Twitter bans posts that ‘dehumanise’ people in connection with diseases

Twitter Inc said on Thursday it is banning posts that “dehumanize” people because they have a disease or disability or because of their age, a step that happens to correspond to an explosion of tweets about the spreading coronavirus.
The company told Reuters that the policy change was not a reaction to the outbreak of the virus, which causes the respiratory disease COVID-19, but was part of its continual effort to update its rules against hateful conduct.
“We couldn’t have predicted that this would happen in terms of the coronavirus,” Jerrel Peterson, Twitter’s head of safety policy, said in a phone interview.
Twitter has long been under pressure to clean up hateful content on its platform, and social media sites are under scrutiny over their attempts to handle misinformation and abuse related to the coronavirus outbreak.
A Reuters search for derogatory terms linked to the virus on Twitter found posts that called Chinese people “subhuman” or likened them to animals.