Twitter chief Jack Dorsey promises new measures to tackle violent & sexual messages on the platform
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has promised that the platform will be stronger in how it deals with unwanted sexual misconduct and messages around violence following the #womenboycotttwitter movement that saw its users silence themselves for a day.
Twitter chief Jack Dorsey promises new preventative measures on the platform
Dorsey tweeted a series of eight messages to recognize the movement and promise more action. His response followed the silencing of actress Rose McGowan, one of the accusers of Hollywood mogul Harvey Wienstein, who faces numerous accusations of sexual misconduct.
Twitter censored McGowan’s account for a number of hours last week, and then claimed that it was because she broke its rules by sending out a telephone number. This sparked anger amongst its community who saw it as Twitter acting against McGowan, having faced many claims of ignoring the plight of users in the past.
Without explaining how he planned to take action, Dorsey promised the group that Twitter would be responsive in future and that the changes would be implemented in the coming weeks.
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