Twitter's CEO, Jack Dorsey, announced on Twitter that the company would be making more changes to its anti-harassment policies following a boycott of the platform protesting the silencing of women.
Dorsey explained in a series of eight tweets that the company has been prioritising and working towards improvements on its policies for the past two years. As a result of the day-long boycott, Twitter is reportedly taking "a more aggressive stance" on their rules and their enforcement of them. Specifically, the CEO lists unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups and tweets that glorify violence among the areas they are giving the most attention.
1/ We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day. We’ve been working to counteract this for the past 2 years.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
2/ We prioritized this in 2016. We updated our policies and increased the size of our teams. It wasn’t enough.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
3/ In 2017 we made it our top priority and made a lot of progress.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
4/ Today we saw voices silencing themselves and voices speaking out because we’re *still* not doing enough.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
5/ We’ve been working intensely over the past few months and focused today on making some critical decisions.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
6/ We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
7/ New rules around: unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
8/ These changes will start rolling out in the next few weeks. More to share next week.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
The boycott of the popular social media platform came as a response of solidarity to actress Rose McGowan, who asked her friends and followers not to use the app for 24 hours to make a statement against women being silenced on social media.
This call to action started after the actress was suspended this week when she posted a screenshot containing Harvey Weinstein's private phone number. Suspicions arose that the reason for the suspension was actually for McGowan speaking out against Harvey Weinstein for decades of sexual harassment and assault, in addition to calling out other men in Hollywood including actor Ben Affleck and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Twitter has received criticism surrounding its policies and what appears to be selective enforcement of them. For example, Rose McGowan had her account suspended for releasing the phone number of Harvey Weinstein; however, President Donald Trump shared Lindsey Graham's phone number and received no such suspension.
Countless celebrities joined in protest by publicly sharing their support and staying off Twitter on Friday 13th.
In direct response to these complaints, Twitter's CEO admitted that the platform needed to do a better job at "showing that we are not selectively applying rules." Twitter users had a flood of comments and suggestions in response to Dorsey's tweets, including questions about who the app allows to become verified in light of hate speech and how the company plans to follow through on enforcing their policies.
Jack Dorsey later retweeted coworker, Bo Han who wrote, "We will be better. We need to be better."
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