() — Twitter appears to have quietly rolled back a part of its policy on hateful conduct that included specific protections for transgender people.
The policy previously stated that Twitter prohibits “targeting others with repeated insults, tropes, or other content that attempts to demean or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes gender confusion or previous name of transgender people.” But the second line was removed earlier this month, according to archived versions of the page. WayBack Machine.
Twitter also removed a line from the policy detailing certain groups of people often subjected to disproportionate abuse online, including “women, people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and people of color and historically marginalized communities.” underrepresented”.
The platform presented for the first time its policy prohibiting gender confusion and deadnaming (referring to a person’s name before they transitioned) from transgender people in 2018 as part of a broader review of its hateful conduct policy.
The change to the hateful conduct policy is one of several updates Twitter has made to its content moderation and security practices since Elon Musk took over the company last year. twitter too restored the accounts of users who had previously been banned for violating its rules, stopped enforcing its Covid-19 misinformation policy, allowed users to purchase blue checkmarks, and applied controversial new labels to the accounts of various news organizations.
LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD rejected the hate speech conduct policy change in a statement Tuesday.
“Twitter’s decision to covertly reverse its longstanding policy is the latest example of how unsafe the company is for both users and advertisers,” said GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis. “This decision to roll back LGBTQ safety further alienates Twitter from TikTok, Pinterest and Meta, which maintain similar policies to protect their transgender users at a time when anti-transgender rhetoric online leads to discrimination and violence online. The real world”.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on the change, though the platform announced a few other changes earlier this week. updates about how it applies its hateful conduct policy. The platform said it plans to begin labeling some tweets that violate its hateful conduct policy and reduce their visibility, a practice similar to that used under the company’s previous leadership, under which it reduced visibility or removed violating tweets. .
“Restricting the scope of tweets helps reduce binary ‘leave or remove’ content moderation decisions and supports our free speech vs. free scope approach,” the company said in a tweet. Twitter also said it will not place ads next to content that has been flagged as infringing.
Twitter under the rule of Elon Musk
Musk has been in the process of trying to encourage advertisers to return to the platform, after many halted spending over concerns about Musk’s policy changes, increased hate speech on the platform, and cutbacks. in the company’s workforce, threatening the company’s core business.
The billionaire tried to reassure advertisers about Twitter’s approach to hateful conduct at a marketing conference Tuesday, saying: “If someone has something hateful to say, it doesn’t mean you should give them a megaphone,” according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
Musk has faced a series of criticisms from the transgender community, most notably from his transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson. Last year, she petitioned a California court to change her last name to that of her mother, Justine Wilson, Musk’s ex-wife and mother of five of their seven children, because she no longer wanted to be related to her father “in any way, shape or form.” or way”.
Musk has also posted several tweets in which he mocked the idea of people choosing the pronouns they want applied to them. He had a tweet in December 2020, which he later deleted, that read “when you put it on your timeline” along with a drawing of an 18th century soldier rubbing blood on his face in front of a pile of corpses and wearing a cap that read ” I love to oppress.”
And last December, Musk, who is a vocal critic of many restrictions and covid protocols, he tweeted: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”
But in other tweets, Musk has insisted he has no problem with transgender people, saying his problem is with “all these pronouns,” calling them an “aesthetic nightmare.” He also noted that his auto company Tesla has repeatedly earned a 100% rating from the Human Rights Campaign as one of the “Best Places to Work for LGBTQ+ Equality.”
— ‘s Chris Isidore contributed to this report.
