Twitter flags hateful tweets to be taken down for policy violations
To reinforce its commitment to transparency under Elon Musk’s administration, Twitter has introduced a new policy aimed at increasing the transparency of enforcement actions against hateful tweets.
Twitter plans to add visible tags to tweets that have been found to potentially violate its policies, which has affected their visibility. Starting with tweets that violate its hate speech policy, Twitter said it will expand the feature to other areas of politics “over the coming months.”
“Creating the reach of tweets, also known as visibility filtering, is one of our current enforcement actions that allows us to move beyond the binary ‘leave up versus take down’ approach to content moderation,” the social media giant said in a blog post.
The company says that the latest change is designed to lead to more proportionate and transparent enforcement actions for everyone on the platform without affecting the user’s account.
We’ve heard from many of you that you want to know what Freedom of Speech, Not Reach looks like in practice. This is the sticker that is displayed when we have limited the visibility of a tweet. Keep the feedback coming! https://t.co/AUYDP2kYPi pic.twitter.com/BaJuSfcz0q
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) April 17, 2023
When a tweet violated Twitter’s policy, the company could limit their reach with “visibility filtering,” excluding them from search results, trends, and more.
However, the public would not necessarily know if the tweet had been moderated in this way, but the situation is changing.
“We will soon add publicly visible tags to tweets that potentially violate our policies, indicating that we have restricted their visibility,” the company said.
It added that these flags bring a new level of transparency to enforcement by showing both the author of the tweet and other Twitter users what policy the tweet may be violating.
The microblogging site also noted that users whose tweets have been flagged can submit feedback if they believe a tweet has been flagged incorrectly, but says they may not receive a response, and it does not guarantee that the tweet’s reach will be restored.
“Writers can submit feedback on the label if they believe we improperly limited the visibility of their tweets. Currently, submitting feedback does not guarantee that you will receive a response or that your tweet’s reach will be restored,” Twitter added in a blog post.
Twitter acknowledges that automation can mean it goes wrong, but it plans to allow writers to appeal the decision at some point “in the future.”
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