Twitter Adds More Options to Report Tweets Sharing Personal Information

Twitter’s looking to improve its response to violations of personal privacy on the platform by adding a new option for users to specify the type of personal information being shared via tweet.

As you can see in the example above, now, when reporting a tweet which shares private information, users will be referred to an extra listing which will enable them to specify whether the tweet contains contact information, a home address or physical location, financial information, or government issued ID info.

Which is good – the capacity to provide more specific information will help users more accurately, and easily, report any such issue at hand, and help Twitter’s team understand the problem faster (and worth noting, Twitter rolled out similar options for spam tweets late last year). But what Twitter hasn’t said is what that means on their end, how Twitter will respond, based on each type of report.

It would make sense, for example, that Twitter might prioritize violations of financial information over others, as that could be immediately harmful. Of course, if Twitter were to come out and say ‘financial reports are treated with more priority’, everyone would start using that, even when the problem wasn’t related, in order to push their issue up the queue, so it makes sense why Twitter might not reveal this. But still, it’s an interesting consideration – Twitter notes in the announcement that this option is about ‘moving faster’ in addressing reports, but the extra classification, you would think, would only improve the speed of response in that they are able to better categorize and sort such, which, you’d assume, relates to the importance of each.

That’s not a bad thing – obviously, some violations are more damaging than others – but it is interesting to consider what those reports actually mean, and how they will, in fact, speed up response.

The new reporting options are being rolled out now, and will be available to all users within the next few days.