Twitter apologises to women abused online

He wrote: “I personally apologise to the women who have experienced abuse on Twitter and for what they have gone through.

“The abuse they’ve received is simply not acceptable. It’s not acceptable in the real world, and it’s not acceptable on Twitter.

“There is more we can and will be doing to protect our users against abuse. That is our commitment.”

His messages come as Twitter today clarified its rules on abusive behaviour amid a growing backlash over a series of attacks.

The company has updated its rules to make it clear that abuse will not be tolerated and has put extra staff in place to handle reports of abuse, it said today.

The move comes as Scotland Yard said its e-crime unit is investigating allegations by eight people of abuse on the microblogging site.

There has been growing concern over abuse on the site after three female journalists said they had been the subject of bomb threats, while two received threats of rape.

An online petition calling for Twitter toadd a “report abuse” buttonto tweets has already attracted more than 124,000 signatures.

In a message posted on its blog today, Mr Wang and Twitter’s senior director for trust and safety, Del Harvey, said: “It comes down to this: people deserve to feel safe on Twitter.”

They said the clarified rules make clear that Twitter will not tolerate abusive behaviour, and an “in-tweet” report button has been added so people can report abusive behaviour directly from a tweet.

“We want people to feel safe on Twitter, and we want the Twitter rules to send a clear message to anyone who thought that such behaviour was, or could ever be, acceptable,” they wrote.

They said additional staff are being added to the teams which handle abuse reports, adding: “We are committed to making Twitter a safe place for our users.”

The bomb threat tweet was sent to Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, Independent columnist Grace Dent and Europe editor of Time magazine Catherine Mayer, as well as a number of other women.

In separate incidents, Labour MP Stella Creasy and campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, who successfully fought for a woman’s face to appear on £10 banknotes, were threatened on Twitter with rape. Two arrests have already been made in relation to those threats.

The anonymous Twitter accounts from which the bomb threats originated were suspended, although screen grabs were widely circulated online.

Scotland Yard said an investigation into eight allegations had been launched.

The force said: “Detectives from the Specialist Organised & Economic Crime Command have taken responsibility for the investigations into a number of allegations recently made to the MPS relating to allegations of malicious communication made on the social networking site Twitter.