Twitter bans sharing media of private individuals without consent. Here’s what that means.

Following big changes to the company’s leadership, Twitter just expanded their private information policy to include the ban of “sharing media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted”, but what exactly does this mean?

Their private information policy has been around for a while, and includes basic things like banning the sharing of someone’s address, identity documentation, contact information, etc. In addition to this, Twitter now made it so that you can’t post media (be it photos or videos) of someone else without their consent.

No, this doesn’t mean you can’t post a picture of your new born baby because they didn’t give you consent. Twitter will only remove posts in violation of this rule if they’ve been reported.

To clarify the motivations behind this change, Twitter said this in a thread: “This policy update will help curb the misuse of media to harass, intimidate, and reveal the identities of private individuals, which disproportionately impacts women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.”

In the blog post about this new change, Twitter defines the rule with a lot of exceptions. It only applies to private individuals, and not public figures, so you can share pictures of celebrities as long as the tweets are “shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse”. They didn’t really specify what exactly counts as public discourse, but assure that they will assess the content themselves. Media that’s already public or is being covered by traditional media is still allowed, as Twitter feels like it would be relevant to the community.

How to report someone on Twitter for posting pictures of you

If someone posted a picture of you without your consent, you can report the post to have it taken down. First, go to the tweet you want to report, click on the three dots on the top right, and select ‘Report Tweet’. After that, select ‘It’s abusive or harmful’, then ‘Includes private information’, and specify what type of content is being posted. If it was a hacked image, you can choose ‘Hacked materials’, but you can choose ‘Other’ if it’s not.

They will require a first-person report of the photo/video in question (or from an authorized representative). Twitter will remove the tweet once they approve your report claim. If the post was found to be part of harassment, intimidation, or threat, then they will remove it under the abusive behaviour policy. If it’s a private nude image, they will remove it under the non-consensual nudity policy.

However, if someone is involved in a crisis event, or a newsworthy event of public interest value, then Twitter will keep the post up if it outweighs the safety risks to said person.

I feel like this is a great addition to their private information policy and should be applied to more companies. I checked Facebook‘s reporting page and could not find a place to report the posting of private media, nor is it in their community standards page. As far as I’m aware, Facebook only has a category for sharing nude media.

[ SOURCE, IMAGE SOURCE ]