Ms Karen White:

The Senator raised several issues and I will do my best to address them as quickly as I can. She mentioned a strong emphasis on notification. I have tried to communicate to the committee this morning that we are trying to reduce the burden on victims having to report to Twitter. People absolutely need a mechanism to get in touch with Twitter to tell us if they have been subjected to certain types of behaviour. In response to the Senator's point that if someone cannot see something, that person cannot notify us, we made a change some years ago to allow bystander reporting. If a person sees something online, it goes back to the "see something, say something" principle. If people see someone being bullied in the playground, they should say something to the teacher. The same principles apply online. We allow bystander reporting.

In addition, I have highlighted that 30% of the action that we take on content deemed to be abusive behaviour is taken proactively. That is without any reports; it is content that Twitter has surfaced for human review. We hope that figure will increase so that we can further reduce the burden on victims having to report content to us.

We had a problem with repeat offenders at Twitter. It was a bit like playing whack-a-mole in that we would suspend an account and another account would be opened. We did significant work with our trust and safety council which advised us of the need to remedy this situation. We have stopped repeat offending by more than 100,000 accounts over the past year.

Our actions are having real results. I do not mean to imply that we have fixed the problem in its totality but we are slowing it down. Our actions are stopping repeat offenders opening new accounts or engaging in multiple account abuse, where one individual has multiple accounts with the sole intention of abusing others on the service. We rely on behaviour base signals. There are several signals that may not be visible to individuals who use our service or to the public at large but they are behind the scenes, such as whether an email address has been verified or whether an account is mentioning other accounts in large volumes. That would give the impression to us that an account is potentially violating rules on behaviour.