{"id":40848,"date":"2017-12-18T23:42:36","date_gmt":"2017-12-18T23:42:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bnreport.com\/twitter-suspends-britain-first-leaders\/"},"modified":"2017-12-18T23:42:36","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T23:42:36","slug":"twitter-suspends-britain-first-leaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bnreport.com\/en\/twitter-suspends-britain-first-leaders\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter suspends Britain First leaders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twitter has suspended the accounts of two leaders of a British far-right group shortly after revising its rules on hate speech.<\/p>\n

Paul Golding, Britain First's leader, and Jayda Fransen, his deputy, can no longer tweet and their past posts no longer appear.<\/p>\n

The organisation's official Twitter page has suffered the same fate.<\/p>\n

It appears that three of Ms Fransen's posts that President Trump retweeted have gone from his feed as a result.<\/p>\n

The messages had featured anti-Muslim videos<\/a> and proved highly controversial when the American leader shared them in November.<\/p>\n

British Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesman said it had been "wrong for the president to have done this".<\/p>\n

Ms Fransen and Mr Golding were arrested earlier this week<\/a> over separate behaviour relating to Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n

Restricted swastikas<\/h2>\n

Twitter announced in October that it planned to take a tougher stance against hate symbols as well as those who posted messages that glorified or condoned violence.<\/p>\n

It has now said that those who express an affiliation with groups that use or celebrate violence to achieve their aims will be permanently suspended.<\/p>\n

Hateful imagery \u2013 such as the Nazi swastika \u2013 can still be posted, but will initially be hidden behind a "sensitive media" warning, that visitors must disable to proceed. However, such content will no longer be allowed on a person's profile page.<\/p>\n

Those that featured examples will be asked to remove them. Repeat violators will be banned.<\/p>\n

The company said the move would "reduce the amount of abusive behaviour and hateful conduct" on the network.<\/p>\n

"If an account's profile information includes a violent threat or multiple slurs, epithets, racist or sexist tropes, incites fear, or reduces someone to less than human, it will be permanently suspended," it explained.<\/p>\n

"We plan to develop internal tools to help us identify violating accounts to supplement user reports."<\/p>\n

Twitter has promised a more robust system to appeal against decisions, but said that it was still in development.<\/p>\n

US bans<\/h2>\n

The company is not commenting about the action it is taking against individual accounts citing "privacy and security reasons".<\/p>\n

That has left it to others to play detective and report who else has been suspended. Many are using the hashtag #twitterpurge to do so.<\/p>\n

US accounts that appear to have fallen foul of the new rules include:<\/p>\n