Twitter is to act against a wider range of violent threats as part of renewed efforts to tackle abuse.

The social network has acknowledged that its previous rules, which said a threat needed to be “direct” and “specific” to justify its intervention, had been too “narrow”.

The firm will still require a complaint to be made before it blocks an account.

But it said it was also attempting to automatically make a wider range of abusive tweets less prominent.

Its actions follow a series of high-profile cyberbullying incidents.

Earlier this month, TV host Sue Perkins stopped posting to Twitter after reporting that her timeline was “full of blokes wishing me dead”, following false claims that she was to present the TV show Top Gear.

Shaun Himmerick, producer of the video game Mortal Kombat X, also recently stopped using the network after he said users had threatened his wife and daughter.

The problem is not limited to Twitter – in March, a study of 1,000 UK-based 13-to-17-year-olds by broadband provider Europasat indicated that nearly half of those surveyed had been sent abusive messages over the internet.

Read the article “Twitter Cyberbullies Targeted with New Anti-Abuse Tools” on bbc.com.