Freedom of Speech Not Reach: New Updates and Progress

On Twitter people are free to be their true selves. Everyday, we work to preserve free speech on Twitter, while equally maintaining the health of our platform. Since the launch of Freedom of Speech Not Reach, we’ve seen encouraging results. That’s why in the coming weeks, we’re expanding the application of this enforcement action from our Hateful Conduct policy to now include our policies on Abusive Behavior and Violent Speech. 

Today, more than 99.99% of Tweet impressions are from healthy content, or content that does not violate our rules. For the small minority of content that is violative, we apply proportionally appropriate enforcement action. We will continue to remove the most serious violations of our rules, such as illegal content, and suspend bad actors from our platform. 

More than any other platform, Twitter’s enforcement approach brings a new level of transparency to restricting the reach of Tweets identified as potentially violating our policies by making the content less discoverable.

The Twitter community has also provided valuable feedback to help us make meaningful changes to the accuracy of our label application, such as identifying instances where reach was not appropriately restricted and improving recognition of context in our detection.

Here is some of the impact since we launched this new enforcement philosophy:

• Labels have been applied to more than 700,000 violative posts that fall under our Hateful Conduct policy. We also proactively prevent ads from appearing adjacent to content that we label.
• Compared to a healthy Tweet, these new labels reduce the reach, or impressions, of violative content by 81%. 
• More than one third of authors proactively choose to delete the Tweet after they are informed that its reach has been restricted.
• On average, only 4 percent of authors have appealed labels.
• 90 percent of all appeals receive a response within 30 minutes.

While this progress is promising, our work is ongoing. And as part of our commitment to transparency and results, we’ll continue to provide periodic updates on our progress.