use of the social network to incite violence, and to crack down on
abuse and harassment on the service. The new rules are the latest
implemented by social networks aiming to stem violence and harassment
while attempting to safeguard freedom of online speech. "We need to
ensure that voices are not silenced because people are afraid to speak
up," said Twitter's head of product management Shreyas Doshi in a blog
post.
"To that end, we are today announcing our latest product and policy
updates that will help us in continuing to develop a platform on which
users can safely engage with the world at large." Some of the changes
were outlined last week in a Washington Post column by Twitter general
counsel Vijaya Gadde.
On Tuesday, Doshi noted that Twitter had updated its policy on
violent threats "so that the prohibition is not limited to 'direct,
specific threats of violence against others' but now extends to
'threats of violence against others or promot(ing) violence against
others."
He said the previous policy "was unduly narrow and limited our ability
to act on certain kinds of threatening behavior." Twitter's new policy
also allows the social network to "lock" abusive accounts for specific
periods of time, which could help crack down on so-called
cyberbullying and spam. "This option gives us leverage in a variety of
contexts, particularly where multiple users begin harassing a
particular person or group of people," Doshi said.
Doshi also noted that Twitter would be testing "a product feature to
help us identify suspected abusive Tweets and limit their reach." The
new tool, which was not described in detail, could help Twitter
identify abusive activity by looking at "a wide range of signals and
context that frequently correlates with abuse including the age of the
account itself, and the similarity of a tweet to other content that
our safety team has in the past independently determined to be
abusive," said Doshi.
This tool "will not affect your ability to see content that you've
explicitly sought out, such as tweets from accounts you follow, but
instead is designed to help us limit the potential harm of abusive
content," he noted. Twitter's actions follow initiatives by Facebook
as well as Facebook-owned Instagram that aim to crack down on abusive
conduct and use of the platforms to promote violence.
Social networks have been struggling with defining acceptable content
and freedom of expression, and radical extremism and violence
increasingly linked to these services. Facebook said last month it
will not allow the social network to be used to promote terrorism or
hate speech as it unveiled a wide-ranging update of its "community
standards."
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