Twitter has published a blog post aimed at clarifying some of the changes it's planning to make it easier to respond to and flag up harmful content that users see or have directed at them on the social media app.

Currently, reporting a Tweet involves a somewhat wordy series of menus where you can select reasons why you think a Tweet is problematic, but in often vague ways that don't make it clear exactly what you think is wrong with it.

The new options, as explored in the blog post, instead offer the chance to categorise what you think the Tweet is doing wrong according to its content, rather than by Twitter's complex terms of service, which will conclude with a recommendation of the sort of report you most likely want to file.

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Twitter

Twitter calls this "symptoms-first", establishing what happened before the report is concluded, and believes that it'll make things easier for the users reporting a Tweet rapidly - to the point where it's already testing the system across a small group of users in the US.

The system also offers a lot more types of offence for users to select, creating the opportunity for more accurate reports to send through, all of which should make it more straightforward for Twitter to deal with them.

While it doesn't say this explicitly, it also means that if Twitter receives large volumes of reports about types of Tweet that aren't currently breaking its terms of service, but nonetheless are offending swathes of people, it could inform future changes to those terms of service.

For now, the service isn't ready for the wider user-base, but the blog post indicates this rollout should start in early 2022, so there isn't too long to wait until you can report Tweets with a little more empowerment.