- Twitter announced that it is going to start labeling tweets that violate community guidelines from world leaders including President Trump
Twitter is going to start labeling tweets from President Trump and other world leaders who violate community guidelines. This change is part of an effort to “protect the health of the public conversation.”
President Trump’s tweets have been in the spotlight since he was elected as he has been using his account to criticize opponents, the media, and other world leaders. Twitter acknowledged that it made exceptions for malicious tweets in the past.
“Our highest priority is to protect the health of the public conversation on Twitter, and an important part of that is ensuring our rules and how we enforce them are easy to understand,” said Twitter in a company announcement. “In the past, we’ve allowed certain Tweets that violated our rules to remain on Twitter because they were in the public’s interest, but it wasn’t clear when and how we made those determinations. To fix that, we’re introducing a new notice that will provide additional clarity in these situations, and sharing more on when and why we’ll use it.”
The new label is expected to provide “additional clarity in these situations.” And the label will be applied to policy violating tweets from accounts that belong to political figures, verified users, and profiles with over 100,000 followers.
Whenever Twitter determines whether a tweet is in violation, you will have to opt-in to read it. And that tweet will be placed behind a screen that has to be clicked or tapped through to see it.
When there were calls to have President Trump’s account on Twitter banned in the past, a company spokesperson said that this would be blocking “important information that people should be able to see and debate.”
The goal of this label feature is to “strike the right balance” between free expression and fostering accountability while reducing the potential harm caused by the tweets.
Twitter is also going to use algorithms to downlink tweets that are in violation of the policy. This change is being implemented immediately and is only going to apply to future tweets.
In the past, Twitter used to delete tweets that contained hateful conduct, threats, and violence glorification.
