Twitter has updated its enforcement policy for limiting the reach of specific tweets it deems are in violation of its rules against Hateful Conduct. Reiterating their philosophy, “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” the social media platform will begin adding labels to identify which tweets have been given limited reach.
“Restricting the reach of Tweets, also known as visibility filtering, is one of our existing enforcement actions that allow us to move beyond the binary “leave up versus take down” approach to content moderation,” the company wrote.
“However, like other social platforms, we have not historically been transparent when we’ve taken this action. Starting soon, we will add publicly visible labels to Tweets identified as potentially violating our policies letting you know we’ve limited their visibility.”
Twitter explained that this action will be “taken at a tweet level” and will not affect the user’s account, as in shadow banning. The company also said that they may get the labeling wrong “occasionally,” and so will soon allow authors to appeal the decision to limit visibility. No word yet on whether this appeal feature will only be available on Twitter Blue, the platform’s $8/month subscription service.
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Twitter has been on a labeling spree for the past few weeks. It recently slapped the “Government-funded Media” label on publicly-funded news organizations NPR, BBC, PBS, and CBC.
Early last month, Twitter owner Elon Musk mocked BBC’s investigation into the rise of trolling and hate speech on the platform. The report, which was written by BBC disinformation and social media correspondent Mariana Spring, is a teaser for the BBC Panorama documentary on the topic. Spring gathered information from academic data and current and former Twitter employees.
“The company is no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation, following lay-offs and changes under owner Elon Musk,” Spring wrote.
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