SOCIAL
Twitter Announces Expansion of Trust and Safety Council to Improve Platform Policies
Twitter has announced that it will expand its Trust and Safety Council advisory group to ensure that it considers the perspectives of a broader cross-section of society when establishing its platform rules and policies.
As per Twitter:
“In 2016, we established the Twitter Trust and Safety Council, which brings together more than 40 experts and organizations to help advise us as we develop our products, programs and the Twitter Rules. We’ve been discussing internally and with the current members how we can make sure the Council best serves the people who use Twitter, and heard feedback that we needed to broaden membership to include a more diverse range of voices and organize members to have deeper conversations.”
To meet such need, Twitter says that the Council will now be made up of several dedicated groups, “each focused on advising us on important issues that contribute to real-world harm”.
Those key areas will be:
- Safety and online harassment
- Human and digital rights
- Child sexual exploitation
- Suicide prevention and mental health
Twitter says that making a more specific focus on these areas will help it adapt to rising challenges faster, while expanding the representative groups within its council will ensure more perspectives are considered in its policy decisions.
Twitter’s also looking to establish working groups on additional areas of concern:
“One such group will work on the issues we face as we broaden our interpretation of dehumanization.”
These are key issues, and ensuring that as many perspectives as possible are considered will ideally help Twitter to formulate more inclusive, adaptive rules, which cater to evolving demand. Interestingly, Twitter’s also creating a separate internal group to examine the possibilities of a decentralized social networking model, which, among other things, may be able to address these same concerns by opening them up to even more inputs.
No social platform, or indeed, any space where such a wide range of different people interact, will ever be able to solve all of these issues, as such. But by opening up the discussion to a broader set of perspectives, and taking in more considerations, Twitter will better ensure that its policies are inclusive, relevant, and get to the heart of each issue.
Twitter says that it will share more details about its processes on such next month.