Twitter CEO says sorry after worldwide outage
(Reuters) – Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) said on Thursday its microblogging platform was back up partially after suffering a worldwide outage for more than an hour.
“We were down ... and now slowly coming back up. Sorry!,” Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said in a tweet here
The interruption was due to an internal system change, the company said, adding that it was working to fully fix the problem.
Outage tracking website Downdetector.com earlier showed that there were nearly 70,000 people across the globe reporting issues with Twitter.
Shares of the company were marginally down in extended trading.
Twitter said the new rules would apply to politicians and government officials with more than 100,000 followers.
If flagged, a notice would cover the offending tweet and require a user to click on a link to view it.
Critics have said the social media platform has not done enough to police tweets from politicians that would be removed if a typical user posted them. Some have called on Twitter to take down vitriolic tweets from US President Donald Trump and other politicians, while Trump and other conservatives have repeatedly accused technology companies of favoring liberals.
Trump boasts more than 61 million followers on Twitter, and many of his tweets are in the news.
The White House declined to comment on the announcement.
Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted a link to coverage of the announcement by the conservative Daily Caller website and warned: “If they can do it to the Leader of the Free World imagine what they are doing to you and your voice!”
A Twitter spokeswoman said a human reviewer will decide which tweets receive the new label, not artificial intelligence monitoring. If a violation were found, a task force of teams would rule whether the questionable tweet should be considered in the public interest.
“There are certain cases where it may be in the public’s interest to have access to certain Tweets, even if they would otherwise be in violation of our rules,” Twitter said in a blog post.
Twitter to deemphasize, label politician tweets that break rules
Twitter Inc said it would identify and de-emphasize tweets that broke its rules but came from important sources such as politicians, in order to strike a balance between free expression and accountability.
“We’ll now clearly label any tweets which violate our terms of service but decide to keep up due to public interest,” Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said.
