Twitter's new live streaming service, Periscope, has a harassment problem

Periscope, Twitter's new live streaming video app, has barely been around for a week but is already rife with the type of abuse Twitter has battled for years.

The streams of female Periscope users have been flooded with rude and unwelcome comments, often sexual in nature. 

"Yesterday morning my co-workers started a Periscope and in less than 30 seconds, along came the harassment," Sean Creeley at Embedly writes.

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"There were only about 12 viewers of this stream, a quarter of users watching were there to do harm."

Periscope, which allows anyone to tune in to a personal livestream channel on your phone, is inherently voyeuristic. The app's default setting is public, allowing anyone to view your stream and leave a comment, and though explicit live streams are banned, the company says less about sexual harassment.  

The app's community guidelines simply ask that users "respect one another. Do not abuse, harass or post others' private, confidential information." 

But releasing confidential information seems to be less of a problem than the lewd internet trolls who seem to have found a new home on the service:

Embedly

Embedly

It's not an isolated problem, either, looking at various tweets:

Twitter itself has battled harassment for years.

In February, CEO Dick Costolo admitted that the service, "sucks'" at dealing with abusive users and in March, the company announced that it would begin automatically generating printable abuse reports that can be handed to the police. Several weeks ago, Twitter introduced a "quality filter" option aimed at filtering out hate speech.