Tweets that dehumanize religious groups will now be removed by Twitter

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Today, Twitter announced some updates to its policies. These new policies largely address hateful language directed at religious groups. The new polices are supposed to go into effect today, July 10, with moderation practices also being enforced immediately.

The company has also noted that if this new policy were to be successful, it would start applying a similar policy for other protected groups of people in the near future.

The new policy looks to address specific examples of content which targets members of religious groups that should be removed once reported

Tweets that ‘dehumanize’ people based on their religious beliefs, for example, referring to a religious group as “rats,” “viruses,” and “filthy animals” — are now explicitly forbidden by the platform’s rules.

Twitter’s safety team stated “We create our rules to keep people safe on Twitter, and they continuously evolve to reflect the realities of the world we operate within,” further going on “Our primary focus is on addressing the risks of offline harm, and research shows that dehumanizing language increases that risk.”

Twitter has long struggled to detect and fight harassment on their platform which is why they have made multiple efforts to change its platform’s moderation policy to combat this ongoing issue.

What do you think? Glad to see Twitter doing more to address harassment on its platform? Is this enough or should social channels be doing more? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Murtaza Islam

Murtaza is a Computer Science student who takes immense interest in mobile technology. He believes the future of computing lies in smartphones because ARM architecture will eventually take over. He also loves to tinker with ROMs and kernels keeping up with the latest in smartphones.