Skip to main content

Twitter will now label, hide tweets when Trump, other politicians break its rules

Twitter announced Thursday that it will add a notice over politicians’ tweets if the social network deems the tweet to violate its rules. The new system is effective immediately.

“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,” the company said in the blog post. “To fix that, we’re introducing a new notice that will provide additional clarity in these situations, and sharing more on when and why we’ll use it.”

Recommended Videos

This new feature will apply to all government officials, or those running for office, who have 100,000 followers or more and have verified accounts. Twitter’s guidelines are extensive and broad, but specifically ban violent threats, targeted harassment, and “hateful conduct.”

Instead of encountering an offending tweet in your timeline, you’ll now see a notice stating that it has violated Twitter’s rules instead of the tweet itself. Users will have to click through the warning in order to see the original tweet. Twitter will also make sure that these potentially harmful tweets aren’t spread to millions of users via its algorithm.

Twitter

Tweets that have been flagged under the new system will also not appear in Twitter’s safe search mode, on your timeline when you’re viewing Top Tweets, on live events pages, in push notifications, in the notifications tab, or under the Explore feature.

While Twitter did not specifically call out President Donald Trump in the blog post, the new rules are all but certainly aimed at him. As Twitter’s single most visible user, Trump’s behavior on the platform has long been a sticking point for the company — especially when he attacks other world leaders or political rivals. That said, the new rules only apply from this point forward — meaning past tweets won’t be flagged under the new system.

“In instances where a Tweet violates our rules and our review doesn’t find that it would be in the public interest to leave it up, we will require the account owner to remove the Tweet,” Twitter wrote. “Either way, this notice will make our decision-making clearer.”

Trump claimed during a Wednesday interview that Twitter was purposely limiting the reach of his tweets and making it harder for people to follow his account.

Allison Matyus
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…
Twitter is building two new ways to handle tweet replies
A person's hands holding a smartphone as they browse Twitter on it.

Replies on the bird app could be getting a makeover, as Twitter is apparently working on two new features that could shape how we respond to tweets.

On Wednesday, Jane Manchun Wong posted screenshots of two different reply-related features that Twitter is building. The first of Wong's tweets featured a screenshot that showed off an option to "Start a Space about this Tweet." And the second tweet Wong shared had a screenshot of a new "Pin Reply" feature.

Read more
Twitter for iOS now lets you dig up people’s tweets more easily
The Twitter app on the Sony XPeria 5 II.

Twitter recently rolled out a new feature to its iOS app, making it easier to search the tweets of an individual user. Previously, the search term could be amended manually if you wanted to filter tweets by a particular person, but Twitter has added a button for easier access, as spotted by XDA Developers.

Twitter has long since offered advanced search filters on its platforms, whether on desktop or mobile. This was to allow people who wanted to streamline their search by more precise parameters to do so. One of those parameters included usernames, and there was both a field for searching usernames directly, as well as a shortcut (from:username search term) where you could input into the search bar.

Read more
Twitter is facing its own outages as Facebook users flock to other sites
A Twitter logo graphic.

When Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram all went down, the groundswell of people rushing to other platforms to continue their social posting and messaging -- likely to poke fun at Facebook, frankly -- was intense. So much so, it seems, that Twitter is also experiencing problems.

Everyone's favorite doomsday watchlist Downdetector shows many reports of issues with Twitter, and staff members here at Digital Trends are seeing intermittent problems loading tweets -- both on the timeline and from individual links. So far the issue doesn't seem universal, and content usually loads after a handful of page refreshes, so we can hope this is a little blip and not the start of a larger problem.

Read more