Twitter’s new change will hide the tweets from public figures that violate its community guidelines

Micro-blogging website Twitter has started rolling out a new notice today for the tweets that belong to public figures and breaks its community guidelines. With this, if any public figure – a Prime Minister or President or Actor – tweets something that breaks the guidelines set by Twitter, it would notify the users about the violation. In addition to this, the reach of the tweet will also be decreased. Although this change is not rolling out for the platform yet, but according to the company’s executives, it will be coming soon.

The notice released by Twitter is applicable for tweets from the accounts of the political figures, verified users and the accounts with more than 1,00,000 followers. If any tweet from these accounts gets flagged for violating the rules of Twitter, then a team of people from the company will decide whether it is a “matter of public interest” or not. If it is indeed in public interest, then a light grey box will appear before the tweet itself and will notify the users who see the post that it violates the rules of the company. However, the tweets will not be removed and they will remain on the platform. According to the micro-blogging platform, this new change will preserve the tweet as a part of the public record without allowing it to be promoted to new audiences.

If any tweet from a public figure found to be violating the rules receives this notice, then the platform will feature it less for the audience. The posts from that account will not appear in the Safe Search, the Top Tweets timeline, live events pages, recommended push notifications, the notifications tab, or the Explore page altogether. This new change is applicable on Twitter starting today.

According to Twitter’s safety team, ‘In the past, we’ve allowed certain Tweets that violated our rules to remain on Twitter because they were in the public’s interest, but it wasn’t clear when and how we made those determinations. Serving the public conversation includes providing the ability for anyone to talk about what matters to them; this can be especially important when engaging with government officials and political figures.”

We should mention that earlier, some of the public figures were found to be violating Twitter’s rules. According to Twitter, banning such people completely might keep the public from important and relevant information. Earlier in 2018, Twitter called out to Donald Trump for some of his tweets. In that regard, Twitter wrote in a blogpost, “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. By nature of their positions these leaders have outsized influence and sometimes say things that could be considered controversial or invite debate and discussion. A critical function of our service is providing a place where people can openly and publicly respond to their leaders and hold them accountable.”