On Thursday, Twitter announced that its abuse-report system, which was recently refined to simplify and shorten the reporting process, has now expanded to allow users to report content such as self-harm incidents and "the sharing of private and confidential information" (aka doxing).

The announcement, posted by Twitter Vice President of User Services Tina Bhatnagar, explained that December's report-process update was met with a "tripling" of the site's abuse support staff, which has led to a quintupling of abuse report processing. "While we review many more reports than ever before, we’ve been able to significantly reduce the average response time to a fraction of what it was, and we see this number continuing to drop," Bhatnagar wrote.

Thursday's update also mentioned "several new enforcement actions for use against accounts that violate our rules." Sources at Twitter have confirmed to Ars Technica that one of the site's new enforcement actions will include a contact-information verification system—a first for the service. This means that in certain situations where users have been warned or temporarily banned but not permanently suspended, they will be instructed to provide either an e-mail address or phone number to return to the service. Ars was told that for the time being, this verification wouldn't be applied to every warning or temporary ban.

Bhatnagar's announcement came a little over two weeks after the leak of an internal Twitter forum post by CEO Dick Costolo regarding how the site handled abuse reports. At the time, Costolo told his staff, "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform, and we've sucked at it for years."