Twitter starts crackdown on hate

Hyderabad: Twitter accounts may be suspended because of the use of words such as “kill”, “die”, “moron”, “rape”, and “knife” in tweets. Vidhya P.’s Twitter account (@books_thief) was suspended last week, and there seems to be no sign of it being reinstated despite she having filed an appeal. “Twitter went through old tweets where I had used certain abusive words. I received a mail stating that I had violated the site’s norms, and so my account was being suspended. I have appealed at the forum for suspended accounts, I have received no reply,” she says.

Nani, whose Twitter account (@ Ynakg) had 37,000 followers, was suspended because the system found that he had used the word “kill” in one of his tweets. “It was an attempt to translate a Telugu joke into English. My tweet, which read ‘She will Kill’, was posted in 2015. Twitter sent me a mail calling it a violation,” he says. @WeAreHyderabad which had 35,000 followers, was suspended for posting a video which was considered to be violent.

The site’s bots are looking for instances of sexually explicit or abusive language, defamation of individuals, political parties, nations, or religions, and violent content. They are unable to identify words in which letters are replaced by special characters, such as “r@pe”, k1ll”.

The Information Technology Act prohibits:
1. Criminal intimidation
2. Morphed pictures
3. Obscene content
4. Cyberstalking
5. False reports

• What you can do: Check your timeline and delete offensive tweets.
• Twitter has become proactive in curbing hate speech, the use of derogatory language, and threats of death and rape.
• The system looks for keywords on the basis of which it identifies violations of the site’s norms.