Acknowledging that maybe having a grieving daughter driven from your service by users posting Photoshopped pictures of her dead father’s body might indicate a slight problem with its community, Twitter has responded to Zelda Williams’ retreat from social media yesterday, saying it’s looking at ways to improve its response to harassment.
“We will not tolerate abuse of this nature on Twitter ,” said Del Harvey, head of Twitter’s Trust & Safety Team, whose stated goals are to “ensure user trust, protect user rights, and mitigate legal risk through policy definition, TOS enforcement, and safety advocacy.” He continued:
“We have suspended a number of accounts related to this issue for violating our rules and we are in the process of evaluating how we can further improve our policies to better handle tragic situations like this one. This includes expanding our policies regarding self-harm and private information, and improving support for family members of deceased users.”
It’s not clear what the service’s self-harm policies have to do with this issue, though it probably doesn’t mean “encouraging people who harass grieving family members with morgue photos to harm themselves instead.”