This year, says Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, harassment and abuse was the company's "top priority" and they've "made a lot of progress." This was part of a mini tweet storm Friday that Dorsey posted in response to a week of criticism and a boycott by women prompted by the brief suspension of actress Rose McGowen's account in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
Dorsey says changes to Twitter are rolling out shortly, and there will be new rules around "unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence."
The storm:
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
Whether or not Twitter's handling of abuse and harassment on the platform has been the company's "top priority," it's clear to many users that the free-for-all social network is pretty much tailor-made for bullying and rudeness in general. Our own president continues to use the platform for off-the-cuff remarks about foreign policy and for taking aim at media outlets, but Twitter has thus far given him a pass saying that "newsworthy" tweets are an exception, because they're coming from a world leader.
And at least one of the company's other priorities, recently, was retooling the entire platform to allow tweets to be twice as long, 280 characters, up from 140.
Curiously, Dorsey did not use the new character limit to his advantage Friday it seems like all of that could have been said in like three tweets, instead of eight.
