Twitter Reveals Timetable For Platform Safety Changes, Explains Why It Takes Time

Twitter says it will take a while to roll out all of its safety changes aimed to reduce hate and violence on the site, with the earliest one launching next week and the latest next year.

The platform released on Thursday night a calendar of changes it will implement throughout the rest of the year going into January. The schedule comes after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey promised last week to roll out more aggressive rules to combat harassment on the social media platform. All planned safety changes are expected to roll out by next year.

“This won’t be a quick or easy fix, but we’re committed to getting it right,” Twitter said. “Far too often in the past we’ve said we’d do better and promised transparency but have fallen short in our efforts.”

In the post, Twitter explained why it takes time to roll out safety changes for its millions of users.

“Making a policy change requires in-depth research around trends in online behavior, developing language that sets expectations around what’s allowed, and reviewer guidelines that can be enforced across millions of Tweets,” Twitter said. “Once drafted, we gather feedback from our teams and Trust & Safety Council.”

The Twitter Trust & Safety Council includes safety advocates, academics, researchers and advocacy organizations, like GLAAD, European Schoolnet and the National Cyber Security Alliance.

The social media platform said it collects input from around the world for its diverse network of users. The new rule is then tested with samples of potentially abusive tweets and if they meet expectations, Twitter starts to “build and operationalize product changes to support the update.” The platform then trains their global review teams and updates its Twitter Rules to start enforcing the new policy.

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

Besides the upcoming changes, Twitter has launched other tools to combat online harassment, including new filtering options for notifications, stopping the creation of new abusive accounts by banned users, strengthening safer search results and hiding abusive tweets. The company also teamed up with IBM earlier this year to use its AI technology Watson in its fight against online hate.