Twitter has announced changes to its policy which will enable it to restrict the reach of ‘hateful’ tweets.
The company said that it has updated its approach to policy enforcement to make it better aligned with its commitment to transparency. Under this, the platform will restrict the reach of ‘hateful’ tweets that violate its policies by making the content less discoverable.
“Our mission at Twitter 2.0 is to promote and protect the public conversation. We believe Twitter users have the right to express their opinions and ideas without fear of censorship. We also believe it is our responsibility to keep users on our platform safe from content violating our rules,” the company stated in a blog post.
As per Twitter, these beliefs are the foundation of “Freedom of Speech and not Freedom of Reach” which apparently is the enforcement philosophy of the platform.
The microblogging platform also announced that with the recent update in place, the ‘visibility filtering’ will allow the platform to move beyond the binary “leave up versus take down” approach to content moderation.
“Starting soon, we will add publicly visible labels to tweets identified as potentially violating our policies letting you know we’ve limited their visibility,” the blog mentioned.
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 label that'll be displayed when we've limited the visibility of a Tweet. Keep the feedback coming! https://t.co/AUYDP2kYPi pic.twitter.com/BaJuSfcz0q
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) April 17, 2023
With this, Twitter also announced that tweets with ‘visibility limited’ label will be made less discoverable on the platform and that no ads will be placed adjacent to content that it labels as violative of its rules against hateful conduct.
This essentially does not mean that the ‘hateful’ tweets would not come up in search results, trends, recommended notifications, For You and Following timelines, and more as such tweets would continue to remain online but will only become less discoverable or may even get down ranked in replies.
While these labels will initially only apply to a set of Tweets that potentially violate Twitter’s Hateful Conduct policy, the platform has plans to expand their application to other applicable policy areas in the coming months, as per the blog post.
“This change is designed to result in enforcement actions that are more proportional and transparent for everyone on our platform. What remains unchanged is our commitment to keeping Twitter a safe place for conversation. We will continue to remove illegal content and suspend bad actors from our platform,” the company said