Twitter Enlists Women Organization for Its Anti-Harassment Policy
The Women, Action & the Media, or simply the WAM organization has teamed up with Twitter in an attempt to make the popular social network a harassment-free environment. This collaboration aims to understand a lot more about how online harassment actually takes place and how 'trolls' behave in order to find better ways of stopping them.
WAM is also one of the groups that forced Facebook to change its policy in regards to 'cruel and insensitive content'. Together with the Everyday Sexism Project and activist Soraya Chemaly, The Women, Action & the Media organization put together a project called the #FBrape campaign which forced 15 brands to withdraw their advertisements and changed the social network's entire view on the matter.
Now, WAM has created an online form that will provide a better tool for online victims to report gender-related harassment. The questionnaires will be verified by members of the organization, then the ones who get approved will be forwarded to Twitter and the organization will track their resolve. Furthermore, the form contains questions designed to provide new information about online harassment and at the end of the testing period all the data gathered will be analyzed in order to find patterns and come up with solutions for stopping the phenomenon.
This announcement comes after the Gamersgate debate, one of the trendiest topics in the last few months which brought online harassment back into the media spotlight. Since the Internet is filled with people who think they are omnipotent but only behind the screen of their computers, several authors who made feminist remarks about the woman's image in modern video games have received online rape and death threats.
