It has been a week since Robin Williams’ daughter, Zelda Williams, left Twitter following gruesome images of her late father showing up on her feed. She left the social media site writing, “Mining our accounts for photos of dad, or judging me on the number of them is cruel and unnecessary.” Now, Twitter is responding back after reviewing its user-protection policy concerning deceased users.

Twitter updated its policy on Tuesday indicating: “In order to respect the wishes of loved ones, Twitter will remove imagery of deceased individuals in certain circumstances. Immediate family members and other authorized individuals may request the removal of images or video of deceased individuals, from when critical injury occurs to the moment before or after death.”

This new policy is a change from its traditional hands-off policy on deleting content, with exceptions to obscene or pornographic images and content that is misleading, violating trademarks, containing another party’s confidential information, or a threat of violence against others.

Though, the new policy also states that it will take into account public interest factors such as the newsworthiness of the content, so it may not be able to honor all requests.

This new policy also comes shortly after gruesome images and videos were released of the American photojournalist beheaded. The account responsible for tweeting the images has been suspended as has the accounts associated with posting the photo-shopped images that drove William’s daughter to leave the social media site.

[Source: Twitter]

Photo by Dgultekin, via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported