, we’re enhancing our in-product harassment reporting and making improvements to ‘block’,” Twitter’s director of product management Shreyas Doshi said.

Everything that happens in the world, happens on Twitter – to the tune of more than 500m tweets every day. That can sometimes include content that violates our rules around harassment and abuse and we want to make it easier to report such content. So, we’re improving the reporting process to make it much more mobile-friendly, require less initial information, and, overall, make it simpler to flag tweets and accounts for review.”

The changes will also make it simpler for those who observe abuse, without necessarily enduring it directly, to flag up users.

These enhancements similarly improve the reporting process for those who observe abuse but aren’t receiving it directly,” Doshi added. And to enable faster response times, we’ve made the first of several behind-the-scenes improvements to the tools and processes that help us review reported tweets and accounts.

As for the changes to block, the new blocked accounts page – which you can get to from the settings menu on Twitter.com – shows you the accounts you’ve blocked. We’ll be adding more controls and features to this page in the coming months. Additionally, accounts that you’ve blocked won’t be able to view your profile.”

Starting today we're rolling out an improved way to flag abusive Tweets. See how it works.https://t.co/Yf6cStz0z1

— Support (@Support) December 2, 2014