Well, I’ll be: staying true to their recent promise to crack down on harassers, Twitter is following Reddit’s example and has updated its terms of service and banned the posting of “intimate photos or videos that were taken or distributed without the subject’s consent.”
Unfortunately, the company’s new restrictions require a fair amount of policing from the people whose intimate images have been shared without consent: the person in the photo must report the problem themselves, and each reposting or manual RT of the image must be reported individually. As heartening as these new measures are, it would be incredible if Twitter developed a photo matching system that took the onus off revenge porn’s victims and didn’t require people reporting an issue to do the potentially traumatizing work of searching for images.
In an interview with Fusion, a Twitter employee who “declined to be named because the company doesn’t have any employees publicly commenting on the new policy” detailed what the company’s new standards might define as “intimate:”
He said that while there’s no hard-and-fast rule on what counts as intimate, the company is trying to get at the ‘range of horrendous behaviors that people engage in’ including not just full frontals and lingerie shots, but up-skirt photos and perhaps even what Reddit likes to call “creep shots,” revealing photos taken of unsuspecting women in public.
Twitter promises to respond to all reports “in a timely manner”; in a recent blog post, the company announced it had tripled the size of its abuse response team, although no specific numbers were given.
(via The Daily Dot)
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