Twitter announced on June 27 that it will identify and down-rank tweets coming from important sources such as politicians that break its rules.
“We'll now clearly label any tweets which violate our terms of service but decide to keep up due to public interest,” Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said, Reuters reported.
If flagged, a notice would cover the offending tweet and require a user to click on a link in order to view it.
“We’ll also take steps to make sure the Tweet is not algorithmically elevated on our service, to strike the right balance between enabling free expression, fostering accountability, and reducing the potential harm caused by these Tweets,” Twitter said on its blog.
In particular, Twitter indicated that the given tweet would feature “less prominently” on the platform and not appear in a number of search and other functions on Twitter: safe search, top Tweets, live event pages, push notifications, notifications tab, and explore.
Twitter added, “there are cases, such as direct threats of violence or calls to commit violence against an individual, that are unlikely to be considered in the public interest.
“In instances where a Tweet violates our rules and our review doesn’t find that it would be in the public interest to leave it up, we will require the account owner to remove the Tweet,” the company announced.
Links to Trump?
The move has been linked to President Donald Trump by some, even though the company did not in any way mention the President in its new announcement.CNBC’s Tech editor Steve Kovach tweeted: “Twitter doesn’t call out Trump by name, but this is clearly a new Trump rule—labeling tweets that violate rules.”
The Twitter announcement comes as Trump alleged that the social media company is censoring him.
“They’re doing it to me on Twitter,” he responded.
“What they did to me on Twitter is incredible. You know, I have millions and millions of followers. But I will tell you, they make it very hard for people to join me on Twitter and they make it very much harder for me to get out the message.”
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., warned in response to Twitter’s announcement: “If they can do it to the Leader of the Free World imagine, what they are doing to you and your voice!”
Not Just Twitter
The latest Twitter announcement comes shortly after Google and Reddit had reportedly taken efforts to suppress content related to Trump.Meanwhile, Reddit on June 26 put restrictions on its popular subpage ‘r/The_Donald.’ Now, it is reported that the subreddit, which is said to be the internet’s biggest President Donald Trump fan club, is no longer showing up in search, recommendations, or general Reddit feeds, such as the r/Popular.
“The reason for the quarantine is that over the last few months, we have observed repeated rule-breaking behavior in your community and an over-reliance on Reddit admins to manage users and remove posts that violate our content policy, including content that encourages or incites violence,” the company told the The_Donald’s voluntary content moderators in a message.
One volunteer moderator, shadowman3001, who manages the official Twitter account of The_Donald (@thedonaldreddit), dismissed the argument, saying that “fairly few” of the actions by the moderators deal with “calls to violence.”
After the quarantine, the page grew by about 10,000 subscribers in 24 hours, compared with a growth of about 11,000 a month during the preceding year.
- Google Stealthily Infuses Political Agenda Into Products to Prevent Trump Reelection, Insiders, Documents Say
- Facebook vs. Conservatives
- Twitter Joins Facebook in Creating Registry for Online Political Ads
- Google Doubles Down on Claiming Political Neutrality, Despite Evidence to Contrary
- Largest Pro-Trump Community Gains 10,000 Members After Reddit ‘Quarantine’
Friends Read Free