Twitter Bans Posts That 'Dehumanize' People In Connection With Diseases

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Twitter said on Thursday it is banning posts that "dehumanize" people because they have a disease or disability or because of their age, a step that happens to correspond to an explosion of tweets about the spreading coronavirus. The company told Reuters that the policy change was not a reaction to the outbreak of the virus, which causes the respiratory disease COVID-19, but was part of its continual effort to update its rules against hateful conduct.

"We couldn't have predicted that this would happen in terms of the coronavirus," Jerrel Peterson, Twitter's head of trust and safety policy, said in a phone interview. Twitter's hateful conduct policy already bans attacking or threatening others on the basis of categories such as race, sexual orientation, age, disability or serious disease. This update will mean that those attacks do not need to be targeted to an individual or specific group. Now, even "if it's a tweet that doesn't have an @mention that likens a group based on their age, disability or disease to viruses or microbes or maggots, something that's less than human, that can be in violation of our policy now," Peterson said. Twitter went on to say that any offending tweets must be removed. Tweets sent before Thursday would also need to be deleted, but would not directly result in account suspensions, it said.

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