The Good (and the Bad) of Twitter's New Bid to Stop Harassment

Is the Internet a safe space for women?

It's a huge question-yet, more and more, the answer seems to be a clear no. Last month, online abusers drove female video game critics and developers out of their homes with violent threats. One critic's public event had to be canceled because of a promise of mass shootings. And a new Pew study put the harassment in statistically sharper terms: 25 percent of young women have been sexually harassed online, and 26 percent have been stalked.

This kind of online stalking and harassment isn't new itself, but its recent visibility has accelerated the conversation about what we should be doing to protect women from abuse on the web. Much of this conversation has centered on Twitter, where so much recent abuse has happened. Because of Twitter's open nature-any user can send a message to any other user, in public-it's especially vulnerable to mass harassment and abuse.

On Thursday, the nonprofit organization Women, Action, and the Media-abbreviated WAM! or WAM-announced a new initiative with Twitter, to try to make the service safer for women. That partnership has been widely greeted as a step forward, a sign Twitter is finally taking harassment seriously. To my eye, though it just seems like another stopgap-and further evidence Twitter isn't yet willing to invest to protect its most vulnerable users.

WAM, in effect, got super powers within Twitter's moderating environment. After submitting an abuse report to Twitter, users can now also submit one to WAM. WAM will make sure the users's claims are credible, then 'escalate' the report in Twitter's system, flagging it for immediate handling by the company's moderators.

While WAM hopes to bring all expedited reports to a 'speedy resolution' within 24 hours of receiving them, it cautions, 'we're not Twitter, and we can't make decisions for them.' It instead will advocate for users within the moderation system.

WAM will also be keeping track of whose reports get handled and whose don't. Using its access to Twitter's moderation system, WAM will be collecting data on how poorly gendered abuse is handled across the site.

WAM won't have these super powers forever, nor does it want them. Its executive director Jaclyn Friedman told me that she thought the program's initial test period would run for only about a month.

Even only a few weeks, she hopes, will give it a sense of how well or poorly abuse reports are handled across the site. It will also let WAM figure out what Twitter's moderators consider okay.

'We'll be escalating [harassment reports] even if they don't fit Twitter's exact abuse guidelines,' Friedman said. WAM intends to 'cast a wider net' and see what Twitter's moderators address.

WAM is a small nonprofit outside of Boston with a staff of two. Those two employees will be doing all the work: Friedman and WAM's community manager, Mina Farzad, will personally read and vet every harassment report that WAM receives.