Twitter policy takes aim at coronavirus discrimination

Twitter's ongoing quest to make everyone behave better online has a new target.

The social media giant has made an update that prohibits the use of dehumanizing language toward people on the basis of age, disability, or disease. Dehumanizing language is speech that compares or treats others as less than human. For example, comparing a member of one of Twitter's (newly expanded) protected groups to animals or vermin is textbook dehumanization.

Twitter says the change has been in the works for a while, but that the latter category is particularly timely. Animosity and racism against people who have contracted novel coronavirus has been rising. So now, on Twitter at least, fearful people can't deploy dehumanizing hate toward people who happen to have contracted a scary illness.

For example, a phrase like "People with coronavirus are vermin" is now not allowed.

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Twitter debuted the idea of its anti-dehumanizing language policy in 2018. It finally enacted a narrower version of the rules in July 2019, which only specifically prohibited dehumanizing language against members of religious groups. This specificity came under fire when President Trump invoked the dehumanizing tropes of "vermin" and "infestation" against the Rep. Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore — and Twitter clarified that Trump had not broken its rules.

Dehumanizing language specifically is on Twitter's no-go list because research has shown that its use contributes to real world violence. It's part of Twitter's larger effort to improve "conversational health" on the platform, which means more empathetic interactions, less toxic trolling and inflammatory bots. Now, wouldn't that be nice?

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