Earlier this year,
Significantly, Twitter said it would also police violent hate speech "on and off the platform"-a move that some sites like Recode speculated could "saddle itself with an incredible burden" but seems more like a pretext for Twitter to get rid of users who might espouse awful ideas, yet don't necessarily go around making violent threats. With the rollout date imminent, it remains to be seen whether Twitter is preparing a dramatic change in the way it polices users on the site or if the new approach will simply fall in line with its time-honored, laissez-faire approach of inaction and confusion .
In the past few months, users have gotten mixed signals on just how this could go down. For example, in early November, the site verified Jason Kessler , giving a shiny blue checkmark to the organizer of a violent neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that left three people dead and scores wounded. The incident was particularly galling because in August, Kessler had tweeted that the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer at the rally was "payback time."
But soon thereafter, Twitter halted all account verifications and announced it would be re-examining its policies. Days later, Twitter began
removing the verified badges
from a number of high-profile white supremacist and alt-right accounts and banned Tim "Baked Alaska" Gionet, one of the service's most annoying
Nazi-adjacent trolls
. That would seem like a positive step, though there were some troubling signs Twitter just
doesn't have enough qualified moderators
to ensure a more punitive approach is rolled out fairly-for example, a fair number of anecdotal accounts suggest it's easy for trolls to game its
Time will tell what happens. In the meantime, Twitter's alt-right crowd is clearly spooked, with some users like white supremacist Jared Taylor warning that the site will "make a clean sweep of everything 'offensive'" and may start mass-banning users tomorrow.
[ Recode ]