Women, Action & the Media, a non advocacy group is working with micro blogging site Twitter to improve the social-media service's response to online harassment of women.
A recent Pew study revealed that 26% of women aged between 18 and 24 have been stalked online and approximately 25% have been targets of online sexual harassment. WAM has created an online form that lets "users report gendered harassment details that have never before been tracked and analyzed."
"WAM will escalate validated reports to Twitter and track Twitter's response to different kinds of gendered harassment," the group said in a release. "At the end of the pilot test period, WAM will analyze the data collected and use it to work with Twitter to better understand how gendered harassment functions on their platform, and to improve their responses to it."
“There are a lot of different ways that women are getting harassed and Twitter’s current reporting system isn’t catching all of them,” said Jaclyn Friedman, executive director of Wam. “You might report one tweet, but that may not rise to the level of harassment,” said Freidman. “But if you paint a picture of other harassment, you get a bigger story.”
"We're always trying to improve the way we handle abuse issues, and WAM is one of many organizations we work with around the world on best practices for user safety," Twitter said.
Earlier this year, Twitter has announced a strict 'no porn' policy on its video sharing service, Vine. The company stated in a post that users will no longer be allowed to post and share sexually explicit content on the video sharing site.
Source: WAM