In response to the sexual assault and harassment cases accusing the producer Harvey Weinstein, Twitter has decided to strengthen the rules of its platform, where harassment remains a major problem. On Tuesday, October 17, the new rules of Twitter had been unveiled by the magazine Wired, which managed to obtain an internal email from the management. On Thursday, they were made official by Twitter, which supplemented them with other decisions and provided a timetable for implementation until January.
For example, it will now be forbidden on the platform to change your username in order to insult someone. Previously, victims of harassment who quoted their attacker’s pseudonym in a tweet found themselves unwillingly broadcasting an insult to their followers.
Twitter will also take a closer look at who the people are who report problematic tweets, and their connection to the harassed or harassing person. Some harassment campaigns sometimes consist in massively reporting the victim’s account, hoping that Twitter will block it by mistake.
