Social media giant Twitter has been forced to take action after a series of posts were made with the intention of dehumanizing religious groups.
The company has announced that it will be updating hate-speech rules to ban posts that liken religious groups to rats, viruses or maggots, in a decision that has been taken after “months in conversations,”
according to the BBC.
“Our primary focus is on addressing the risks of offline harm – and research shows that dehumanising language increases that risk,” the company said in a blog post.
The new rules may deter hateful individuals such as Louis Farrakhan from posting anti-semitic comments on the platform. Indeed, he has already been ordered to delete a video in which he referred to Jewish people as “termites.”
Shockingly, the video was allowed to remain on Twitter for months after it had been originally posted — something that was picked up on by CNN’s Jake Tapper.
In another post, Farrakhan claimed to be “unmasking the Satanic Jew and the Synagogue of Satan” and made several offensive remarks about the Jewish people.
Twitter hopes that its new policy will root out some of this ghastly language and reduce the anti-religious sentiment seen posted to the platform on a daily basis.