{"id":73512,"date":"2014-11-16T00:05:26","date_gmt":"2014-11-15T22:05:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=73512"},"modified":"2014-11-14T15:58:34","modified_gmt":"2014-11-14T13:58:34","slug":"tackling-the-twitter-abuse-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/internet\/73512\/tackling-the-twitter-abuse-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Tackling the Twitter abuse “crisis”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Women, Action and the Media (WAM<\/a>) activist group announced on Friday a collaboration with Twitter<\/a> to address online harassment of women, which it claims has \u201creached crisis levels\u201d.<\/p>\n

The group, concerned by the vicious targeting of women online, started a pro-bono project to support users experiencing gendered harassment or abuse. Their website now hosts a detailed reporting form<\/a> so they can validate and escalate claims of abuse to Twitter.<\/p>\n

So while this seems a positive step, historically Twitter hasn\u2019t addressed issues of harassment on its platform well at all. Will this new collaboration change anything?<\/p>\n

A growing issue<\/h2>\n

A quarter of 18- to 24-year-old women surveyed<\/a> by the Pew Research Center reported having been stalked or sexually harassed online, and a similar report<\/a> from Demos found terms such as \u201crape\u201d, \u201cslut\u201d and \u201cwhore\u201d were often used in tweets to convey casually misogynistic sentiments, or to threaten and abuse other users.<\/p>\n

High-profile stories<\/a> of online misogyny<\/a> are often reported in mainstream news<\/a>:<\/p>\n