Twitter’s newly improved tweet-reporting tools are now available to everyone on the platform. The company first began testing the new process for reporting harmful tweets in December, saying it was trying to take a “people first” approach that would make it easier to flag tweets.
Previously, Twitter’s reporting process required users to navigate a series of menus in order to identify the specific rule they believed had been broken. The process was confusing, even for those familiar with Twitter’s policies, and often resulted in problematic tweets not being properly flagged.
The revamped process instead begins each report by asking users to describe “what happened,” rather than prompting them to guess which rule may have been broken. It also makes it easier to report tweets in which someone else is being targeted, and gives users more options for reporting hate speech.
That simplified approach is already paying off, according to Twitter. The company says the new reporting process has resulted in a 50 percent increase in “actionable reports” since it began testing six months ago.