Twitter bans the message that dehumanize linked to human diseases
Twitter Inc said on Thursday it will ban the posts that “dehumanize” the people, because they have a disease or disability, or age, a step, which happens to correspond to an explosion of tweets about the spread of coronavirus.
The company told Reuters that the policy change was not the reaction of the outbreak of the virus that causes respiratory disease COVID-19, but was part of its continued effort to update the rules against hostile behavior.
“We could not have predicted that this would happen in terms of corona virus” Jerrell Peterson, Twitter’s head of security said in a telephone interview.
Twitter has long been under pressure to clean up its hateful content on the platform, and social media sites are under review for more than attempts to handle false information and misuse of corona virus outbreak.
Reuters to look derogatory terms to the detection of the virus on Twitter posts that called the Chinese “sub-human” or compared them with animals. The outbreak, which began in China, has spread to nearly 80 countries and killed more than 3,000 people.
Peterson said the three new categories were added not because there were more reports of hateful language in these areas, but because of the potential harm to offline.
Twitter hostile behavior policy already prohibits attacking or threatening others on the basis of categories, such as race, sexual orientation, age, disability or serious illness. This update means that these attacks do not need a targeted individual or a particular group.
Now, even “if it is not tweet that @mention that compares a group basis, disability, age or viruses or germs, or larvae of the disease, which is less than a man who can break the policy now,” Peterson said.
In announcing the new policy blog post, Twitter said breaking tweets must be removed. Tweets were sent before Thursday would also be removed, but will not directly result in account termination, it said.
In July 2019 Twitter expanded the rules of the language ban is considered to “dehumanize” the people on the basis of religion. In January-June last year, Twitter’s Transparency Report said that had been a 48% increase in accounts reported possible violations of its hostile operating practices. Twitter said it had taken steps to 584,429 unique share of hostile behavior violations.
Twitter also announced on Wednesday that it has tested a new type of content that will disappear after 24 hours, similar stories feature of Facebook Inc.’s first popularized by Instagram and Snapchat, Inc. Snap.
Twitter spokeswoman Lauren Alexander said that this short-term content should also include the company’s hostile behavior rules.
The activist investor Elliott Management Corp, which has gained share in the company, is to drive changes in Twitter, inter alia, by deleting CEO Jack Dorsey
