Twitter is moving to remove inappropriate religion-based content as part of its effort to curb hate speech.
In a blog post about its policy update, Twitter said it is expanding its rules against hateful conduct to include language that dehumanizes others on the basis of religion.
This is after months of conversations and feedback from the public, external experts and Twitter’s own teams, the Twitter Safety Team said in a blog post.
In the same post, the team also showed examples of tweets with offensive content targeted at religious groups.
“Starting today, we will require tweets like these to be removed from Twitter when they’re reported to us,” Twitter said.
According to the team, tweets that break the updated safety policy posted before the policy came into effect will be deleted however, it will not result in the offending account being suspended.
Twitter and other social networks have been struggling with ways to remove hateful and abusive content while remaining open platforms.
The online services have also faced accusations that the rule act that suppresses the political views of some quarters.
Twitter last month said it would add warning labels to tweets from officials and politicians that violate its rules.
To balance this, Twitter said its updated safety policy is focused on offensive content based on religion rather than political groups, hate groups or other non-marginalized groups with the type of language shown in the examples.
In addition, Twitter said it had enhanced its training program to be longer and more in-depth for its team members to ensure they were informed when reviewing reports.
