We want to provide much needed clarity around the actions we’ve taken with respect to two NY Post articles that were first Tweeted this morning.
The images contained in the articles include personal and private information — like email addresses and phone numbers — which violate our rules. help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-p…
As noted this morning, we also currently view materials included in the articles as violations of our Hacked Materials Policy. help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-p…
Commentary on or discussion about hacked materials, such as articles that cover them but do not include or link to the materials themselves, aren’t a violation of this policy. Our policy only covers links to or images of hacked material themselves.
The policy, established in 2018, prohibits the use of our service to distribute content obtained without authorization. We don’t want to incentivize hacking by allowing Twitter to be used as distribution for possibly illegally obtained materials. blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/c…
We know we have more work to do to provide clarity in our product when we enforce our rules in this manner. We should provide additional clarity and context when preventing the Tweeting or DMing of URLs that violate our policies.
We recognize that Twitter is just one of many places where people can find information online, and the Twitter Rules are intended to protect the conversation on our service, and to add context to people’s experience where we can.
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We placed a public interest notice on this Tweet for violating our Civic Integrity Policy, specifically for encouraging people to potentially vote twice.
To protect people on Twitter, we err on the side of limiting the circulation of Tweets which advise people to take actions which could be illegal in the context of voting or result in the invalidation of their votes.
At Twitter, we’re committed to protecting people’s ability to express their fundamental civil rights safely — especially voting. That’s why we’re expanding our Civic Integrity Policy to protect against attempts to undermine vital democratic processes. blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/c…
Under this expanded policy, we will label or remove false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process. We will begin enforcing this updated policy in 7 days.
Amid #COVID19, the conversation happening on Twitter has become even more important and nuanced as more voters turn to mail-in voting and more people are mobilized online. We’re updating our policies and enforcement guidance to better reflect that changing conversation.
Twitter is where people can share their truths and find comfort in community. Since the launch of our #thereishelp prompts in 2018, we’ve continued to expand the feature to connect people with resources when searching certain terms related to suicide and self harm.
This month, we’ve expanded the feature to six more countries. Access to support is key. Suicide rates can increase in prolonged crises, and COVID-19 has left many people vulnerable to mental health problems. If you or anyone you know is suffering, remember #ThereIsHelp.
We placed a public interest notice on two Tweets in this thread for violating our Civic Integrity Policy, specifically for encouraging people to potentially vote twice.
The laws regarding the invalidation of mail-in ballots when individuals choose to vote in person are complex, and vary significantly by state. Our goal is to prevent people from sharing advice about voting twice, which may be illegal.
To protect people on Twitter, we err on the side of limiting the circulation of Tweets which advise people to take actions which could be illegal in the context of voting or result in the invalidation of their votes.
We suspended five Twitter accounts for platform manipulation that we can reliably attribute to Russian state actors. As standard, they will be included in updates to our database of information operations in the coming weeks to empower academic research. help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-p…
The accounts purported to be associated with a website called PeaceData, which publishes a range of content about global political issues. At least some of the content published on the website was created by real people who appear to have contributed to PeaceData as freelancers.
The Tweets from the Russian-linked accounts were low quality and spammy, and most Tweets from these accounts received few, if any, Likes or Retweets.
The accounts achieved little impact on Twitter and were identified and removed quickly.
We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm. In line with this approach, this week we are taking further action on so-called ‘QAnon’ activity across the service.
We will permanently suspend accounts Tweeting about these topics that we know are engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension — something we’ve seen more of in recent weeks.
In addition, we will:
1⃣ No longer serve content and accounts associated with QAnon in Trends and recommendations
2⃣ Work to ensure we’re not highlighting this activity in search and conversations
3⃣ Block URLs associated with QAnon from being shared on Twitter