Twitter strengthens anti-hate policy, warns against abusive behavior

• Twitter, announces policy targeting hate speech and abusive behaviors.
• Twitter introduces “Freedom of Speech, Not Reach” policy to restrict visibility of rule-violating accounts.
• An update reveals that over 700,000 violative posts have been labeled under the Hateful Conduct policy.

Elon Musk‘s company, Twitter, recently made an announcement regarding its policy on hate speech and freedom of speech. They pledged to broaden their actions, targeting individuals engaged in “violent speech” and “abusive behaviors.”

In April of this year, the San Francisco-based social media company introduced its policy titled “Freedom of Speech, Not Reach.” This policy aims to restrict the reach of accounts that violate the platform’s rules and regulations, ensuring that their content is limited in its visibility to the public.

In their new approach to content regulation, Musk’s company has chosen to address hate speech by labeling such content and requiring the authors to remove their tweets. Twitter states that this approach has shown promising results in combating hate speech.

We remain committed to maintaining free speech on Twitter, while equally maintaining the health of our platform. Today, more than 99.99% of Tweet impressions are from healthy content, or content that does not violate our rules.

Read more about our progress on our enforcement…

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— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) July 12, 2023

The social media giant shared an update on the progress in line with the policy through a blog post, which stated: “Labels have been applied to more than 700,000 violative posts that fall under our Hateful Conduct policy.”

In line with the policy, Twitter proactively prevents ads from being displayed alongside labeled content, resulting in an 81% reduction in the reach of those posts and making them less discoverable.

After evaluating the outcomes of the policy, Twitter expressed its intention to expand the platform’s actions against abusive behavior and violent speech.

Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk for $44 billion last year, reported that “more than 99.99% of Tweet impressions are from healthy content or content that does not violate our rules.”

Twitter strengthens anti-hate policy, warns against abusive behavior

Regarding violative content, the update mentioned that proportionate enforcement actions are taken for a small percentage of such content. The platform continues to remove the most serious rule violations and suspend bad actors from the platform, including those sharing illegal content.

The blog post indicated that when informed that their content violated the rules, a significant portion of users deleted their tweets, while approximately 4% appealed the decision. The post also stated that 90% of those who appealed received a response within 30 minutes.

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This progress update is particularly significant as Musk’s company faces strong competition from Mark Zuckerberg’s newly launched social media platform, Threads, which gained millions of sign-ups within hours.

Twitter‘s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, reiterated the company’s commitment to free speech, a value shared by owner Elon Musk. Yaccarino’s goal is to position Twitter as the most accurate and real-time source of information, serving as a global hub for communication.