Twitter bans ‘dehumanizing language’ aimed at religious groups

Twitter’s ban on “dehumanizing” language is slowly taking shape. 

Nearly ten months after the company announced plans to update its rules, Twitter has made its first rule change to cover “dehumanizing language” about religious groups. 

Under the new rules, Twitter won’t allow tweets that compare specific religious groups to animals, or express other hateful opinions. The company says it will require old tweets that violate the new policy to be deleted, and that going forward it may suspend accounts that break this rule. (As with its other polices, Twitter relies mainly on user reports to police its platform.)

Here are a few examples of tweets that would be covered under the new policy, according to Twitter.

While these may seem like pretty obvious examples of hate speech, Twitter would not have removed these tweets under its previous policies, which only covered specific threats against individuals or calls for violence. Twitter, which has spent more than a year trying to make conversations more “healthy,” has cited research linking dehumanizing language to violence as one of the reasons for its latest policy change.

Notably, though, the new rules do not address other groups that may be targeted by this type of hate speech. The company says it plans to eventually expand the policy to cover dehumanizing language that singles out others based on their race, gender, or sexual orientation, though it’s not clear how long that might take.

For a company that’s often criticized for waiting too long to take harassment and abuse seriously, critics might argue this is yet another case of the company taking too long to implement what seem like obvious changes. 

Twitter, on its part, says that it’s spent the last several months listening to user feedback and consulting with experts, and the company cites several “additional factors we need to better understand and be able to address before we expand this rule to address language directed at other protected groups.”

As with so many other Twitter policies, it’s still a work in progress.