Twitter Makes It Easier To Report Tweets That Dox You

Twitter says it wants to react faster in dealing with tweets that contain personal information, and so it has expanded its reporting feature to include more details about what the reported tweet contains. If someone maliciously reveals your private information on Twitter — or carelessly shares something they shouldn't — you can now alert Twitter to the fact that a reported tweet contains personal info.

Twitter already features a report button, which enables users to report tweets they feel are in violation of the platform's rules. The company has been criticized for what some feel is a failure to respond to reports in a timely manner, which in some cases could enable harassment to carry on for long periods of time. One particularly problematic issue is doxxing.

The act of doxxing includes revealing someone's personal information — name, address, phone number, or similar info — to the Internet at large without the person's permission. This could result in the person being harassed online and in real life, making it important for services like Twitter to move quickly in pulling the content.

According to a new tweet from Twitter's official 'Safety' account, the company has added new report options related to doxxing in its report functions. As the GIF above shows, users are now able to alert Twitter when a tweet contains information related to doxxing.

The report function's "It's abusive or harmful" contains a section called "Includes private information." By selecting these options, users can now mark that a tweet has contact info, personal financial data, geographic info like an address, an ID or government-issued ID number, or "Other" related data. Twitter says it has added these options in order to more quickly review the offending tweets.