When Daniel Sieradski, a writer and Internet activist, had his name, phone number, and address posted on Twitter last week, he spent days fielding anti-Semitic texts. He attempted to report the account that had published his personal information—as did other Twitter users—but received a response saying the user who’d doxed him hadn’t broken any rules. Twitter finally suspended the offending account, but only after days of other people with bigger platforms tweeting about Sieradski’s plight and personally contacting employees at Twitter. “It really seems like Twitter only takes abuse seriously when it starts to negatively impact their brand,” he told me. “Unless you’re a celebrity with a blue checkmark whose presence here drives Twitter’s bottom line, you’re on your own.”

The type of harassment suffered by Sieradski is as innate to Twitter as, say, hashtags. Along with abuse spread by human beings, the company has also been forced to contend with abuse from accounts that aren’t run by people at all, but by inanimate bots. In recent months, Twitter has attempted to dissuade both groups of bad actors by adding accountability to its system. And on Tuesday, it announced a new initiative presumably designed to target the latter: for the first time in its decade-plus history, Twitter will require confirmation of an e-mail address or phone number in order to sign up for an account. “As we have stated in recent announcements, the public health of the conversation on Twitter is a critical metric by which we will measure our success,” the company said in a blog post. “Going forward, Twitter is continuing to invest across the board in our approach to these issues.”

If this sounds like the barest of bare minimums, that’s because it is. Other platforms with far less-visible harassment issues have long required phone number or e-mail verification when someone first opens an account. It is also a tacit acknowledgement of another issue Twitter has dodged for years: a preponderance of bots and other fake accounts, some of which have been weaponized for political purposes. Bots have proven a thorn in Twitter’s side over the course of both national and local elections; last year, researchers estimated that bot accounts make up 9 to 15 percent of all users on Twitter, a number the company has stringently denied. As my colleague Nick Bilton has reported, Twitter has long known about its fake-follower problem, but it has few incentives to get rid of bots. It was only after The New York Times published an exposé on Devumi, a company that sold fake followers to hundreds of users, including celebrities and politicians, that Twitter cracked down, deleting about a million fake accounts. (A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the purge at the time.) Now, Twitter is conducting an audit to prevent automated sign-ups—as a result, Twitter says, some 50,000 spam accounts are being blocked from registering on a daily basis. Twitter told the Hive it’s taking action imminently in an effort to keep spam accounts at bay and prevent mass signups, and that it will soon take further steps that may cause users’ follower counts to drop. (When it challenges accounts to confirm a phone number or email, Twitter says the account’s follows can disappear until it passes the challenge.)

Twitter has struggled, in the past, to clean up its platform without provoking accusations of political bias. When Twitter launched an anti-bot campaign back in February, in which suspect users were asked to confirm their identities by providing a phone number, it was met with instant uproar from conservatives who believed the effort targeted them specifically. The hashtag #TwitterLockOut began trending, and right-wing personalities took up the cry. “I woke up and saw I lost 100 or so followers,” columnist Adriana Cohen tweeted. “First time that’s ever happened. Are Conservatives being targeted like the IRS”? At the time, a Twitter spokesperson told me that the company had enforced its rules “without political bias.” If an account was believed to have violated Twitter’s terms of service, the spokesperson said, its owner may have been asked to “confirm a phone number so we can confirm a human is behind it. That’s why some people may be experiencing suspensions or locks.”