Twitter Expands Hate Speech Rules

Twitter has once again expanded its hate speech policies to “prohibit language that dehumanizes people on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin.”

Engadget reports that social media platform Twitter has expanded its hate speech policies again, this time to “prohibit language that dehumanizes people on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin.”

The change in policy comes more than two years after Twitter said that it intended to ban dehumanizing language and over six months from the last change to the site’s policies that banned hate speech relating to age, disability, and disease.

Twitter will now require users to delete tweets with dehumanizing language targeting people based on their race, ethnicity, or national origin. The platform claims it will now actively monitor reported tweets based on the new policy and will deploy automation technology to actively detect potential violations. Justifying the new updates, Jack Dorsey’s company has cited research that links dehumanizing language to real-world violence.

Other social media platforms such as Facebook have had similar hate speech rules in place for years but Twitter has been much slower in updating its policies. Twitter first promised to focus on removing dehumanizing language from its platform in September 2018.

Since then, the company has introduced just three updates to the rules. Twiter prohibited dehumanizing language targeting religious groups in 2019. Twitter says that it isn’t reluctant to make these changes but wants to implement them correctly. Twitter noted that it takes feedback from Twitter users before implementing changes in order to “expand our understanding of cultural nuances and ensure we are able to enforce our rules consistently.”