Twitter it is promising that it will take “less severe actions” by sanctioning accounts that violate its rules; It will only suspend Twitter accounts that engage in “repeated, serious, or ongoing violations” of its rules. The company it also says It will allow anyone to appeal suspensions starting February 1, and those who do so will be judged using updated standards.
What will Twitter do instead of suspending your account? The “less severe actions” are things Twitter has been doing for years, such as limiting the visibility of a tweet or telling a user to delete a tweet before they can return to the site. Today’s change is that Twitter promises to use those tools more often, instead of going straight to the ban button.
The company it also says is planning to be more transparent with its compliance actions and will release some unspecified new features to help with that next month. One possible example: CEO Elon Musk promised last year that Twitter would alert you when you’ve been “shadow-banned” and why.
Today, Twitter also appears to be justifying its decisions to bring those people back to Twitter, saying that it “did not reinstate accounts that engaged in illegal activity, threats of harm or violence, large-scale spam and platform manipulation, or when not there was a recent appeal to reinstate the account.” That makes it rather strange that Trump was let down, given that Twitter said in 2021 that definitively suspended the former president “due to the risk of further incitement to violence.” However, that may be because, like the genesis of the amnesty policy itself, Trump was voted down because Elon wanted him back and decided to poll his own audience.
