Twitter bans posts that ‘dehumanise’ people in connection with diseases

Example tweets provided by social media company Twitter show the types of language not allowed by its hateful conduct rule, which will now include language that dehumanises on the basis of age, disability or disease. — Twitter/Reuters

Twitter Inc said on Thursday it is banning posts that "dehumanise" people because they have a disease or disability or because of their age, a step that happens to correspond to an explosion of tweets about the spreading coronavirus.

The company told Reuters that the policy change was not a reaction to the outbreak of the virus, which causes the respiratory disease COVID-19, but was part of its continual effort to update its rules against hateful conduct.