"Twitter Backs Off Broad Limits on 'Dehumanizing' Speech", 9 July 2019

[On 9 July, 2019]... Twitter rolled out its first official guidelines around what constitutes dehumanizing speech on its service... “While we have started with religion, our intention has always been and continues to be an expansion to all protected categories,” Jerrel Peterson, Twitter’s head of safety policy, said... “We get one shot to write a policy that has to work for 350 million people who speak 43-plus languages while respecting cultural norms and local laws... We realized we need to be really small and specific.” ... Twitter has focused its removal policies on posts that may directly harm an individual, such as threats of violence or messages that contain personal information or nonconsensual nudity. Under the new rules, the company is adding a sentence that says users “may not dehumanize groups based on their religion, as these remarks can lead to offline harm.”...Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a civil rights group, said... "Dehumanization is a great start, but if dehumanization starts and stops at religious categories... that does not encapsulate all the ways people have been dehumanized"... In October and November [2019]... Twitter... [narrowed] down to groups that are protected under civil rights law, such as women, minorities and L.G.B.T.Q. people...  Those include the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, which was preceded by hate campaigns on social networks like Facebook... The company prepared a feature to preserve tweets from world leaders... even if they engaged in dehumanizing speech. Twitter reasoned that such posts were in the public interest.