Facebook Fights Abuse Better, Twitter Fights Spammers Better

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 20 Oct 2009

One problem that some Facebook users experience is abuse. Some bully, harass, or behave in an offensive manner towards a small fraction of Facebook account holders. It is something that happens - rarely, but it happens. Consequently the team behind the popular social networking site is improving the manner in which it responds to abuse reports.

A bit of help from the abuse victim is required. The Facebook user that experienced abuse must provide “accurate and detailed information” to help the Facebook team locate and remove abuse from the social networking site. Since the info must be accurate and detailed, the report abuse feature has been enhanced to allow abuse victims to send specific and detailed reports.

“Specifically, we created much more granular reporting categories for you to classify the issues you may come across. We also added new fields where you can detail the location of abuse that occurs in videos or text. For example, if you want to report offensive content in a video, you now can tell us the specific time during the video when the abuse occurs. Or if you're reporting a note, you can copy and paste the offensive text directly from its source. The information you provide helps our international team of professional reviewers prioritize reports and know what they're looking for when reviewing the content,” explained User Operations Team member, Jessica Ghastin.

Moving on, popular micro-blogging site Twitter is tackling unwanted things as well – not abuse, but spam. Nobody likes to get spam messages in their email inbox, and they definitely do not want to be spammed in Twitter. So the team behind Twitter has released a new tool that lets you flag accounts used for spam.

“Folks can now help us conquer spam by calling our attention to a profile they find questionable. Click the “Report as spam” button under the Actions section of a profile’s sidebar and our Trust and Safety team will check it out to see what needs to be done. No automated action will be taken as a result of reporting a user as spam (in other words, it can't be used to incite an angry mob against an account you don't like.) And once you report a profile it will automatically be blocked from following or replying to you,” explained Twitter’s Jenna Dawn.


Latest News


Sony's 'Attack of the Blockbusters Sale' Slashes Prices in Half for a Ton of PS4 Games

17 Aug 2017

How Samsung's New T5 Compares to the Old T3 Portable SSD (Infographic)

17 Aug 2017

See all