Do you see comments denigrating cultures, genders, ethnicities etc littered all over Twitter? Is it frustrating to see tweets like ‘Indians are scum’ not being taken down because they’re not directed towards any one individual? Well, all that might be about to change. Twitter has proposed a policy that will allow you to flag ‘dehumanising’ tweets such as those reducing groups to their genitalia or those calling certain cultures ‘animalistic’.
According to the proposed clause, Tweeple cannot post content that harms offline groups through their tweets. Those groups can include:
“Any group of people that can be distinguished by their shared characteristics such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, serious disease, occupation, political beliefs, location, or social practices.”
Vijaya Gadde and Del Harvey of Twitter’s Trust & Safety team wrote in a Twitter blog post:
“Language that makes someone less than human can have repercussions off the service, including normalising serious violence.”
With an intent to broaden hateful content restrictions, Twitter had been working on the policy change for several months now.
Twitter already has a ‘hateful conduct policy’ which prohibits its users from directly from threatening violence or directly attacking a specific individual on the basis of characteristics such as race, sexual orientation, or gender. But the new policy can be applied to all groups rather than just specific protected classes.
Gadde and Harvey added,
“With this change, we want to expand our hateful conduct policy to include content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target.”
But Twitter won’t roll out the updated policy immediately. In an unusual step, Twitter is asking for feedback regarding wording to be used in the policy amendment that can be provided on the blog itself. The feedback form will be available till October 9.
