UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 28 APRIL 2016
A Birmingham City University criminologist has praised Twitter for implementing new ways of reporting online hate crime, an action he has campaigned for in his academic research.
Twitter’s new update this week means that users can now attach multiple tweets to a single report against online hate crime.
In a paper launched in Parliament in October last year, Dr Imran Awan called for Twitter to review its reporting mechanisms and to implement a contextual basis for the recording, reporting and monitoring of tweets.
"Twitter's new rule is an important step in the fight against online hate crime, and in particular Islamophobia, online" said Awan, Associate Professor in Criminology at Birmingham City University.
In September 2015, Dr Awan led a training session with Twitter UK highlighting the dangers of online anti-Muslim hate crime and later that year was commissioned by Tell MAMA to co-produce a report examining online and offline Islamophobia.
Working alongside Dr Irene Zempi, a lecturer in Criminology at Nottingham Trent University, the academics discovered that many of those subjected to online threats live in fear of virtual attacks becoming 'real world' violence.
"Behaviour that crosses the line into abuse is against our rules and we want it to be easy for you to report it to us," said Hao Tang, a safety engineer at Twitter.
Issues of online hate crime and the impact it can have on vulnerable communities are explored in Dr Awan's latest book, 'Islamophobia in Cyberspace: Hate Crimes go Viral' (2016).