Twitter Is Giving Special Treatment to Popular and Celebrity Accounts

Twitter is giving its most prominent users special treatment under a secretive program called “Project Guardian,” Bloomberg reported.

Thousands of Twitter accounts most likely to experience harassment, including those with high follower counts, celebrities and politicians, will have reports of abusive content prioritized by Twitter, according to Bloomberg. The company will move complaints related to these users to the front of the content moderation line, and it will handle them before complaints related to users not covered by the program.

“Project Guardian is just the internal name for one of many automated tools we deploy to identify potentially abusive content,” Katrina Lane, vice president for Twitter’s service organization, told Bloomberg. “The techniques it uses are the same ones that protect all people on the service.”

Twitter told Bloomberg that the list is constantly changing and isn’t only for celebrities, but also covers those who become the target of unwanted social media attention for any reason.

“The reason this concept existed is because of the ‘person of the day’ phenomenon,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, told Bloomberg. “And on that basis, there are some people who are the ‘person of the day’ most days, and so Project Guardian would be one way to protect them.”

Twitter did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for additional comment.

Twitter reportedly adds accounts to the program by factoring in recommendations by Twitter content moderators as well as agents of famous accounts and sometimes news organizations.

The program is similar to a content moderation system employed by Facebook known as XCheck, in which posts made by certain “whitelisted” accounts that Facebook flags will be subject to a separate content review process.

Long-reigning Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down from his position last week and was replaced by former chief technology officer Parag Agrawal, who has overseen the deployment of a new policy banning the sharing of certain private media.