With no fanfare, Twitter changed its hateful conduct protocols by eliminating protections for transgender people. .“The policy previously stated Twitter prohibits ‘targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals,’” reports CNN, “but the second line was removed earlier this month, according to archived versions of the page from the WayBack Machine.”.Twitter users can now refer to transgender people by their actual genders and their original, gender-appropriate names, reports the Daily Caller, adding, “the move is yet another representation of Elon Musk’s efforts to shift Twitter back towards a pro-free speech policy, as well as to increase transparency on the site, both of which were key promises he made when he first set out to buy Twitter last year.”.Another line was removed regarding groups of people who are at times targets of inordinate abuse online, such as “women, people of colour, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual individuals, and marginalized and historically underrepresented communities.”.CNN reports LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD called out the hateful conduct policy change in a statement..“Twitter’s decision to covertly roll back its longtime policy is the latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike,” GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in the statement..“This decision to roll back LGBTQ safety pulls Twitter even more out of step with TikTok, Pinterest, and Meta, which all maintain similar policies to protect their transgender users at a time when anti-transgender rhetoric online is leading to real world discrimination and violence.”.The platform said it plans to start applying labels to some tweets that violate its hateful conduct policy and reduce their visibility, a similar practice to the one used under the company’s previous leadership, under which it either reduced the visibility of or removed violative tweets, adds CNN..In a tweet, Twitter said: “Restricting the reach of tweets helps reduce binary ‘leave up versus take down’ content moderation decisions and supports our freedom of speech vs freedom of reach approach,” adding it will not place ads next to content that has been labeled as violative..Musk tried to alleviate advertisers’ fears regarding how the platform deals with hateful conduct at a conference Tuesday, saying, “If somebody has something hateful to say, it doesn’t mean you should give them a megaphone,” according to a report from the Wall Street Journal..A number of high-profile conservative people and accounts were banned from Twitter under the old guidelines for referring to transgender people by their given names and genders at birth..The satirical site Babylon Bee was locked out of its own Twitter account in March of 2022 for mockingly referring to Richard Levine, an official in the Biden Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services and a man who believes he is a woman, as their ‘Man of the Year.’ Levine now goes by the name of Rachel Levine, reports American Greatness..Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk also lost access to his account in 2022 for saying Levine had previously been married, fathering two children, before transitioning in 2014..Fox News host Tucker Carlson was banned from Twitter after showing the posts from Babylon Bee and Kirk.
