Twitter representatives were expecting these results

Apr 18, 2015 09:32 GMT  ·  By

It seems that, despite their constant attempts to put an end to the abuse taking place on the website, Twitter still takes the leading position when it comes to the inability of tackling Internet trolls.

A new study shows that almost 88 percent of the online abuse takes place on Twitter, and the executives are not afraid to admit it.

Vijaya Gadde, general counsel for Twitter, did not seem taken aback by the alerting statistics. On the contrary, she declared that they were perfectly aware of the fact that the platform was increasingly affected by online abuse.

In an article for the Washington Post, Miss Gadde emphasized the idea of freedom of expression as one of the attributes Twitter is striving to promote as part of their intention to show that “everyone has a voice and the right to use it.”

However, she admits to this being a seemingly unreachable ideal, given the less fortunate experiences that most users have to deal with when using the social platform.

In response to the study depicting Twitter as the number one social media website when it comes to cyberbullying, the company’s general counsel revealed that their response time was “inexcusably slow” and that the substance of their retort was “too meagre.”

Many of the users who deal with bullying or abuse on Twitter are probably unaware of the fact that the social platform has put at their disposal a few ways of fighting against trolls.

Twitter tried several other measures before

The most common move would be to simply unfollow the person who is bothering you, but Twitter also gives you the possibility to block a user (all you have to do is click on the head icon on the profile of that person, and you should have the option to block them). And if this does not help either, you can just report that person to Twitter.

But, according to Miss Gadde’s sayings, Twitter is working on reducing the number of online threats by increasing that of people working on protecting the users, in order to provide faster replies to those filing the complaints.

The company hopes that this will help them deliver a safer environment for their users and considerably reduce the abusive content.

Only last month, Twitter updated its guidelines and banned revenge porn, which refers to any sort of attempt to reveal intimate videos or pictures to the public without the consent of the person appearing in them.

It remains to be seen whether Twitter’s upcoming measures will manage to stop abusive and hateful tweets and discourage users from posting them on the platform.