Twitter says it is banning posts that "dehumanise" people because they have a disease or disability, a step that coincides with an explosion of tweets about the spreading coronavirus.

The company says the policy change was not a reaction to the outbreak of the virus, but was part of its continual effort to update its rules against hateful conduct.

AFP

"We couldn't have predicted that this would happen in terms of the coronavirus," Jerrel Peterson, Twitter's head of safety policy, said.

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.

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Twitter's hateful conduct policy already bans attacking or threatening others on the basis of categories such as race, sexual orientation, age, disability or serious disease. This update will mean that those attacks do not need to be targeted at an individual or specific group.