Twitter App Now Lets You Appeal Violations Directly

Even the best of us sometimes say something we later regret or are interpreted as offensive. Usually, a retraction and an apology is enough. On Twitter, however, you have to fill up an online form and twiddle your thumbs waiting for your account to be reinstated if the powers that be allowed it. Now Twitter is making that process easier by letting you do it all in the app. And, hopefully, it will also take Twitter less time to process those appeals as it has promised.

On the one hand, a laborious and time-consuming appeal process does serve as a deterrent to tweeting something that violates Twitter's policies. On the other hand, it is also too easy to get flagged for something you may have not realized was a violation or was really intended to be "a joke". Either way, too many innocent users may have found themselves waiting for weeks before getting any response from Twitter.

Part of that may have been its own process. Once notified of a violation, a user would have to open up a browser and fill in a form. That may take the support time far longer than necessary to wade through the list. Waiting times can randomly last from few hours to a few weeks, time that Twitter is also losing revenue-generating traffic.

The new in-app appeals system is promised to reduce that by 60%, says Twitter. The notification happens inside the Twitter app itself and the accused need to do only two things. First is to remove the offending tweet. The other is to explain why Twitter should unban you.

The new system does make it easier for the wrongly accused to get their voices heard but hopefully it won't be abused by trolls and misguided users. Then again, those probably won't agree to remove their offensive tweets anyway.