No more offensive tweets or accounts in Twitter
New York, Feb 22: Twitter is in a process of cleaning itself. According to reliable sources, Twitter has started deleting offensive tweets. It aims to transform the communication platform to a safer one for its users by weeding out communications which are of offensive in type.
According to international standards, offensive communications are classified into four.
- Threats of violence to person or damage to property.
- Harassment or stalking, coercive behaviour, disclosing private sexual images.
- Breach of any court order or some statutory prohibition.
- Grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false.
Twitter has started blocking accounts temporarily of those who used their accounts for communication in offensive language. The move of deleting offensive tweets has come a week after such blocking. Also Twitter announced that the accounts once blocked permanently could not be retained and those users who are banned permanently cannot ever return to Twitter.
Twitter user John Sweeney (@SuperNerdLand) was the first to notice that the micro-blogging site had ‘ghost’ deleted his offensive tweet.
He was able to read that tweet but the rest of the users were redirected to an error page if they even tried to enter the URL manually.
However, users have blamed the micro-blogging site for removing tweets which are not offensive in nature.
A tweet about an Indian politician’s wedding was also deleted mysteriously, with the user alleging that his post contained nothing offensive.
Twitter has been claiming that it “prohibits the promotion of hate content, sensitive topics, and violence globally”.
Recently, the micro-blogging site rolled an update that would collapse abusive or low-quality tweets as well as introduce a safer search feature where sensitive content is hidden.
Day by day, numerous communications are sent via social media and such comments gives the potential to prosecute a very large number of cases. Taking together, for example, the following social media platforms are likely to contain hundreds of millions of communications every month: Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; YouTube; WhatsApp; Snapchat; Instagram and Pinterest. Apart from twitter, these application also must follow the way Twitter has shown.
