Understanding Twitter’s new rules on harmful tweets | WARC | The Feed

Understanding Twitter’s new rules on harmful tweets

Twitter, the social media platform, has announced plans to reduce user and advertiser exposure to harmful tweets, but questions remain around how its policies will be enforced in practice.

The new approach

• Speaking at the POSSIBLE Miami conference, Elon Musk, Twitter’s CEO, said freedom of speech was a priority, even if it meant some ad dollars flowed away from the platform.
• Twitter dubbed its new approach to limiting the spread of harmful tweets as “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” – and as a step beyond the old “leave up versus take down” mindset.
• Starting “soon”, the company reported, it will “add publicly visible labels” showing when the discoverability of posts breaking its hateful content policies has been curtailed.
• Coupled with lower reach, this material will not have ads placed alongside it, enhancing brand safety.
• The authors of such messages can “submit feedback” to challenge this designation, but precise details of the workings of all these procedures are currently unclear.

The start of a conversation

• Edward Perez, a former director of product management for Twitter, told Fast Company that heightened transparency of this kind is a worthwhile objective.
• However, he suggested, this will not be the “end of the conversation”, as the protocols informing Twitter’s choices will attract inevitable scrutiny.
• “I think there will be reasonable third parties that will want more detail about the automated systems that are helping to make these decisions,” he said.

Reduced headcount poses questions

• Twitter has drastically cut its headcount since being purchased by Elon Musk in October 2022, including a reduction in the size of its content moderation team.
• Steven Buckley, a lecturer in media and communications at City, University of London, said the complexity of language meant relying on automated moderation would be “problematic.”
• “It is all well and good Twitter saying that they will limit the reach of particularly bad content, but given that Twitter is working with far fewer staff than it used to, who exactly is going to do this policing?” he asked.
• As Twitter now charges researchers $42,000 per month to access API data, it could be very “difficult for the public to know the impact these new labels will have,” he added.

Sourced from Twitter, Fast Company