FILE PHOTO: People holding cell phones are silhouetted against a projected background with the Twitter logo in this illustrative photo taken September 27, 2013. REUTERS / Kacper Pempel / Illustration / File Photo (REUTERS)News 

Twitter expands hate speech rules to include race and ethnicity

Twitter Inc on Wednesday expanded its hate speech ban policy to include “language that dehumanizes people on the basis of race, ethnicity and national origin,” it said in a statement. .

The company banned speech that dehumanizes others on the basis of religion or caste last year and updated the rule in March to add age, disability and illness to the list of protected categories .

Civil rights group Color of Change, which is part of a coalition of rights organizations pushing tech companies to reduce hate speech online, called the changes “essential concessions” after years of external pressure.

A Twitter spokesperson said the company had from the start planned to add new categories to the policy over time after testing to ensure it can consistently enforce the updated rules.

In a statement, Color Of Change Vice President Arisha Hatch slammed Twitter for failing to update policy ahead of the November presidential election, despite repeated warnings from advocacy groups against violent and dehumanizing speech .

Hatch also said Twitter has refused to provide transparency on how its content moderators are trained and the effectiveness of its artificial intelligence in identifying content that violates the policy.

The jury is still out for a company whose track record of implementing policies and enforcing its rules is uneven with far-right users, she said.

“In the absence of hard evidence that the company will follow through, this announcement will fall into a growing category of too few and too late public relations stunt offers.”

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