On Wednesday, Twitter released a new policy restricting “violent speech” on its social media platform. Among its updates, Twitter expanded its policy on the coded language used to incite indirect violence and prohibiting users from wishing harm on others through direct threats against physical infrastructure essential to daily, civic or business activities.
Twitter’s new violent-speech policy states that “healthy conversations can’t thrive when violent speech is used to deliver a message. As a result, we have a zero-tolerance policy towards violent speech in order to ensure the safety of our users and prevent the normalization of violent actions.”
The old Twitter rules, last issued in 2019, stated a “zero-tolerance policy against violent threats. Those deemed to be sharing violent threats will face immediate and permanent suspension of their account.”
Specifically, “statements of an intent to kill or inflict serious physical harm on a specific person or group of people” — provide examples of such statements that would invite scrutiny. The old policy stated tweets with “I will,” “I’m going to,” and “I plan to” commit acts of violence against specific people or groups of people were prohibited.
Although Musk’s new Twitter policy is similar to the old one, lines were blurred before Musk took over as users complained that their tweets and/or entire accounts were disabled with flagged warnings claiming they were inciting violence or using threatening language when they showed no correlation other than a display of facts.
This proves that policies are only as good as those who enforce them. Twitter’s old policies showed to have loopholes needing some serious adjustment – we will be on the sidelines seeing how these new policies under Musk turn out. Hopefully, it’ll be for the better.
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