Twitter under the new leadership of Elon Musk has taken a different approach towards content that violates its Hateful Conduct policy - instead of permanently banning the user who posted the content, the social media platform will restrict the reach of the tweets. However, Twitter could make certain tweets harder to discover without the knowledge of the user, and without explaining why their reach has been restricted in the first place.
With Twitter's updated policy, the platform will stay committed to its current beliefs on free speech while providing transparency in enforcing the new rule.
Twitter Introduces Transparency in Moderating Hateful Tweets Through Labeling
Twitter's latest blog update echoes its current CEO's take on freedom of speech, reiterating that the online platform should "promote and protect the public conversation." While there are times when users forget about Twitter's rule on hateful and violent tweets as they express their opinion, the platform should resort to making their hateful tweets less discoverable, and not the censorship of users.
"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," Twitter said in its latest blog.
However, Twitter also acknowledged in their latest blog that the platform has forgotten about transparency as they moderate hateful content. Restricting the reach of the tweets, or "visibility filtering" as Twitter calls it, is the number one course of action when a tweet violated the hate speech rule.
Although, Twitter has not explained limiting the reach of certain tweets, hence leaving some users clueless when they discover that some of their tweets get less engagement than they usually get. There have also been rumors that Twitter's present algorithm was manipulated on purpose to favor certain users like the Twitter CEO himself over others to make their tweets more visible.
To provide transparency, Twitter has announced that it is starting to label tweets that are deemed as hate speech.
"However, like other social platforms, we have not historically been transparent when we've taken this action. Starting soon, we will add publicly visible labels to Tweets identified as potentially violating our policies letting you know we've limited their visibility," Twitter announced.
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Tweet Labelling Works for Hate Conduct Policy Violation, for Now
Twitter also added that users will have the chance to appeal the label on their tweets. They will be allowed to submit feedback explaining why they think that the label was a mistake. However, giving feedback is not a guarantee that users will get a response immediately, or the reach of the labelled tweet will be restored.
Furthermore, Twitter said that the transparency on the moderation of tweets only covers those that potentially violate the rule on hateful speech. Other Twitter policies may also lead to reach restrictions once violated.
"While these labels will initially only apply to a set of Tweets that potentially violate our Hateful Conduct policy, we plan to expand their application to other applicable policy areas in the coming months," Twitter said.
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