Twitter has announced that it will add a new label to tweets who violate its rules, reporting them as hate speech – but that the social network will not remove. These labels will indicate that Twitter has limited the dissemination of these tweets because they contain hateful or offensive content.
Twitter, label for hate speech (which does not delete)
On your own blog, Twitter explains that “This helps us balance the need to maintain a public conversation with adhering to our policies. We also want to be more transparent about our moderation actions and the reasons behind them.”
Labels only come on tweets that violate Twitter’s hateful conduct policy, which forbids attacking or threatening other people based on their membership of a group. The labels they will not affect your account status of whoever posted the tweet. But they will prevent the tweet from being promoted or displayed in certain sections of the platform.
Twitter said labels are one form of feedback for users who violate its rules and that they will allow them to “submit feedback” or “appeal” Twitter decisions if they feel they have been treated unfairly. Twitter also claimed that will not show ads next to labeled tweets.
This is the latest initiative by Twitter to address the issue of problematic content on its platform. Previously, Twitter had introduced labels for tweets that contained false or misleading informationespecially during the 2020 US election. Twitter has also limited the visibility of some tweets without providing a clear explanation, as was the case with Substack after the launch of its Twitter-like notes.
Twitter has stated that the new labels will apply to “other applicable policy areas” in the coming months, but did not specify which ones.