Twitter Fixes Its Bad Policy On Blocking 'Hacked' Documents
from the good-to-see dept
As I'm sure you're already aware, there was a lot of focus this week on Twitter's content moderation practices, after it chose to stop people from linking to a sketchy NY Post article that contained some emails taken from a computer that was claimed to have been Hunter Biden's laptop. While many in the Trump orbit were insisting that this was "anti-conservative bias," the company said that the issue was violating its "hacked content" policies, as well as its policies against showing images revealing personal information, such as email addresses.
As we have discussed in the past this policy was already quite controversial, out of fear that it would be used to block reporting on leaked documents.
Late last night, Twitter announced that after hearing those concerns, they were changing the policy. Rather than responding to the controversy, and the nonsense grandstanding by clueless politicians, they were actually responding to the legitimate concerns many of raised about how this policy could block legitimate reporting, journalism organizations, and activist groups:
Why the changes? We want to address the concerns that there could be many unintended consequences to journalists, whistleblowers and others in ways that are contrary to Twitter’s purpose of serving the public conversation.
— Vijaya Gadde (@vijaya) October 16, 2020
The new policy is that Twitter may -- instead of blocking such links outright -- begin to add labels and context to such links. In other words (once again) taking a "more speech" approach, rather than a straight up "block" decision. I think this is the right move and, while I wish Twitter had made it earlier, it's good to see the company paying attention and improving.
So, what’s changing?
1. We will no longer remove hacked content unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them
2. We will label Tweets to provide context instead of blocking links from being shared on Twitter
— Vijaya Gadde (@vijaya) October 16, 2020
As the new announcement notes, the policy against linking to private information or manipulated media remain in place -- suggesting that this won't actually change the ability to link to that NY Post article. But it does fix the hamfisted nature of that policy.
Filed Under: content moderation, friction, hacked documents, journalism, labelling, more speech, reporting
Companies: twitter
