Twitter: Protecting Integrity of Conversation in Ethiopia

It is indeed unfortunate to see the humanitarian crisis prevailing currently in the country of Ethiopia and needless to say such a time is exceptionally volatile. Twitter has continued to monitor the ongoing conflict and humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia closely with the main focus to protect the “safety and integrity of the conversation” on the platform. Let’s have a look.

In times of crisis, Twitter deploys a number of tools to prevent the amplification of harmful content and to limit the visibility of such content across the entire platform.

“In Ethiopia, we’re focused on proactively reviewing Tweets for violative content, along with ongoing enforcement of our policies against dehumanizing speech and content that promotes violence and discrimination. Though we aim to enforce our rules as equitably and even-handedly as possible, our first priority is the safety of the people on Twitter and those on the ground.” says Twitter.

Twitter operates in favour of action and it looks at specific indicators of offline harm to guide its product interventions. Twitter has specially:

• Paused Trends in Ethiopia, given the potential for harm and attempts to manipulate trending topics.
• Paused List discovery, to limit the targeting and harassment of individuals.
• Launched a search prompt with relevant keywords that points to a Twitter Moment with digital safety and security resources.
• Halted advertisements in the region.

And it’ll continue to:

• Monitor the service for signs of platform manipulation and spam based on behavior and building new detections and mitigations for “copypasta” and other types of platform manipulation that we’ve observed in the context of the crisis.
• Deamplify harmful content, including claims that create risk of harm to humanitarian workers on the ground.

“We believe Twitter is a place for different voices and perspectives to be heard. Our rules are enforced objectively on content and accounts — we remain neutral to political identity and ideology. And, when possible, we strive to ensure our actions are proportionate to the propensity for harm.”, says Twitter.

In this regard, the social media platform is constantly updating its approach and doing everything to reduce harm.