A spokesperson for Twitter said the company intended from the outset to add additional categories to the policy over time after tests to ensure the revised guidelines can be reliably applied.
On Wednesday, Twitter Inc extended its policy barring hateful speech from covering “language that dehumanizes people on the basis of race, ethnicity and national origin,” it said in a statement.
Last year the company banned speech that dehumanizes anyone based on faith or caste and revised the law in March to add age, disability and sickness to the list of groups covered.
A spokesperson for Twitter said the company intended from the outset to add additional categories to the policy over time after tests to ensure the revised guidelines can be reliably applied.
In a tweet, Twitter was criticized by Color Of Change Vice President Arisha Hatch for failing to amend the guidelines before the presidential election in November, prompting repeated concerns from activist organizations against abusive and dehumanizing speech.
Twitter has also failed to include transparency about how its content moderators are educated and the usefulness of its artificial intelligence in detecting content that breaks the regulation, Hatch said.
With far-right extremist consumers, the jury is still out for an organization with a spotty track record of policy compliance and enforcement of its laws,”The jury is still out for a company with a spotty track record of policy implementation and enforcing its rules with far-right extremist users.”
She added that this launch would slip into a growing group of too little too late PR stunt offers, void of hard proof that the company will carry through.
