A New Harassment Policy for Twitter - The Atlantic

There are two public-facing pieces to the new features (Twitter also says it’s working on “behind-the-scenes improvements,” but hasn’t detailed what those are). The first is how the service handles blocking. Now, users can see whom they’re blocking in a list in the settings menu, and edit their blocks in one place. Before, many users relied on outside services to manage their growing list of users they didn’t want to see. Now they can do it natively, in Twitter. And if you’re blocking someone, that person will no longer be able to see your profile.

The second piece of the updates involves changing the way users report potentially abusive tweets. This is where many users have been frustrated in the past, feeling as though the options they were given to report tweets was confusing, and the interface difficult to use. (This was especially for third parties trying to report harassment.) In its blog post announcing the updates, Twitter explains that it is “improving the reporting process to make it much more mobile-friendly, require less initial information, and, overall, make it simpler to flag Tweets and accounts for review.”