Twitter, Inc. may not be the only social networking company struggling against online harassment, but it has been one of the most visible. With a near-constant barrage of bullying and even death threats made by and against its users, Twitter has been scrambling to come up with a solution, and it has not been easy.

In a memo leaked last month, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo admitted that the company is failing at protecting its users, and that failure is hurting the business. “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform, and we’ve sucked at it for years,” he wrote. “It’s no secret, and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.”

Over the last few months, Twitter has slowly introduced new features designed to fight harassment on the site. It has increased the size of its Safety Team, banned revenge porn, and made several tweaks to streamline its abuse reporting tools.

“The amount of gender violence I experience is absolutely extraordinary”

But despite all of these changes, harassment is still a very real problem for Twitter users, as most recently showcased by film star Ashley Judd, who has decided to take legal action against several Twitter users for sending her sexually threatening messages. “The amount of gender violence I experience is absolutely extraordinary,” Judd said.

Judd’s harassment case comes on the heels of Twitter’s latest attempt to curb online abuse by adding an automatic reporting tool that will generate a detailed account of the abuse that can be easily delivered to the local authorities. The reports will include the relevant tweets, timestamps, usernames and URLs in a format designed to make it easier for law enforcement to file an official report regarding the harassment.

While this tool will certainly make gathering the relevant information easier, it does not actually increase Twitter’s involvement in preventing abuse in any meaningful way. Rather the responsibility still falls on the affected users to report the abuse, gather the necessary information and deliver it to the local authorities.

This was already something users were required to do by taking screenshots of the information, so in reality, Twitter’s new tool will do little more than save users the trouble of taking the snapshots themselves.

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