NowThis News has uncovered that Elon Musk’s “utopian” Twitter 2.0 involves quietly rolling back policies on deadnaming and misgendering transgender people on the app.
According to NowThis: “[In] another alarming step in his never-ending crusade to ‘de-wokify’ Twitter … several users and activists noted that the social media app had quietly removed a policy banning the ‘targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals’.”
Twitter’s statement released on April 17th said: “We’re adding more transparency to the enforcement actions we take on Tweets. As a first step, soon you’ll start to see labels on some Tweets identified as potentially violating our rules around Hateful Conduct letting you know that we’ve limited their visibility. These actions will be taken at a tweet level only and will not affect a user’s account. 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.”
That was enough to prompt users to go digging and quickly noted that the policy around misgendering and deadnaming trans individuals was gone.
It’s a troubling prospect from a marketing perspective. As Twitter becomes more conservative and more controversial, brands will have to really think about if they can afford to market on the platform.
