Twitter to delete tweets that dehumanize people based on religion

From Tuesday, Twitter will remove tweets when these people dehumanize on the basis of religion. This also applies to tweets sent before the new rule was set. Twitter hopes this will keep the platform safe for users.

With dehumanizing tweets means twitter posts with which religious groups are compared with, for example, rats and viruses. People who are part of that religion run the risk of ‘offline damage’, according to the social medium. Therefore, as of today, such tweets will be removed from the network when reported. Users who break the rules run the risk of being temporarily banned from reading messages or being banned from the network. Twitter users who posted such tweets before these rules came into effect do not “immediately” run the risk of account suspension.

Twitter says it will implement the new rule based on feedback from 80,000 users. According to Twitter, respondents indicated that language use could be improved by, among other things, adding extra details. The term ‘identifiable groups’ was also first used to indicate which tweets could be labeled as hateful, which the respondents did not think was limited enough.

Another change the platform has made is training Twitter employees for longer and more thoroughly. According to the platform, “many” users were concerned about Twitter’s ability to “enforce the rules fairly and consistently”. The improved training process should counteract this.

Another social network, Instagram, announced on Monday that it would introduce new measures against online bullying. For example, reactions are analyzed in advance for mean texts. When the artificial intelligence suspects that the response is mean, the user is asked whether he or she really wants to post the message. This tool will be released for international users at a later date.