Periscope Lets Users Be the Jury When It Comes to Flagged Comments

— -- Periscope, the Twitter-owned live-streaming app, has unveiled a new policy for handling potentially abusive comments on the service.

After a comment has been flagged by a user for being abusive, a randomly selected jury of a few users will be asked to vote on whether the comment is spam, abusive or if it looks fine.

"The result of the vote is shown to voters. If the majority votes that the comment is spam or abuse, the commenter will be notified that their ability to chat in the broadcast has been temporarily disabled," a Periscope blog post said this week. "Repeat offenses will result in chat being disabled for that commenter for the remainder of the broadcast."

The entire policing process is designed to take a matter of seconds, according to the company. If users don't want to be selected to serve on a jury, they can opt out in their settings. Broadcasters who don't want their viewer comments to be moderated can also decline to participate.

The new procedure is designed to work alongside Periscope's other safety tools, which allow users to block or remove people from their broadcasts, report ongoing harassment and opt to restrict comments from only people the know, according to Periscope.

The new crowd-sourced policing procedure comes as Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft and YouTube agreed to a new code of conduct from the European Commission, pledging to remove illegal hate speech within 24 hours and to educate and "raise awareness" with users about appropriate online behavior.