Twitter can be a cesspool for hate speech. If you spend any meaningful amount of time on the social network or enter a few choice words into its search bar, you’ll undoubtedly find harassment or abuse that violates some Twitter rule.
The problem for Twitter has always been in enforcing those rules. Rarely known for its decisive action, the San Francisco–based company in the past has acted ham-handedly to complaints of hateful content or, sometimes, not at all, triggering waves of confusion and mistrust among users.
It appears the company is moving to filter out inappropriate content based on religion as part of its effort to curb hate speech.
On Tuesday, it announced an expansion of policies around hateful content that dehumanises others based on their religion. The company will require the removal of tweets that dehumanise whole religious groups, like those seen below, when they’re reported to the company.
While some Twitter users may wonder how this wasn’t already a policy — its current terms of service already prohibit threats based on race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and other characteristics — a company spokesperson noted that today’s policy change was meant to set a clearer standard for enforcement against hateful content based on religion, not just direct attacks.
Twitter, the spokesperson said, had not been consistent in explaining why some tweets pertaining to religious groups were taken down in the past or left up.
The company said it’s starting with religious groups and will see how the new policy goes into effect before deciding to expand the rule to address other protected groups.
Twitter’s changes come in light of several policy adjustments, including one last month in which the company announced that it would place warning labels on tweets from world leaders that violated its rules in order to “protect the health of public conversation.”
The company said that the latest update resulted from over 8,000 responses from around the world to a public survey and months of conversations with external experts.
“Many people raised concerns about our ability to enforce our rules fairly and consistently, so we developed a longer, more in-depth training process with our teams to make sure they were better informed when reviewing reports,” Twitter wrote in a company blog post.
“For this update, it was especially important to spend time reviewing examples of what could potentially go against this rule.”
They will require reported tweets that were made before the rule was set to be removed, according to a spokesperson, though they will not trigger any suspensions or further action against an account.
Multiple violations of the new policy regarding religious groups after Tuesday may cause suspensions or outright bans.
Critics, however, said such a move will still be ineffective.
One group, online racial justice organisation Color of Change, criticised Twitter for not going far enough to “ban all forms of dehumanisation immediately.”
Twitter’s new policies mimic rules already set in place by other giant social media sites. Facebook’s policies prohibit dehumanising inferiority speech and statements aimed at specific groups of people. The policies ban such derogatory remarks aimed at racial, ethnic, and religious affiliations.
YouTube condemns and deletes dehumanising language directed at individuals and groups based on religion, nationality and sexual orientation.
How social networks go about enforcing these rules is heavily criticised. Many civil rights groups and various other advocates question the processes in which platforms such as Facebook will effectively monitor harassment, hate speech and misinformation.
For now, Twitter’s new policies against dehumanising language will cover religious groups; however, in due time, they will expand to various protected classes. But before the expansion, the company will have to assess numerous factors such as the best ways to protect conversations in marginalised groups.
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