Twitter is finally rolling out a new policy to deal with the trolls that have been attracted to tweeting like moths to a porch light on a warm summer night. Some have even made it a commercial venture.

I’m sure the policy itself will be abused and revised, but it’s a start.

Here’s a news report, followed by the official announcement from Twitter: let the flaming begin…

A New Harassment Policy for Twitter

Twitter has admitted there is a problem. After Zelda Williams signed off for good, the service re-upped its efforts to handle abuse. And today, the service announced a handful of changes aimed at making it easier for victims of harassment to report abusers.

There are two public-facing pieces to the new features (Twitter also says it’s working on “behind-the-scenes improvements,” but hasn’t detailed what those are). The first is how the service handles blocking. Now, users can see whom they’re blocking in a list in the settings menu, and edit their blocks in one place. Before, many users relied on outside services to manage their growing list of users they didn’t want to see. Now they can do it natively, in Twitter. And if you’re blocking someone, that person will no longer be able to see your profile.

The second piece of the updates involves changing the way users report potentially abusive tweets. This is where many users have been frustrated in the past, feeling as though the options they were given to report tweets was confusing, and the interface difficult to use. (This was especially for third parties trying to report harassment.) In its blog post announcing the updates, Twitter explains that it is “improving the reporting process to make it much more mobile-friendly, require less initial information, and, overall, make it simpler to flag Tweets and accounts for review.”

Building a safer Twitter

In our continuing effort to make your Twitter experience safer, we’re enhancing our in-product harassment reporting and making improvements to “block”.

Everything that happens in the world, happens on Twitter - to the tune of more than 500 million Tweets every day. That can sometimes include content that violates our rules around harassment and abuse and we want to make it easier to report such content. So, we’re improving the reporting process to make it much more mobile-friendly, require less initial information, and, overall, make it simpler to flag Tweets and accounts for review. These enhancements similarly improve the reporting process for those who observe abuse but aren’t receiving it directly. And to enable faster response times, we’ve made the first of several behind-the-scenes improvements to the tools and processes that help us review reported Tweets and accounts.