Twitter has announced that it will be introducing disclaimer labels which will be placed on future tweets from world leaders that break its community guidelines, CNN reported.
This new policy change could have a particularly big effect on President Trump, whose tweets have been known to go against the social media site’s policies.
If a tweet is determined to break one of Twitter’s rules, it will receive a disclaimer label, effectively hiding (though not deleting) the message.
These tweets will be blocked out from users’ view with a grey text box that reads, “The Twitter Rules about abusive behavior apply to this Tweet. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain available.”
It is then left up to the user as to whether they allow the tweet to be viewed on their feed or not.
Any tweets that receive these warnings will be noticeably featured less on the social media platform.
The message won’t appear in Safe search, the Top Tweets timeline, live vents pages, recommended push notifications, the notifications tab, or the Explore page.
These disclaimers will effectively lessen the reach of the Tweet, meaning fewer people will be exposed to it.
As announced in a blog post , Twitter explained this policy change will only be applied to people who meet certain criteria. That includes people who are considered government officials and world leaders, who have more than 100,000 followers, and whose accounts are verified.
The tweets must be considered to be “in the public’s interest” to be viewed in order to receive the label.
The company said these new disclaimers are in an effort to reduce “the potential harm caused by these tweets.”
“Our highest priority is to protect the health of the public conversation on Twitter, and an important part of that is ensuring our rules and how we enforce them are easy to understand,” they wrote in the post. “In the past, we’ve allowed certain Tweets that violated our rules to remain on Twitter because they were in the public’s interest, but it wasn’t clear when and how we made those determinations.”
In the past, Twitter has allowed harmful tweets from Trump and other world leaders to remain because they were deemed to be in the public’s interest.
Trump in particular has been criticized for his regular violations of Twitter’s community guidelines. In 2017, the POTUS tweeted a video of himself that had been edited to look like he was tackling and punching a figure with the CNN logo over its face.
“#FraudNewsCNN #FNN,” Trump captioned the tweet without any further context.
In response, CNN released a statement saying it’s “a sad day when the President of the United States encourages violence against reporters.”
At the time, Twitter came under fire for its refusal to suspend Trump, despite his account posting harassment-related content.
In an story on the subject, CNN quote Trump as calling Twitter a “wonderful thing” because it allows him to speak directly to the people.
But it’s what he’s saying to them that is particularly troubling, and his repeated use of his Twitter account to attack people he doesn’t like or agree with.
At the time, it was revealed that Twitter wouldn’t act against Trump’s account because it would then have to act against other accounts acting similarly, too.
“If [Twitter] suspends his account, they’ll have to do this consistently with other harassment accounts, which is impossible,” an anonymous former Twitter executive told CNN.
They went on to say that blocking Trump’s account, but missing other similar accounts, would leave the company open to being accused of acting politically.
In its blog post, Twitter announced that these new warning labels won’t be applied to any Tweets sent out prior to today.
They also said that “given the conditions outlined…it’s unlikely you’ll encounter [labels] often.”
“Over time, public interest and how it’s defined on Twitter may change as we observe different types of behavior,” the post reads. “We’ll continue to evaluate how our rules and enforcement actions can be clearer and keep working to make our decision-making easier to understand.”
h/t: CNN
