Like most online communities, Twitter Inc. has been fighting abuse and harassment on its platform almost since it first launched in 2006. Now, the popular microblog is once again trying to tackle trolls with updated rules that clarify what behaviors can get your account banned.

“Online behavior continues to evolve and change, and at Twitter, we have to ensure those changes are reflected in our rules in a way that’s easy to adhere to and understand,” Twitter said in a blog post Friday. “Today, we’re publishing a new version of the Twitter Rules to clarify our policies and how we enforce them.”

The company noted that the rules themselves have not actually changed significantly, but the new guidelines offer more examples to make it easier for users to tell what behaviors are not acceptable. The rules categories with the biggest updates include abuse, self-harm, spam and related behaviors, and graphic violence and adult content.

Twitter said it considers context when evaluating whether tweets violate the rules. This includes who is being targeted by the abuse and who reported it, but it also includes whether a tweet is “newsworthy and in the legitimate public interest.” In other words, abusive tweets made by random users might get taken down, but if they are made by a public figure, they may stay up. Twitter said it will reveal more details about how it reviews and enforces decisions on abuse in another update that will be posted Nov. 14.

The new rules take into account “the latest trends in online behavior,” and the company said it will be “constantly evaluating our rules and iterating to make them clearer.” Twitter will also release updated rules on other categories on Nov. 22 that will include new guidelines covering violent groups, hateful imagery and abusive usernames. Twitter’s announcement today is the first in a series of updates promised last month by Chief Executive Jack Dorsey (pictured), who posted a stream of tweets pledging to fight abuse more heavily:

“We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day. We’ve been working to counteract this for the past two years. We prioritized this in 2016. We updated our policies and increased the size of our teams. It wasn’t enough. In 2017 we made it our top priority and made a lot of progress. Today we saw voices silencing themselves and voices speaking out because we’re *still* not doing enough. We’ve been working intensely over the past few months and focused today on making some critical decisions. We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them.”

That’s not the only set of Twitter policies to draw attention today. A security lapse enabled a worker to deactivate president Donald Trump’s account briefly on Thursday. Twitter said it implemented additional safeguards against such behavior.

Still, the company itself seems to be on the rebound after a rocky few years, with user growth picking up again in recent months. The company has also been selling off or shutting down various services in an attempt to streamline, such as when it sold off its mobile app developer platform, Fabric, for an undisclosed amount to Google LLC in January.

Photo: JDLasica/Flickr