Twitter on Thursday announced it will add warning labels to problematic tweets from politicians like Donald Trump, whose deranged posts may violate its rules, but remain a matter of public interest. It’s a potentially major step toward rooting out harmful content on the site, but raises familiar concerns for a company that has long been inept at policing content, and hesitant to do so in the first place. “In the past, we’ve allowed certain Tweets that violated our rules to remain on Twitter because they were in the public’s interest, but it wasn’t clear when and how we made those determinations,” Twitter said in a statement. “To fix that, we’re introducing a new notice that will provide additional clarity in these situations.”

In its blog post Thursday, Twitter acknowledged that certain unnamed “government officials and public figures...sometimes say things that could be considered controversial or invite debate and discussion”—perhaps, for instance, this or this, or this—but emphasized that a “critical function of our service is providing a place where people can openly and publicly respond to their leaders and hold them accountable.” So, Twitter said, it will “place a notice” on such tweets in the future, which will require users to go through a screen before seeing the tweet, and “provide additional context and clarity.” It will also “take steps to make sure the Tweet is not algorithmically elevated on our service, to strike the right balance between enabling free expression, fostering accountability, and reducing the potential harm caused by these Tweets.”

Twitter has long shrugged at hate speech and misinformation on its platform, but has recently taken some action, booting some of its worst abusers, including Alex Jones and Milo Yiannapoulos. Still, C.E.O. Jack Dorsey has seemed out of his depth when it comes to the more nuanced questions of what to do when the person peddling hate and conspiracy isn’t some fringe troll like Jacob Wohl, but the most powerful person in the world. Asked by reporter Ashley Feinberg in January what Twitter would do if Trump “tweeted out asking each of his followers to murder one journalist”—an extreme, but uncomfortably conceivable hypothetical—Dorsey responded with word salad. “I’m not going to talk about particulars,” he said in the HuffPost interview.

The new policy, which the company was reported to be weighing back in March, would represent at least some action toward addressing the platform’s misuse. But the announcement failed to establish a clear criteria as to which tweets would warrant such a warning label, which likely means Twitter will continue to rely on its gut in adjudicating what does and doesn’t cross the line. The company explained in its blog post Thursday that it will judge tweets to be dangerous based on the “immediacy and severity of potential harm from the rule violation with an emphasis on ensuring physical safety.” But weighing the “potential harm” of speech, let alone the public value of a controversial statement, can be difficult even for established news organizations. Dorsey and Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg have already proven clumsy in their attempts to make such assessments. It’s hard to imagine Twitter will magically improve overnight.

Of course, the company is taking a big political risk in taking any action at all. While many users have complained about hate speech and fake news, Trump and other conservatives have whined that efforts to clean up the site amount to censorship. Just this week, the president claimed that the company is “biased” in favor of Democrats, engaged in a shadowy plot to make it “very hard for people to join me on Twitter.” “Twitter is very terrible, what they do,” he said in a Fox Business Network interview Wednesday. “They make it very much harder for me to get out the message.” Twitter’s latest action could make it even harder for the president to get his message out there, if that message happens to be lies about Barack Obama’s birth certificate or retweets of far-right anti-Muslim videos. That could fuel more accusations from the right that Twitter and other Silicon Valley companies are biased against them—an accusation Dorsey has bristled at. In theory, it will be a major move for Twitter if they apply the warning label to Trump tweets. In practice, the process could be much more equivocal.

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