Twitter will now label and limit tweets that break its rules
Twitter will now label and limit tweets that break its rules
Hateful tweets will have their visibility reduced in new safeguard measures
Twitter will soon begin labeling tweets that violate its policies on hate speech, and reduce their visibility to other platform users.
The warning labels, announced in a string of tweets, will only be added to individual tweets, not accounts. Twitter said restricting the reach of tweets “helps reduce binary ‘leave up versus take down’ content moderation decisions and supports our freedom of speech vs freedom of reach approach”, adding the new system is intended to improve the transparency of its moderation policy.
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Twitter labels
🚫 Twitter will now label tweets that break its hate speech policies
📉 Labelled tweets will have their visibility reduced
👩⚖️ Users can’t yet appeal labels to have them removed
🤔 Elon Musk alluded to the policy last year
Tweets bearing the label will be made less discoverable on the platform and will not appear next to adverts. Presumably, the tweet can still be viewed if a person is directly linked to it, although it won’t appear in Twitter’s internal search results.
The label will appear as a small blue box underneath the message of the tweet, stating that the visibility of the tweet has been reduced because it’s suspected of violating Twitter’s rules against hateful content.
“We may get it wrong occasionally, so authors will be able to submit feedback on the label if they think we incorrectly limited their content’s visibility,” Twitter said. “In the future, we plan to allow authors to appeal our decision to limit a Tweet’s visibility.”
Currently, authors can submit feedback if they believe a label has been incorrectly applied to their tweet, although a response is not guaranteed and the appeal process hasn’t been fully rolled out.
Twitter said it will “continue to remove illegal content and suspend bad actors from our platform” alongside the new label.
Shortly after Elon Musk bought the platform last year, he mentioned pursuing a policy of “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach”, whereby individual tweets that promote hate speech are demonetized or have their visibility restricted, but not entirely removed.
Last week, Twitter announced other big changes to its monetization systems with a new subscription model that allows eligible users to lock content and tweets behind a paywall. As well as letting users send even longer tweets than the already very, very long messages premium users have access to, it’s yet another way for Twitter to drum up revenue through the relaunched Twitter Blue service.