Together for a Better Internet: Twitter supports #SaferInternetDay 2019

Tuesday 5 February 2019 marks #SaferInternetDay and is an opportunity for everyone around the world to come together with the common goal of creating a safer internet.

The theme for Safer Internet Day 2019 is Together for a Better Internet and to recognize and support this goal, Twitter, in partnership with the Safer Internet Day Coordinating Team, has launched a special emoji in the shape of hands cupping the globe. The emoji appears when people Tweet with the hashtags #SaferInternetDay and #SID2019. The hashtags are available in 12 different languages, including Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), and Bahasa Indonesia.

Improving the collective health of the public conversation - which includes online safety in its many forms - is our number one priority as a company. From our CEO down, it’s part of everyone’s job at Twitter. In 2018, we made more than 70 changes to our product, policies and processes to build a healthier Twitter.

To help people stay safe on Twitter, the changes we made this year enabled us to take action on more abusers who were reported to us in comparison to last year; stop hundreds of thousands of accounts from rejoining after a suspension for abusive behavior; and reduce abuse in conversations.

Additionally, we focused on:

• Introducing new signals, focused on behaviors, into how we present and organize Tweets
• Expanding our team and focusing more resources on our health work, including the acquisition of Smyte
• Gathering public feedback as we developed new policies for the first time
• Hosting our second Trust and Safety Council Summit with online safety experts from around the world

• Rolling out new notices so it’s easier to see when a Tweet was removed for breaking our rules
• Updating our rules to more clearly address specific types of hateful conduct we take action on, such as deadnaming and misgendering

In addition to the changes to Twitter's product, policies and processes, we have partnered with a number of organisations around the world on a range of activities to support online safety in areas such as violent extremism, child sexual exploitation, suicide and self harm, women's safety, LGBTQ safety and many more.  

In Asia Pacific, we are proud to have increased the number of safety partners by 30 percent in the last year. Specifically in India, some examples of those partnerships include:

• The launch of our 100th @Tweesurfing video, in partnership with the Centre for Social Research. @Tweesurfing leverages the power and reach of people on Twitter who use the platform for positive social change, by engaging with them via video clips and events across India on the theme of online safety. In 2018, we conducted six  Tweesurfing workshops in six states across India, held 4 events in Mumbai Bangalore Kolkata Delhi, and hosted 15 Tweechats on topics such as being women on Twitter, counter speech, social media for social solutions and more. 
• We collaborated with the School Leaders Network on using Twitter for education - specifically on online safety and media literacy. Through Twitter workshops, panel discussions at conferences and tweet chats conducted between 7th April 2018 to 15th January 2019, we reached 865 school leaders/educators/influencers, representing approximately 2700 schools in India. 
• We collaborated with Responsible Netism (@Rnetism)
  initiative on their cyberpsychology conference and presented our safety work/tools to an audience of over 400 educators. The initiative hosted safety workshops across Maharashtra for educators. 
• As part of our ongoing safety initiative we onboarded The Aarambh India Initiative (@aarambhindia) as our safety partner for CSE. The Aarambh India Initiative works to safeguard children from sexual offences - both online and onground. 
• Our safety partner, White Swan Foundation (@mentalhealthind) ran programming on mental health on Twitter through the day, in both English and Hindi, and pushed out information on other mental health organizations on Twitter. We helped amplify their efforts with an ads grant.

We're also using Safer Internet Day as an opportunity to remind people of best practices to keep themselves safe on Twitter and online via a series of blog posts. Keep an eye out this week for more information on:

• How to customise and control what you see on Twitter
• How to manage your privacy on Twitter
• How to keep your Twitter account secure
• Media and information literacy best practices
• What is spam and how to avoid spamming others on Twitter
• What are the Twitter Rules and what happens when you report

Twitter is a long-time supporter of Safer Internet Day and this year, we are proud to continue our association with this important event. We look forward to ongoing conversation with all of our partners, and to continuing our work to find real, lasting solutions to build a safer Twitter.