22:31

The Guardian’s senior technology reporter, Julia Carrie Wong, has this update on Twitter’s policies for world leader’s tweets:

Twitter on Tuesday published additional information about how it plans to act if a world leader tweets something that violates its rules. The update follows the announcement in June of a policy whereby the company would choose not to delete tweets by major political figures that violated the company’s rules if the company decided it was in the public interest.

Since the election of Donald Trump, Twitter has been in the unenviable position of having the ability to censor the president of the United States on the very platform where he is the most unguarded. It has largely resisted the intense pressure to do so, even when it seemed that Trump’s tweets might have fallen afoul of Twitter’s rules if they had been sent by anyone else.

In September 2017, after Trump appeared to threaten North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Twitter, the company announced that it had begun considering “newsworthiness” when considering whether to take down a tweet.

The June 2019 policy allowed for a scenario whereby a world leader’s tweet was bad enough to come down, but merited remaining up for documentation or accountability. In these scenarios, Twitter said today, the company will apply a label to the offending tweet and users will not be allowed to like, retweet or otherwise share it.

Today’s blog post by Twitter also provides a bit more detail about how they plan to approach such a scenario. The company says that it is more likely to simply delete a tweet by a world leader if it promotes terrorism, violence or self-harm; involves illegal goods or services; is intended to interfere with elections (such as by posting misinformation about voting); or includes the private information of another person – especially if that person is not a public figure.

The company says that it is more likely to allow a violating tweet to remain published if it violates rules against hate speech and hateful conduct; abuse or harassment; or contains graphic or gruesome media.