Twitter Says It Will Take a More Aggressive Stance Against Harassment

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has officially made a statement regarding harassment on the social media platform — including what the company plans on doing to fix it.

The announcement comes on the heels of a boycott where several women — including quite a few celebrities — decided to abstain from Twitter on October 13 in response to Rose McGowan's account being temporarily suspended. Chrissy Teigen was among the stars who decided to join the boycott, and she explained her decision to participate by writing: "They need to see we matter. I'm boycotting for many reasons. To stand with the victims of sexual assault, online threats and abuse. And to boycott the fact our demented, pussy grabbing president can tweet nuclear threats of war I can't even see." Others, however, refrained from the boycott and chose to speak out even louder — refusing to be silenced altogether.

On the same day as the boycott, Dorsey took to Twitter to share how the platform plans to improve its policies in order to make it a safer space. "We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day," his announcement began. "We’ve been working to counteract this for the past 2 years. We prioritized this in 2016. We updated our policies and increased the size of our teams. It wasn’t enough. In 2017 we made it our top priority and made a lot of progress. Today we saw voices silencing themselves and voices speaking out because we’re still not doing enough."

He went on to say that the company has formed new rules with a more aggressive stance, specifying that the rules have to do with "unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence." According to his tweets, these changes will be put into effect next week.

People have often called upon Twitter's executives to tackle the issue of online harassment; in fact, when the company recently rolled out the option to make tweets longer, the internet responded by demanding better policies to keep users safe instead. It remains to be seen what exactly these new rules will be, but hopefully there will be serious steps taken to reduce the bullying and violence that many people encounter on a daily basis.