Following intense pressure from disability rights activists, Twitter announced on Monday that it would now allow users to report tweets directing hate towards people with disabilities.
“It’s against our rules to directly attack or threaten someone based on their protected category, including disability,” a Twitter spokesperson told Mic. “We received feedback from people using Twitter that this needed to be clarified in our reporting flow, and we’ve updated it to be more specific.”
The change to Twitter’s reporting flow marks a major victory for activists who had been fighting for the social media company to take meaningful steps towards protecting users with disabilities from abuse, harassment and hate speech on its platform.
“This is a really good development for me and millions of people like me who want to be able to use Twitter without being attacked for our disabilities,” activist Ady Barkan, director of local progress at the Center for Popular Democracy, told Mic. “I applaud Twitter for its policy change.”
“The acknowledgment by Twitter that ableism is harmful and that abuse of disabled people should not be tolerated is definitely a step in the right direction,” disability rights activist and filmmaker Dominick Evans told Mic.