Online Hate: Jack Dorsey Says Twitter Will Roll Out 'More Aggressive" Rules'

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey went on a tweetstorm Friday night in which he vowed to take a “more aggressive” stance against hate and violence on the platform.

His tweets come after the #WomenBoycottTwitter protest, which followed Twitter’s suspension of actress Rose McGowan’s account this week. McGowan was speaking out against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who allegedly sexually harassed her. The social media platform said it suspended McGowan’s account because one her tweets violated Twitter’s terms of service. However, users said Twitter was silencing the victim for speaking out against her alleged abuser.

On Thursday, Twitter tried to explain the account suspension.

“We have been in touch with Ms. McGowan's team,” Twitter Safety said in a tweet. “We want to explain that her account was temporarily locked because one of her Tweets included a private phone number, which violates our Terms of Service.”

On Friday night, Dorsey said Twitter has been “working intensely over the past few months” on bringing down online harassment. Dorsey said Twitter will launch “new rules around: unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence.”

Dorsey said the “changes will start rolling out in the next few weeks.”

Dorsey said the following Friday night on Twitter:

“We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day. We’ve been working to counteract this for the past 2 years.

We prioritized this in 2016. We updated our policies and increased the size of our teams. It wasn’t enough.

In 2017 we made it our top priority and made a lot of progress.

Today we saw voices silencing themselves and voices speaking out because we’re *still* not doing enough.

We’ve been working intensely over the past few months and focused today on making some critical decisions.

We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them.

New rules around: unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence.

These changes will start rolling out in the next few weeks. More to share next week.”

This isn’t the first time Twitter promised to crack down on hate and violence on its platform. The company previously announced measures to curb online abuse, including new filtering options for notifications, stopping the creation of new abusive accounts by banned users, strengthening safer search results and hiding abusive tweets.

Twitter also teamed up with IBM earlier this year to use its AI technology Watson in its fight against online abuse.