Twitter will label ‘hateful’ tweets when it restricts them

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He's submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Twitter is introducing new labels it will show on tweets the company limits for breaking its rules. The company occasionally restricts tweets that violate its policies by making them harder to find or visible to fewer people, and these new labels will make those actions more clear.

The new labels will first appear on tweets that violate Twitter's Hateful Conduct policy, according to a blog post from the company. "Restricting the reach of Tweets, also known as visibility filtering, is one of our existing enforcement actions that allows us to move beyond the binary ‘leave up versus take down’ approach to content moderation," Twitter wrote. "However, like other social platforms, we have not historically been transparent when we’ve taken this action."

The labels are only implemented at "tweet level" and won't affect a user's account, the company noted in a tweet. You can see a few examples of what the labels look like in these images from Twitter.

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If you feel Twitter is incorrectly limiting your tweet, the company says you can "submit feedback" on the label, and down the line, the company plans to let users appeal Twitter's decisions. Twitter also won't run ads next to labeled content.

Twitter expects to expand the labels to "other applicable policy areas" in the coming months. We’ll have to wait and see if that means they’ll come to tweets the company throttles for no good reason, like what Twitter did to Substack after the launch of Substack's Twitter-like Notes, and what the explanation might be.

This new feature isn't a total surprise: Twitter owner Elon Musk had promised in November that hate tweets would be "max deboosted & demonetized," and in December, he said that the company was working on a way to let you know if you’ve been shadowbanned. It's also part of a broader direction at Twitter to take "less severe actions" against accounts that break its rules under Musk's leadership.

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