Twitter to Crack Down on Hate Groups, Online Harassment With Series of Updates
Twitter has announced the next series of measures they will put in place to push out sexual harassment and hate speech off their platform. This move comes in the wake of the #WomenBoycottTwitter movement.
Perhaps in response to the boycott movement, Twitter chief executive officer Jack Dorsey fired off a salvo of posts of his own last Friday, Oct. 13. In a series of messages, Dorsey wrote that they are stepping up their work in making everyone's voices heard on the platform.
"We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them," he wrote before the weekend. "New rules around: unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence," he went on to say.
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"These changes will start rolling out in the next few weeks. More to share next week," he added. Since then, Twitter has announced a new set of rules geared towards fighting hate speech and harassment on the platform.
These new features include more facilities to report abuse. Unwanted sexual advances, for example, can be reported by everyone who comes across the message, and not just the victims themselves, according to Wired.
The scope of actionable posts will be expanded as well. New categories like "creep shots" and "nonconsensual nudity" will form the basis of banning posts or entire accounts from the social media service.
Twitter is also planning to bury hate symbols and emblems under a "sensitive image" warning. The social media platform also revealed that they are prepared to take matters into their own hands.
From this point on, they will be making specific enforcement actions against problem users, especially "organizations that use/have historically used violence as a means to advance their cause."
"Although we planned on sharing these updates later this week, we hope our approach and upcoming changes, as well as our collaboration with the Trust and Safety Council, show how seriously we are rethinking our rules and how quickly we're moving to update our policies and how we enforce them," Twitter said in a statement, as quoted by Tech Crunch.
