Twitter has been battling cuss words and hate speech since a long time. Twitter did not keep any stone unturned to combat such atrocious behavior. Recently Twitter launched certain tools to analyze the behavior of Twitter accounts to check the likelihood if a user is a threat to any healthy conversation. Now Twitter has expanded the service and are probing into dehumanizing words and eliminating them from their platform.
So, what is meant by dehumanizing language. According to Twitter’s definition dehumanizing language means the following:
Dehumanization: Language that treats others as less than human. Dehumanization can occur when others are denied of human qualities (animalistic dehumanization) or when others are denied of human nature (mechanistic dehumanization). Examples can include comparing groups to animals and viruses (animalistic), or reducing groups to their genitalia (mechanistic).
Hate speech in social media is a very common thing but it leads to communal violence and many other adverse effects.
Check out Twitter’s definition of an identifiable group:
“Identifiable group: Any group of people that can be distinguished by their shared characteristics such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, serious disease, occupation, political beliefs, location, or social practices.”
