Making our rules easier to understand

Our rules exist to help keep everyone using Twitter safe and ensure they can participate freely in the public conversation. Over time, we’ve added new rules and updated existing ones, but these changes eventually made our rules confusing and difficult to understand.

So today, we’re refreshing our rules with simple, clear language and reorganizing them into high-level categories: safety, privacy and authenticity. We’ve also added detail around other policies, including election integrity, platform manipulation and spam.

What’s new?

• We’ve gone from about 2,500 words to under 600. In 280 characters or less, each rule clearly describes exactly what is not allowed on Twitter.
• New categories — safety, privacy, and authenticity — mean our rules are organized thematically, so you can find the information you’re looking for more quickly.
• We’re refreshing rule pages to have more information, including examples, step-by-step instructions about how to report, and details on what happens when we take action. We’ll continue to make updates, but you can see some of the new pages here:

    Private Information

    Sensitive Media

    Terrorism & violent extremism

What comes next?

Everyone who uses Twitter should be able to easily understand what is and is not allowed on the service. As part of our continued push towards more transparency across every aspect of Twitter, we’re working to make sure every rule has its own help page with more detailed information and relevant resources, with abuse and harassment, hateful conduct, suicide or self-harm, and copyright being next on our list to update. Our focus remains on keeping everyone safe and supporting a healthier public conversation on Twitter. You can read our rules at twitter.com/rules.