Posted on October 16, 2019

Twitter Has Published Its Rules for World Leaders, Including What Types of Tweets Won’t Be Allowed

Kevin Webb, Business Insider, October 16, 2019

Twitter has revealed its moderation policies for world leaders in a new blog post.

The post from Twitter doesn’t discuss the actions of any specific world leader, but the company said it wanted to better explain why it makes moderation decisions when reviewing controversial posts from political figures.

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Twitter revealed a new enforcement policy for politicians and other influential users in June that labels tweets that are in violation of the platform’s policies instead of deleting them. However, that policy is only in place for Twitter accounts with 100,000 or more followers.

The company said it will leave controversial tweets intact for the sake of discussion, and so that people can engage with statements made by political leaders.

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Twitter’s saftey account said that offending tweets will be marked with a new warning label that makes it impossible to like reply, share or retweet the tweet in question. However, users would be able to express their opinions on the tweet by using the “Retweet with Comment” function that provides a link to the original moderated tweet.

As the 2020 presidential candidates and other politicians continue to rely more heavily on Twitter as a platform for policy and discussion, they have also questioned the rules of engagement. Earlier this month, Sen. Kamala Harris, a Democratic presidential candidate, wrote a letter asking Twitter to ban US President Donald Trump for six tweets that she felt violated the companies policies.

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In August, Twitter temporarily suspended an account belonging to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign after it posted a video that included violent threats against the senator. Twitter reinstated the account after the campaign appealed the decision and the Republican National Committee threatened to stop funding campaign advertisements on Twitter.

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