Twitter has officially changed its verification policy to exclude individuals that promote hate and racist speech – both online and offline.
Last week, Twitter announced it would remove verification badges from any accounts that don’t follow its guidelines. In the past few days, several prominent British rightwing and American alt-right personalities have had their blue badges stripped off their profiles.
We can’t be bothered to name the names of these scumbags, but this is great news for everyone’s favorite microblogging platform!
On its support page, Twitter said that “. . . promoting hate and/or violence against, or directly attacking or threatening other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease” can result in an account losing its verified status.
“Reasons for removal may reflect behaviors on and off Twitter.” Twitter states.
Users of the platform will now be held accountable for their actions and words in the real world, in addition to their online behavior.
It might not seem like much, but this change in the verification policy is a blow to anyone looking to promote hate speech and racist ideologies. We look forward to seeing more anti-racist changes to Twitter policies in the future.