A Healthier Twitter: One Year In

We want people to feel safe on Twitter. Last year, we shared that building a Twitter free of abuse, spam and other things that distract from the public conversation is our top priority. Since then, we’ve made strides in creating a healthier service. Today, we’re sharing an update on our progress and previewing changes you can expect to see in the next few months.

Here is a summary of progress we’ve made with more detail below:

• 38% of abusive content that’s enforced is surfaced proactively instead of relying on reports
• 16% less abuse reports after an interaction from an account the reporter doesn’t follow
• 100,000 accounts suspended for creating new accounts after a suspension during January-March 2019 – a 45% increase from the same time last year
• 60% faster response to appeals requests with our new in-app appeal process 
• 3 times more abusive accounts suspended that are reported to us within 24 hours compared to the same time last year
• 2.5 times more private information removed with a new, easier reporting process

Taking Action Without Reports
People who don’t feel safe on Twitter shouldn’t be burdened to report abuse to us. By using technology, 38% of abusive content that’s enforced is surfaced proactively instead of relying on reports. This encompasses a number of policies, such as abusive behavior, hateful conduct, encouraging self-harm, and threats, including those that may be violent.

The same technology we use to track spam and other rule violations is helping us flag abusive Tweets to our team for review. With this focus on reviewing this type of content, we’ve also expanded our teams in key areas and geographies so we can stay ahead and work quickly to keep people safe. Reports give us valuable context and strong signal that we should review content, but we’ve needed to do more and this work is showing promise.

What’s to Come
Keeping people safe on Twitter remains our top priority, and we have more changes coming to help us keep working towards that goal. Here’s some of what to expect in the coming months:

• We’ll continue to make changes that will allow us to remove content that breaks our rules faster and before it’s reported, specifically those who tweet private information, threats and other types of abuse.
• We’ll make it easier to share specifics when reporting so we can take action faster, especially when it comes to protecting peoples’ physical safety.
• Context on tweets and our enforcement is important in understanding our rules, so we’ll add more notices within Twitter for clarity, such as if a Tweet breaks our rules but remains since the content is in the public interest. 
• We are updating our rules in the next few weeks so they’re shorter, simpler and easier to understand. 
• Starting in June, we’ll be experimenting with ways to give people more control over their conversation by giving them an option to hide replies to their Tweets.

We have more to do to ensure everyone feels safe on Twitter, and will keep sharing progress on @Twittersafety.