Twitter Is Making Its Safety And Privacy Rules Less Complicated

Twitter announced on June 6 that the company is making the rules on its platform less complicated with clearer and more straightforward language. The social media platform also reported that its rule book has been condensed from 2500 words to just 600, and each rule’s top-line description is now reduced into tweet-sized chunks containing 280 characters or fewer.

The official Twitter Safety account tweeted:

What is also a part of Twitter’s modification is the reorganization of its rules into high-level categories to simplify the process of finding specific topics. The platform's policies can be discovered under topics of authenticity, privacy, and safety. Within these categories, new regulations related to platform manipulation, spam and election integrity have been added.

Moreover, the company is also introducing detailed guidance on the steps needed to report content materials that infringe its rules as well as information on what occurs when Twitter takes action. For more transparency, the corporate is now working to make sure that there is a separate help page for each rule with detailed information and related resources.

Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president of Trust and Safety, wrote in a blog post:

The decision of the platform to make its policies less complicated comes after YouTube's confusing way of enforcing its rules. The corporate repeatedly declined to punish Steven Crowder, a conservative content creator, for his racist and homophobic taunts before demonetizing his YouTube account.

This incident has led to widespread criticism of YouTube and other social media sites including Twitter for their failure to take immediate action. In the past, Twitter came under criticism for not dealing with accounts spreading hate speech. Until now, it still has not introduced a transparent regulation on fighting against white supremacists.