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| Twitter promises less serious action against offending accounts |
Twitter said on Friday that it will take "less stringent measures" when penalizing accounts that violate its rules, and will only suspend accounts that "seriously or persistently and repeatedly" violate its rules.
Severe violations of Twitter's policies include: engaging in illegal content or activity, inciting or threatening violence or harm, targeted harassment of other users, etc.
The company also said that it will allow anyone to appeal an account suspension starting February 1, and anyone who appeals will be judged using Twitter's updated criteria.
Instead of banning accounts, it has taken less drastic measures, including limiting the visibility of tweets or requiring users to delete tweets that break the rules before they can return to the site, which the company has been doing for years. But what has changed now is that Twitter has promised to resort to more disciplinary action rather than hasty accounts.
The company also said it plans to make the app's operations more transparent and will roll out unspecified new features over the next month to make that happen.
One possible example: Twitter CEO Elon Musk promised last year that the platform was working on a new software update intended to notify users whose accounts had been subjected to so-called "bans."
Musk said at the time that the new feature would explain to users why accounts were banned and allow them to petition to have the ban lifted.
It should be noted that the incognito ban is a term used for actions applied to user accounts where Twitter attempts to make them more difficult to find or make their messages invisible to other users of the platform or even followers.
In December, Musk came under fire for suspending the accounts of several journalists over controversy over the release of public data tracking his private jet, but he later reinstated it.