Twitter Archives - Argyll Free Press

While it is not groundbreaking, but still a well-intended feature that requires a small amount of community effort, Twitter is introducing a way to make itself more accessible to the visually impaired. In essence, it is not a feature that will work regardless of circumstances and what device an individual uses, but at least in the case of screen readers and braille displays, Twitter makes it easier. The way that is achievable is through a feature that allows all users to post images along with a description of up to 420 characters.

While the text-only tweets are not an issue that can’t be handled by screen readers, for example, the photos you post are. The new feature allows anyone who posts a photo to Twitter to add the brief description that will make it more accessible to the visually impaired. However, although it’s being pushed to both iOS and Android devices, it is not a feature that will turn on automatically. If you wish to enable it, you can do so through Twitter’s accessibility settings.

While many other social platforms and different parts of the internet already have means of making themselves accessible to visually impaired individuals, provided they have access to specialized tools, Twitter had not yet done plenty in that direction.

Following Twitter’s studies on the matter of post reach and post engagement and their statistics which suggest that tweets that contain photos result in 313% higher engagement from the public, the company decided to truly attempt to include the entirety of its users in its count. As long as the users of Twitter add an image description along with their photos, any visually impaired person will be able to make use of assistive technology in order to understand what the picture is about, even if they cannot see it.

According to some reports, this new feature can easily turn into something that can expand its own utility, being ground for more complex things such as Twitter search or identifying specific tweets.

Some individuals, however, frown upon the way the feature is made available and believe that plenty of people with either miss it while others will not recur to using it out of comfort – considering it has to be turned on manually. Of course, if someone knows a person with a visual disability, they will be more likely to remember to turn it on whereas other content creators may not.

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The new Facebook, Google, Twitter hate speech agreement reached today is the conclusion of the German government’s efforts of the past months to eliminate hate speech from social media platforms in the country.

In accord with the agreement, these three companies will delete any hate speech present in discussions under their control within 24 hours.

Which, as you can imagine, raises the much dreaded specter of censorship. Or at least censorship should be a much dreaded specter in a democratic state.

However, the issue is a tad more complicated, as human affairs often are.

Because the German government’s efforts to curb and hopefully eliminate hate speech completely come amid the growing tensions caused by the refugee crisis.

The fact that this government has to deal with more than 1 million refugees received this year alone, for which it is directly responsible, makes it understandable that they have to take practical, effective measures like the hate speech agreement, and not just put out declarations and urge the population to play nice.

Also worth taking into consideration is that hate speech is illegal by German law, meaning hatred promoted against any segments of the population. So asking foreign companies to forbid users on German territory to use it is not that much of a stretch.

Still, the problem of censorship remains. Where does freedom of speech end?

According to Heiko Maas, the German Justice Minister:

When the limits of free speech are trespassed, when it is about criminal expressions, sedition, incitement to carry out criminal offenses that threaten people, such content has to be deleted from the net. And we agree that as a rule this should be possible within 24 hours.

Germany has asked Facebook to help it better manage the refugee crisis by fighting online racism on its platform since September this year and they initially refused.

That prompted the German government to put on more pressure and in the past few months it started investigating four Facebook executives, including Martin Ott, the managing director for all of Central, Northern and Eastern Europe, claiming they had not done enough to control hate speech and are directly responsible for Facebook’s failure in this direction.

Facebook responded at the time by saying that Martin Ott and all of its employees in Germany have done nothing wrong, performed their duties flawlessly and the accusations lack merit.

Now, it seems Facebook, along with Google and Twitter, have finally decided to agree to the German government’s request. Whether because they see eye-to-eye or because they finally caved to the pressure is hard to determine.

But starting today, users of these social media platforms will be able to report hate speech so that it gets deleted within 24 hours. Specialist teams have been set up to deal with such reports.

Whether for good or for ill, this is happening. What are your thoughts?

Image source: 1.

Twitter Is Introducing a Way to Make Itself More Accessible to the Visually Impaired

Facebook, Google, Twitter Hate Speech Agreement

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