Twitter outage ongoing; new policy on ‘wishes of harm’

Many have been reporting a Twitter outage, with neither app nor website working, while others are able to access the service, but with delays.

Downdetector shows that the problem peaked around 5:30 a.m. EST, improving around 30 minutes later, but with many users still affected …

Twitter outage

Downdetector works by establishing a baseline of typical problem reports for any given service, and only reporting that a site is down when the number spikes significantly. It uses a “Possible problems” status when there is moderate evidence of an incident, and “Problems” where the evidence is strong. The Twitter outage is classified as “Problems.”

At the time of writing, the site indicates that 66% of problems are with the app, compared to 31% for the website.

There was a previous worldwide Twitter outage last month, after the platform announced a big increase in tweet lengths, to 4,000 characters.

Twitter has continued to layoff engineers despite previously stating that there would be no more cuts to staffing, raising the obvious likelihood of a link between the two.

New policy on “wishes of harm”

The Twitter Safety account announced a new policy last night.

We’ve made a few changes to our policies around violent content and similar language. Today, we’ve officially launched our Violent Speech policy, which prohibits violent threats, wishes of harm, glorification of violence, and incitement of violence.

Twitter has a zero-tolerance approach towards Violent Speech, and in most cases, we will suspend any account violating this policy. For less severe violations, we may require you to delete the content before you can access your account again.

If you believe a tweet violates this policy, please report it to us right away. As always, if you think we made a mistake, you can file an appeal.

Engadget compared old and new policies to identify what has changed.

The new policy prohibits users from expressing “wishes of harm” and similar sentiments. “This includes (but is not limited to) hoping for others to die, suffer illnesses, tragic incidents, or experience other physically harmful consequences,” the rules state. That’s a reversal from Twitter’s previous policy, which explicitly said that “statements that express a wish or hope that someone experiences physical harm” were not against the company’s rules.

“Statements that express a wish or hope that someone experiences physical harm, making vague or indirect threats, or threatening actions that are unlikely to cause serious or lasting injury are not actionable under this policy,” Twitter’s previous policy stated, according to the Wayback Machine.

Users are also now prohibited from threatening to damage “infrastructure that is essential to daily, civic, or business activities.”

Photo: Clint Patterson/Unsplash