Twitter bans posts that ‘dehumanise’ people with diseases amid explosion of coronavirus tweets
- The company says the policy change is part of its effort to update its rules against hateful conduct, and not a reaction to the outbreak of the virus
- Twitter has long been under pressure to clean up hateful content on its platform
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 safety policy, said in a phone interview.
Twitter has long been under pressure to clean up hateful content on its platform, and social media sites are under scrutiny over their attempts to handle misinformation and abuse related to the coronavirus outbreak.
A Reuters search for derogatory terms linked to the virus on Twitter found posts that called Chinese people “subhuman” or likened them to animals. The outbreak, which began in China, has spread to nearly 80 countries and territories and killed more than 3,000 people.
Peterson said the three new categories had been added not because there were more reports of hateful language in these areas but because of the potential for offline harm.