Twitter to trolls: Say goodbye to your toxic lists

It's about time, Twitter!

A full decade after launching lists, Twitter's handy feature for following groups of people, the company is finally addressing the tool's dark side: harassment. The service will now allow users to flag lists as abusive, Twitter announced Monday, making it the first time the company has had a reporting function specifically for lists.

With the update, which is available on iOS now and will be on Android and Twitter's website "soon," users are able to report a list the same way they might report an individual tweet. From the list page, the "..." menu will have a "Report" option, which then allows you to flag the list to Twitter.

"Once you’ve submitted your report, we’ll send you an email confirming receipt and provide recommendations for additional actions you can take to improve your Twitter experience," Twitter writes on its help page.

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Here's how it actually shakes down: Once reported, rule breakers (Hi, trolls!) that create lists to enable harassment will be placed in the dreaded Twitter "time-out" until the offending list is deleted, a company spokesperson confirmed.

For users who frequently face harassment on Twitter, the change will address what has long been a major concern. Though Twitter launched lists as a convenience for users, the feature has been widely abused by trolls who use lists to target specific groups of users. Those lists are often shared on forums outside of Twitter in order to make it easier for others to target those same individuals.

The company has faced criticism for how it has handled lists in the past. In 2017, Twitter experimented with hiding list notifications from users, but abruptly reversed course after pushback. Critics of the move pointed out that the change would have made it much more difficult for targeted users to monitor potential harassment.

Up until now, people facing this type of harassment had to block the list creator, which would then remove them from any offending lists. Or, they could choose to report the user individually, which required several extra steps. (Blocking a list creator will still remove you from their lists, but that is no longer the only option available.)

Sadly, if you've been hoping to simply opt-out of lists altogether, you're out of luck ... at least for now. Twitter still doesn't allow public accounts to opt-out entirely, so it largely falls on individual users to keep track of which lists they've been added to.

Twitter's latest move may not be the cure-all harassed users were hoping for, but it does make trolls' lives more difficult. A successful list report could remove hundreds or even thousands of affected members.

Now, if only there were lists for all the horribly toxic lists.