Thursday, December 5

Twitter Set to Ban Dehumanizing Language on its Platform

The social media major Twitter has announced to further update its “hateful conduct” policy to include content that “dehumanizes others”. This will be based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target.

Twitter is one of the most popular micro-blogging platforms in the world has a huge user base. The company has been developing and building a new policy to address dehumanizing language that makes someone less than human.

“Some of this content falls within our hateful conduct policy (which prohibits the promotion of violence against or direct attacks or threats against other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, religious affiliation, age, disability or serious disease). “But there are still Tweets many people consider to be abusive, even when they do not break our rules.” Vijaya Gadde and Del Harvey from Twitter said.

The company says that addressing this gap is part of their work and to serve a healthy public conversation is their motive. With this step, Twitter is now asking its 336 million users to give their feedback on this to make sure how this policy may impact different communities and cultures.

For the various languages that are not represented on the Twitter platform, the policy team is working closely with local non-governmental organizations and policymakers to ensure their perspectives are captured.

 

 

For providing the feedback on the new policy, the users have been given time till October 9. “We’re experimenting with a new way to write and roll-out policy and rules. Let us know what you think,” CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted.

Twitter has always had a good image in terms of privacy concerns as compared to other social networks such as Facebook, and these steps that the company is taking will further build more trust of the people in the company.