Twitter is making a few changes to the policy that dictates how a tweet that has violated Twitter’s terms of service is handled. This is the latest move, in a long line of measures, that are designed to clean up the content that is being shared by users on the platform, after a history of criticism for not having been able to clean up its act.
The biggest update to the policy is about how Twitter will now handle tweets that are reported. If a user, or many users, report a particular tweet as something they find offensive or troublesome, Twitter will as always run it through various parameters to see if its violates the Twitter Rules policy guidelines. If it does, the contents of the tweet will be blocked with the message "This tweet is no longer available because it violated the Twitter rules." Thus far, whenever Twitter took action against any particular post, it wasn’t always clear to other users. “We're adding new notices to make it easier to see when we've taken enforcement action on a Tweet,” says the company’s official statement.
In fact, the next big measure is that unless the person takes action on a reported tweet and deletes it, they will be barred from publishing any new tweets till they do so. Additionally, the message will be displayed for 14 days post the action of deleting the tweet, so that any of the offending account’s followers know that an offensive tweet was posted and successfully reported. This will be visible on twitter.com, the user’s profile and any third party apps you may be using to access Twitter.
The other change deals with what happens to a post that you may have reported to Twitter. Considering you have just reported it for being offensive, for being spam or even for being abusive or bullying for instance, you may not necessarily want to see that tweet on your timeline. Twitter will now hide tweets that you report, with the message "You reported this tweet." If you still want to take a look at that tweet in question at some point of time, there is the “view” option that you need to tap on to do so.
These updates are a part of the changes being rolled out by Twitter, to better deal with offensive posts, fake news, hate speech and online bullying. Just last month, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has mentioned during the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that the social media company was working on better transparency measures, including a report for suspended Twitter accounts.
Twitter says these policy changes are rolling out now, and will be available to all users over the next few days.
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