Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced on Friday that the company would be rolling out new anti-harassment rules following the #WomenBoycottTwitter protest.
“We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day. We’ve been working to counteract this for the past 2 years,” he wrote in a series of tweets. “Today we saw voices silencing themselves and voices speaking out because we’re *still* not doing enough.”
The exec promised a “more aggressive stance” in policing harassment on the platform and said the new rules will involve “unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that [glorify] violence.”
“These changes will start rolling out in the next few weeks,” he wrote. “More to share next week.”
Dozens of women boycotted the social media platform on Friday in solidarity with actress Rose McGowan and as a protest against the silencing of women’s voices, especially victims of sexual assault. The idea for the protest came after McGowan’s account was briefly suspended on Thursday when she tweeted out a personal phone number. After it was restored the same day, she tweeted that Harvey Weinstein had “raped” her and that when she reported it multiple times to Amazon, they said it “hadn’t been proven.”
McGowan responded to Dorsey’s announced by calling on him to “immediately” remove the verification of Richard Spencer. “I heard you have some power in these matters,” she wrote.
In reply to another user, Dorsey explained that the company is “reconsidering” its policy regarding verification, but it was not as high priority as policing behavior on the platform.
“Enforcing according to our rules comes first,” he wrote. “Will get to it as soon as we can, but we have limited resources and need to strictly prioritize.”
1/ We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day. We’ve been working to counteract this for the past 2 years.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
2/ We prioritized this in 2016. We updated our policies and increased the size of our teams. It wasn’t enough.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
3/ In 2017 we made it our top priority and made a lot of progress.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
4/ Today we saw voices silencing themselves and voices speaking out because we’re *still* not doing enough.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
5/ We’ve been working intensely over the past few months and focused today on making some critical decisions.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
6/ We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
7/ New rules around: unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
8/ These changes will start rolling out in the next few weeks. More to share next week.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
Enforcing according to our rules comes first. Will get to it as soon as we can, but we have limited resources and need to strictly prioritize
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017