Twitter's new policy for 'abusive' tweets will probably decrease Trump’s reach

published 27 June 2019

Twitter has a new strategy for dealing with politicians' questionable content.

The platform will soon begin putting labels on tweets from "all verified political candidates and government officials with more than 100,000 followers" that contain "abusive behavior," Twitter said in a Thursday blog post. It will also deprioritize labeled tweets in its algorithm and search functions, but not necessarily remove them from the site.

In the past, Twitter has "allowed certain Tweets that violated our rules to remain on Twitter because they were in the public's interest," it said in the blog post. But its criteria for determining that interest has often been vague. Now, it'll leave many of those questionable tweets available to the public, but block them from view with a label reading "the Twitter Rules about abusive behavior apply to this Tweet. However, Twitter has determined it may be in the public's interest for the Tweet to remain available." Users can then click through the label to see the allegedly abusive message.

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BuzzFeed News asked Twitter if the policy was a direct response to President Trump's tweets decrying Muslims and journalists, among other groups, but the company said it wasn't prompted by a particular leader. Still, it seems clear that the label could end up decreasing the number of people who end up seeing Trump's messages. The decision will likely further conservatives' claims that Twitter and other social media platforms' algorithms are hiding right-wing content from users under so-called "shadow bans."

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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.