Twitter beefs up anti-troll tools

Twitter just made it a little bit harder to be a troll.

In the wake of reports about death and rape threats as well as other abuse targeting women as part of the so-called Gamergate movement, Twitter announced Tuesday that it has improved its reporting and blocking features.

The changes, Twitter said in a blog post, will make it easier to police, and respond to, bad behavior among its roughly 284 million active users.

Particularly on mobile, abuse will be easier to report, requiring less information and simplifying the way a user flags accounts or specific tweets for review. It also will become easier for users to report abuse that they see but were not the targets of themselves.

Survey: 40% of Web users have been harassed

The blog post also says Twitter has improved its “behind the scenes” procedures to make reviewing and responding to abuse reports faster.

Unlike Facebook, which requires that users create accounts using their real names, Twitter allows anonymity. That’s why Twitter is sometimes the forum preferred by people who want to harass others. The service has at times come under fire for not doing enough to clamp down on such abuse.

In the past few months, Gamergate has been the driving force behind a new wave of nasty, and widely reported, abuse on the site.

Ostensibly an effort to improve ethical standards in video-game journalism, it quickly devolved into ugliness, with Web users identifying themselves with the movement targeting female game developers and journalists online.