Reporting, Reviewing, and Responding to Harassment on Twitter (with WAM!)

When people experience harassment online, from individual threats or invective to coordinated campaigns of harassment, they have the option to report the harassers and content to the platform where the harassment has occurred.

In November 2014, Twitter granted Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) a special status of “authorized reporter,” which allowed them to quickly communicate these incidents to the company. Our founder Nathan Matias worked with WAM to lead a team that assessed harassment reports and Twitter’s escalation process. While this project wasn’t a CAT Lab project, it was part inspiration for the creation of CAT Lab. Since WAM! no longer exists as an organization, we are archiving information about the project here.

• Research paper: J. N. Matias, A. Johnson, W. E. Boesel, B. Keegan, J. Friedman, C. DeTar. “Reporting, Reviewing, and Responding to Harassment on Twitter.”
• Matias, J. Nathan (2015) The Tragedy of the Digital Commons. The Atlantic.