People come to Twitter to connect with their communities, be their authentic and true selves, and talk about what’s happening. On Twitter, conversations about Pride Month grew by 76%* in the past year – from discussing Netflix’s romantic comedy Heartstopper to celebrating courageous moments, the LGBTQIA+ community and allies are showing up for one another on Twitter.
This year, we honour Pride Month with the hashtag #WeBelong. For all of the progress that the queer community has made in recent years, efforts to exclude, erase, and degrade them persist. #WeBelong is a call for queers to take up space and be loud in places where they’ve been told they don’t belong or made to feel unsafe in.
Our purpose is to serve the public conversation, and we have rules to ensure all people can participate in public conversation freely from behaviours that discourage people from expressing themselves, such as our hateful conduct policy where people cannot promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and more.
We just launched our new reporting flow that makes it easier for people to report unhealthy and unwanted content via our redesigned process. After testing this feature in the US last year, we saw the number of actionable reports increased by 50%. At every stage of Twitter’s research and design process, the team intentionally included people from marginalised communities — women, people of color, and people from the LGBTQIA+ community, including those who identify as trans or nonbinary.
Here are some more ways to be in control of your Twitter experience:
- Choose who can reply to your Tweets in conversation settings so you can engage in more meaningful conversations and avoid unwelcome replies.
- Hide replies you believe are off-topic or spammy and detracts from the conversation.
- Muting words, phrases, usernames, emojis, and hashtags that may be abusive and cause uncomfortable experiences on Twitter.
- Block accounts feature that helps in restricting specific accounts from contacting people, seeing their Tweets, and becoming followers.
We recognise that there’s more we can do to make this a place where everyone in the LGBTQIA+ community can eagerly say #WeBelong. We’re testing more ways for a safer experience on Twitter:
- Twitter Circle allows people to only show their Tweets to people they’ve picked.
- Safety Mode aims to automatically block accounts that appear to violate Twitter Rules or might be using insults, name-calling, strong language, or hateful remarks. It’s meant to proactively keep you safe from unwanted interactions.
- Prompts to reconsider Tweet replies containing harmful language. Our tests for this feature are seeing promising results, with people changing or deleting their replies over 30% of the time when prompted for English users in the U.S. and around 47% of the time for Portuguese users in Brazil.
