Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Has New Rules for Fighting Hate and Abuse

On Friday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced plans to act more aggressively against hate and abuse on his social media platform.

Twitter has come under fire for increasingly playing host to bullies, harassers, Nazis, propaganda-spreading bots, ISIS recruiters, and threats of nuclear war, reports Wired. The company began altering its stance on free speech back in 2016, creating a Trust and Safety Council made up of safety groups, advocates and researchers. But critics are not satisfied because reports show the company has failed to punish harassers.

Last week, during the Harvey Weinstein sexual misconduct scandal, the company disabled features of Rose McGowan’s account, according to Wired. Groups of women then boycotted the platform for a day in protest.

So the company is changing its plan again. Dorsey announced that Twitter will introduce new rules around “unwanted sexual advances, nonconsensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorify violence,” reports Wired.

1/ We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day. We’ve been working to counteract this for the past 2 years.

— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017

7/ New rules around: unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence.

— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017

The new plan allows observers and victims of unwanted sexual advances to report them, and plans to hide hate symbols behind a “sensitive image” warning, though it has not defined what a hate symbol is, reports Wired. Twitter also plans on taking enforcement actions against “organizations that use/have historically used violence as a means to advance their cause,” though what those actions entail is unspecified.

Twitter has rules prohibiting threatening or promoting terrorism, but these new rules seem to expand that rule to any group promoting violence. Social media platforms are constantly struggling how much “editorial oversight and human judgment to introduce” to their platform, Wired writes.