Twitter tightens anti-hate policy, warns against 'violative, abusive behaviour'
"Labels have been applied to more than 700,000 violative posts that fall under our Hateful Conduct policy," reads Twitter update
July 13, 2023
World richest man Elon Musk's company Twitter announced Thursday a new update about its policy of hate and freedom of speech, with a vow to expand the action net further, including those who carry out "violent speech" and "abusive behaviours".
The San Francisco-based social media company announced its policy in April this year named "Freedom of Speech Not Reach" about those accounts that breach the rules and regulations of the social media platform by limiting their reach to the public.
Under the new content regulation approach, Musk's company opted to tackle the hate speech by measures of labelling them, forcing the authors to remove their tweets, which according to Twitter has brought promising results.
In line with the policy, the social media behemoth shared an update about the progress in a blog post, which read: "Labels have been applied to more than 700,000 violative posts that fall under our Hateful Conduct policy."
"We also proactively prevent ads from appearing adjacent to content that we label," adding the reach of those posts reduced to 81%, making it "less discoverable".
After observing the policy results, the company said it is enhancing the net of the platform’s actions against abusive behaviour and violent speech.
Twitter — which was bought by Elon Musk last year for $44 billion — said: "Today, more than 99.99% of Tweet impressions are from healthy content or content that does not violate our rules."
According to the update, "for the small minority of content that is violative, we apply proportionally 'appropriate enforcement action'. We will continue to remove the 'most serious violations of our rules', such as illegal content, and suspend bad actors from our platform."
"Those who were informed that their content was violating rules, deleted their tweets, and on average 4% of people appealed to the decision," the post stated.
"90% of those who submit the appeal get a response within 30 minutes."
The progress update came at a crucial time when Musk's company is facing immense competition from Mark Zuckerberg's newly launched social media platform Threads which got millions of sign-ups in just hours.
Last month, the new CEO of Twitter Linda Yaccarino, emphasised the company's commitment to free speech, a value shared by owner Elon Musk.
Yaccarino aimed to make Twitter the most accurate and real-time source of information, serving as a global hub for communication.
