Twitter’s core features have been exploited by the web’s most malicious actors, including Russians who spread propaganda during the 2016 US election to stir political unrest. In response, regulators have pushed tech giants to police the content that appears on their sites and services, a role that some find uncomfortable given the industry’s historic hands-off role in favour of free speech.

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Earlier this month, Apple, Facebook and Spotify took action against Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars, whose videos, podcasts and other content have spread conspiracy theories about political figures and attacked victims of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Initially, Twitter broke with its peers and allowed Infowars to continue using its service.

But on Wednesday, Twitter imposed a seven-day “timeout” on Jones after he encouraged his followers to get their “battle rifles” ready against critics in the “mainstream media” and on the left. Twitter imposed the same limitation on the main Infowars account, which means neither account can tweet during the suspension.

In recent months, Twitter has made several changes to promote safety and trust. It has introduced new machine learning software to monitor account behaviour and is suspending over a million problematic accounts a day. The company has updated its policies to emphasise that content that is “dehumanising” or causes “real-world harm” would not be permitted, but Dorsey said executives were still figuring out how to define those terms.

Dorsey said Twitter hasn’t changed its incentives, which were originally designed to nudge people to interact and keep them engaged, in the 12 years since Twitter was founded. “We often turn to policy to fix a lot of these issues, but I think that is only treating surface-level symptoms that we are seeing,” Dorsey said.

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With more limited resources than Facebook or Google, though, Twitter has to be selective about its investments in safety. “Choosing to do one of them comes at a cost of not doing something else because of the number of resources we have,” Dorsey said.

One solution Twitter is exploring is to surround false tweets with factual context, Dorsey said. Earlier this week, a tweet from an account that parodied Peter Strzok, an FBI agent fired for his anti-Trump text messages, called the president a “madman” and has garnered more than 56,000 retweets. More context about a tweet, including “tweets that call it out as obviously fake,” could help people “make judgments for themselves,” Dorsey said.

Twitter some day could also label automated accounts, which businesses also use to send out information such as weather or stock prices, Dorsey said. Some US lawmakers have proposed putting such a requirement into law. Dorsey said the company had not done so yet “because we’ve prioritised other work that we believe will have greater impact,” including shutting down fake accounts.

Twitter’s new policies are being tested at the highest level; including by President Trump, whose tweets are a direct challenge. On Tuesday, Trump called former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, who recently published a tell-all about her time at the White House, a “dog.” He also attacked Harley-Davidson on Sunday for moving jobs overseas; a move that precipitated a 2 per cent drop in the company’s stock price.

Dorsey stuck to his long-held view that an exception generally would be granted to Trump because his comments are newsworthy and give users crucial insights as to how “global leaders think and treat the people around them.”

Washington Post