Twitter, WAM create tool to report women harassment

Partnering with non-profit group Women, Action and Media (WAM), Twitter has created a tool to report women harassment, Capital Technologies, reported.

There had been lot of incidents in recent times of women harassments involving the Twitter platform. The tool would come as a welcome relief for all women on the platform and for the company itself.

According to WAM's executive director, Jaclyn Friedman, they were thrilled to be working with Twitter on a right cause to make the  microblogging site,  a safe place for all women users.

According to recent reports from research conducted by the Pew Research Internet Project, 30 per cent of women on Twitter between the ages of 18 to 24 had experienced sexual harassment. This was a serious issue that had to be looked at and resolved with adequate measures making Twitter safer place for women, she said.

According to the report, women had been subjected to death, rape threats, online stalking, etc, and the initiative by Twitter and WAM would help put an end to the harassment very quickly. With the launch of the new feature on Twitter, it would help women users to speak freely without fearing ending up as targets of abuse, harassment and threats.

Meanwhile CNET reported that one of the groups behind the #FBrape campaign, which compelled Facebook to change its policy on the posting of "cruel and insensitive content" on the world's top social network, had partnered with Twitter for studying how the microblogging service could better police sexual harassment on its site.

WAM said this week that it had created an online form that allowed "users report gender 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."

The announcement comes in the wake of online harassment emerging as a renewed topic of discussion in recent months. A number of feminist critics of sexist imagery in games had received online death and rape threats after the "Gamergate" debate in the video game industry.