Twitter is planning to review its policies regarding world leaders, and it’s seeking input on what those policies should look like. Twitter is running a survey from March 19th to April 12th, and it says, in general, it wants to know “whether or not [the public] believe[s] world leaders should be subject to the same rules as others on Twitter.”
The survey gives you a hypothetical situation and a list of potential actions it should take. It also asks questions like whether leaders should face more, less, or the same amount of scrutiny as other accounts and if it’s okay for the platform to ban a sitting president or prime minister.
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Twitter’s current rules for world leaders were set in October 2019, but a lot has happened since then. In January 2021, Twitter banned then-US President Donald Trump for his tweets encouraging the Capitol mob. The ban followed months of the platform trying to figure out how to deal with him and other world leaders from Venezuela and Brazil tweeting misinformation about the coronavirus.
Of course, Twitter won’t just take the public’s input and run with it. The company also says it will consult “human rights experts, civil society organizations, and academics” from all over the world. Twitter also plans to release the survey in 14 different languages, but it’s currently only available in English. If you’d like to weigh in, you can take the survey here.
