Twitter will label tweets for violating hate speech policy

Twitter announced a new policy in order to offer more transparancy around hateful tweets on the platform. Tweets violating the company's policies will be limited with the number of people it reaches, becoming less discoverable, and will also be downranked in replies.

Twitter says that will add labels to tweets that are identified as potentially violating its guidelines, impacting the tweet's visibility as well. Currently, the company has stated that only tweets violating its Hateful Conduct Policy will be labelled. It intends to expand the feature to other policies soon.

“This change is designed to result in enforcement actions that are more proportional and transparent for everyone on our platform,” Twitter's blog post stated. The post emphasized Twitter's philosophy and called it “Freedom of Speech, not Freedom of Reach.”

Users whose tweets have been labelled can submit feedback if they think their tweet was mislabelled or incorrectly flagged, but they might not receive a response. Twitter relies on automation to make decisions over labelling and flagging inappropriate content, which means it could be heavily subjected to errors. Twitter admits its flawed system and high frequency of errors in a tweet.