Twitter bans hate speech concerning age, disability and disease on its platform

In a bid to curb hate speech on its platform, Twitter on Thursday updated its “rules against hateful conduct.”

The rules now cover tweets that make dehumanising remarks based on age, disability or disease.

“We continuously examine our rules to help make Twitter safer. Last year we updated our Hateful Conduct policy to address dehumanizing speech, starting with one protected category: religious groups. Now, we’re expanding to three more: age, disease and disability,” the social media platform had tweeted from its official Twitter Safety account.

It will also proceed to delete tweets concerning these new categories which were reported before the update on March 5.

“If reported, Tweets that break this rule pertaining to age, disease and/or disability, sent before today will need to be deleted, but will not directly result in any account suspensions because they were Tweeted before the rule was in place,” reads the micro-blogging platform’s newly updated rules.

Twitter had first introduced these new rules against hateful conduct on the platform in September 2018. In July 2019, the platform had updated its rules to include removal of dehumanizing tweets based on religion.

In 2018, the company had asked for feedback to improve its rules. In two weeks, it had received more than 8,000 responses from people located in more than 30 countries.

The company has been attempting to improve its user experience by updating its policies. In a bid to curb abuse online, Twitter in January had introduced a feature where users can limit replies to their tweets. It had also updated its Twitter user rules to prevent misinformation on its platform in February.

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