Twitter has been trying to stamp out harassment, violence and abuse on its platform for years, but it’s nowhere near achieving that goal. Since its administrators regularly get a lot of flak for not moving fast enough to make the website safer, Twitter has published a post explaining why it takes time to conjure up and roll out new policy changes. The company says creating new rules “requires in-depth research around trends in online behavior, developing language that sets expectations around what’s allowed, and reviewer guidelines that can be enforced across millions of Tweets.”
After drafting new policies, Twitter runs them through its trust and safety partners, which include NGOs that focus on human relations, child abuse, mental health and cyberbullying. That’s followed by gathering “input from around the world” to make sure it can get “diverse, global perspectives” on how the rules are interpreted in different cultural and social contexts. Once all that consultation is over, it has to test the rules on potentially abusive Tweets to determine if they’re enforceable and effective. Finally, Twitter has to train its review teams to be able to identify tweets that violate the new policies.
Twitter released a calendar of safety policy rollouts after users organized a boycott in solidarity with “victims of hate and harassment Twitter fails to support.” The upcoming policies aim to get rid of consensual nudity, violence and hate group activities on platform. However, Twitter plans to implement them one by one, so it will take weeks and even months before we’ll see them being enforced.