Twitter bans posts that 'dehumanize' people for diseases like coronavirus

No COVID-19 shaming, please.

Twitter announced Thursday it will ban tweets that dehumanize people because they have a disease, disability, or because of their age, which happens to correspond to a spike in the number of tweets about the fast-spreading global coronavirus outbreak.

Read the announcement on the company blog:Updating our rules against hateful conductTwitter Safety, Thursday, 5 March 2020

Excerpt:

We create our rules to keep people safe on Twitter, and they continuously evolve to reflect the realities of the world we operate within. Our primary focus is on addressing the risks of offline harm, and research* shows that dehumanizing language increases that risk. As a result, of months of conversations and feedback from the public and conversations with bothand, external experts and our own teams, in July 2019, we expanded our rules against hateful conduct to include language that dehumanizes others on the basis of religion. Today, we are further expanding this rule to include language that dehumanizes on the basis of age, disability or disease.

We will require Tweets like these to be removed from Twitter when theyre reported to us:

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.

We couldnt have predicted that this would happen in terms of the coronavirus, Jerrel Peterson, Twitters head of trust and safety policy, told Reuters. Read the rest