Twitter said today it will add labels to tweets flagged by the company to reduce their visibility. Elon Musk & Co. called this a “free speech, no reach.”
Last week, the social media company first made the visibility announcement, saying the label offers greater transparency in the company’s process of narrowing the reach of hateful tweets.
Limiting the reach of Tweets helps reduce binary decisions about moderating ‘cease versus deletion’ and supports our approach of free speech versus freedom of reach,” the company said. said at the time.
“But like other social platforms, we historically have not been transparent when we took this action.”
Twitter said labels will be shown to both authors and viewers. Typically, these tweets will include text such as “Visibility restricted: This Tweet may violate Twitter’s rules against hate speech.”
Image Credits: Twitter
from Twitter enforcement policy says tweets with such labels won’t appear in search results, recommendations, or timelines — those tweets will be hidden in both the “For You” and “Following” timelines. In addition, no ads will be placed next to posts with reduced visibility.
The company admitted that there may have been mistakes in labeling these tweets so that authors can provide feedback. Twitter said this action “does not guarantee that you will receive a response or that the reach of your Tweet will be restored.”
Notably, under the previous administration, Twitter geo-restricted tweets and accounts in certain regions at the request of local government. Twitter states that the new visibility policy will be more granular because it will be applied at the tweet level, not the account level.
It’s not clear if Twitter will limit the reach of a tweet if someone quotes the tweet in question to point out the label. Similarly, drawing attention to tweets with reduced visibility can have the opposite effect, as people may start sharing screenshots of those tweets.
Since Musk took over the social network and became the new owner, he has reduced staff in moderation and security vertically. The new management has also placed an emphasis on developing crowd-sourced moderation tools for Community Notes in an effort to reduce the burden on staff and contractors.