Twitter to ban 'dehumanizing' comments with user help
Twitter to ban 'dehumanizing' comments with user help
Twitter plans to broaden restrictions on hateful content
that would include a ban on tweets dehumanizing people based on race, religion,
sexual orientation
Twitter plans to broaden restrictions on hateful content
that would include a ban on tweets dehumanizing people based on race, religion,
sexual orientation
AFP • September 25, 2018
San Francisco (AFP) - Twitter on Tuesday reached out to
users for help crafting a ban on comments that dehumanize people and set the
stage for real-world violence.
A policy change that Twitter has been working on for
several months is intended to broaden hateful content restrictions at the
service to include barring tweets dehumanizing people based on race, religion,
sexual orientation or other social grouping.
"Language that makes someone less than human can
have repercussions off the service, including normalizing serious
violence," Vijaya Gadde and Del Harvey of the Twitter trust and safety
team said in a blog post.
"We want to expand our hateful conduct policy to
include content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an
identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct
target."
Twitter policy already bans comments that promote
violence or threats based on discrimination, but abusive tweets that do not
break the company's rules are still fired of at the service, according to Gadde
and Harvey.
In an unusual step, Twitter asked for feedback from users
around the world regarding wording to be used in the policy amendment.
"We want your feedback to ensure we consider global
perspectives and how this policy may impact different communities and
cultures," Gadde and Harvey said.
Twitter chief and co-founder Jack Dorsey early this month
told US lawmakers that the San Francisco-based service was "unprepared and
ill-equipped" for the vast campaigns of manipulation that affected social
media in the past few years.
Dorsey, appearing before a Senate Intelligence Committee
hearing on foreign influence campaigns on social media, said the messaging
service was set up to function as a "public square" but failed to
deal with "abuse, harassment, troll armies, propaganda through bots."
"We aren't proud of how that free and open exchange
has been weaponized and used to distract and divide people, and our
nation," he told senators.
"We found ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped for
the immensity of the problems we've acknowledged."
Dorsey said Twitter has stepped up its effort to protect
what he called a "healthy public square" but that the challenges were
daunting.
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