Twitter quietly edited its hateful conduct policy to drop transgender protections

Musk says his own tweets might be labeled under new hateful conduct policy.

See full article...

 

[balthazarr]

Editing quotes like that is more against the rules than my simple statement. There's no hate there. It's a simple statement of fact. They're weird to the other 99% of people. That's the fucking truth. Nothing hateful about it. Didn't even say they're wrong. Just fucking weird. You people are taking political correctness entirely too far.

I don't find it weird that a person would want to be called by whatever name, pronoun, symbol, sound, or whatever of their choosing. And that they would be offended if others around them refused to respect their wishes, especially if that refusal comes from a position of bigotry and discrimination.

I do find it weird that people like you seem obsessed with other's individuality and choices, especially when those choices have absolutely no bearing on your life whatsoever.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Here's hoping you get called Shit-for-brains for the rest of your days.

I'd hazard Azazel himself, if he weren't simply a fantasy, would be pretty pissed someone like you was using his name to regurgitate quality content such as this here missive.

Pretty sure you're replying to someone who was turning the tables on people who deadname by misgendering and misnaming them to their faces.

Have you ever hurried to the bathroom only to blast out the most seismic flatulence you've ever experienced and then felt disappointment that the only thing that came out was noise and gas but no substance? This happened to me in a Walmart bathroom in a stall when there were children by the sinks, they heard the sounds, laughed and made an escape from the room. In that moment my personal dignity was sacrificed at the altar of the entertainment of the people in the room whether I wanted it to be or not. So I'm experienced in martyrdom in the service of others.

Ah, so the origin of your username is onomatopoeia!

Also, need to dig up a link at some point, but there was an interesting story on some NPR show. They were discussing how India's supreme court is hearing arguments about whether to allow same sex marriages and how the majority Hindu party is claiming that it's against Indian culture and some idea that was imported from "the west" during the colonial period. Only, some people looked at texts dating back around 2,000 years and found that it was actually the other way around. It was homophobia that was imported by the British to India. Prior to that, there are examples of same sex couples being celebrated in India.

Yet it's a startling fact that homophobia is almost always present in Right-Wing Authoritarian circles and encouraged by Social Dominant Orientation-prone leadership, like the Nazis. Weird. And don't a lot of them try to retcon the past to fit their anachronistically bigoted views into a mythologized pseudo-history that supports their exclusionary narrative? Surely the ethno-religious exclusionary political movement in India isn't flirting with that, are they?

Secondly: please stop downvoting people who say "it's hard to leave". It is hard to leave, especially if you've been there a long time (15 years in my case, almost to the day). There's a lot of inertia, and a definite 'boiling frog' situation where you say "sure, today is a bit crappier but it's not much worse than yesterday" and you end up delaying another day. But I would also urge those people to read Orwelldesign's extremely well-written post, because at some point you have to say "enough is enough"..

I have to confess, not browsing Ars and leaving comments would be a huge change in my online presence and would remove a lot of the kind of interactions that I find valuable in my day-to-day life. I empathize with those who, having found a lot of value and community on Twitter, have trouble with the looming problem of drawing a line and cutting it out of their lives. It'd be even more frustrating because the site is changing under their feet, through no fault of their own.

Was it a successful business? I thought it was still in the haemorrhaging cash part of getting big, though that could be musk's propaganda in how he was "saving" it?

It had two profitable quarters in recent years and then an anomalously large settlement prevented them from enjoying a 3rd profitable quarter. It was clearly on a pathway to sustainability under the former leadership, if they could manage to avoid alienating more users and attract more advertisers. They were not leaking 4 million dollars per day, as he claimed. Twitter had been running along without making a profit for over a decade at that point and it was considered a known quantity with relatively stable and predictable prospects, becoming profitable on a regular basis was not unrealistic.
Musk announcing his plans changed all of that. Advertisers withheld comitting tor future contracts when he announced his intention to turn it into another 8kun in terms of moderation (this was before he decided that he didn't really want to buy it after all). So even before he took over, he had cut off a huge chunk of the next year's revenue. Then he saddled Twitter with the debt of his takeover to the tune of +1.5 billion dollars in additional expenses per year (interest payments). There is no way he'd ever make it profitable again, despite what he told the banks and other investors who didn't stop to think if what he gamed out in his pitch made a lick of sense. Even if advertisers came back to the same level of spending they did pre-Musk, he'd need multiple times their existing yearly revenue to break even.

My thought exactly... why are we pretending to criticize a platform by continuously making headlines about it and, in turn, giving it free advertisement at almost every turn.

Unfortunately, Twitter being awful is relevant tech news and Ars would actually be remiss not to cover their multitudinous fuck-ups. This isn't like the media hanging on every single stupid thing Donald Trump uttered during his campaign, this is coverage of real changes with real effects in the online world.

weird choices

I know you're just an account created to harass people online. Engaging you directly is a waste of time and it won't stop you from abusing people.

But I'm taking this opportunity to refer people to another one of orwelldesign's fantastic explainer posts. Because it really helped me contextualize and form a framework for how unfair anti-trans rhetoric you're using to hurt people actually is. This is from a Joe Rogan thread last year and was unfortunately buried 70 pages in:

My son and I had a long talk about this around Thanksgiving last year, because the emergency room doctor was consistently misgendering him*, even though there was a note in his file about both his new name and his preferred pronouns (he/him, somewhat obviously). The doctor asked him "why did you choose this?,". ...

And he said "Look, man, I know you don't get it, but I had two choices. The choice was between being an out trans person or a closeted one. I don't have any other options." He can't turn it off. When he wears a dress he feels like a boy in a dress. When he wears makeup he feels like a boy wearing makeup. He feels like he's crossdressing if ever he presents as female -- he did that for Halloween last year, but for him it was a costume, because that's not who he is. If he femmed up, he'd be a //drag queen//, not a //girl.//

So I am in these threads for two reasons: first, the whole stupid "must match your genitals" discussion and accompanying poutrage ignores the FtM trans kids altogether, and second, I want to remind people that this isn't an academic discussion. We're not theory-crafting, this isn't abstract, and when people advocate for biological sex to be the determining factor for sports, they're messing with real people's real lives in a way where these laws are really, really bigoted.

That anecdote has really stuck with me. Among other things, I think it's one of the first I've read to lay out the everyday misery of trans people who have to exist in a society where they can never fully trust the people around them not to resent them just for existing. Nobody who is trans asked to live with it. Nobody chose this. It's not something they can just change about themselves.

The world is full of people saying the things shit-for-brains is saying, and they mean every word of it. They don't have a conception about the basic dignity and commonality of people, regardless of differences between individual people. They chose to inflict more unhappiness on people who are often suffering unfair challenges already. That's not just ignorance, that's cruelty. I happen to think this world sucks enough as-is without going out of one's way to make it even more miserable and intolerant.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

I do find it weird that people like you seem obsessed with other's individuality and choices, especially when those choices have absolutely no bearing on your life whatsoever.

Dollars to donuts this guy is itching to get suspended/banned so he can wear it as a badge of honour over on whatever Reich Wing chat site they normally use. Which may well be Twitter at this point...

 

[GreyAreaUK]

Nobody's stopping them from living their way.

You literally are.

 

[balthazarr]

When they're throwing it in everyone's face like fucking Jehova's Witnesses, it DOES have bearing. Nobody's stopping them from living their way. Fucker quoted me, I responded. Let it go.

Nobody's stopping them?

Florida, for a start, would like a word. Land of the free, my fucking arse.

TIL someone's name is now "throwing it in everyone's face" and equivalent to Jehovah's Witnesses' proselytising.

 

[SixDegrees]

You literally are.

This is very clearly a troll. Report, move on, block if you care to. Responding is giving him what he wants.

 

[balthazarr]

When they're throwing it in everyone's face like fucking Jehova's Witnesses, it DOES have bearing. Nobody's stopping them from living their way. Fucker quoted me, I responded. Let it go.

If we were to all start calling you ShitForBrains instead of BrainDroppings, would you find that offensive?

 

[GreyAreaUK]

This is very clearly a troll. Report, move on, block if you care to. Responding is giving him what he wants.

Yep, concur. Further replies to it from me will not be a thing.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

People characterize anything they don't like as hate speech to suppress other's ideas.

Hate speech may not be legally recognized as such in the US because of our strict interpretations of the First Amendment, but hate speech as a tool of inflicting misery on other people is a real thing. Hate speech is a low-grade form of terrorism, meant to oppress groups by robbing them of their rights. Hate speech is suppression of others, not just their ideas. Racism harms and kills people even if nobody's lynching you. Hate speech about queer people drives higher suicide rates. Hate speech engenders mistreatment of one group by another. Hate speech justifies depriving people of their rights and liberties.

The idea you're advocating, that the concept of "hate speech" is just a tool of censorship by the intolerant, ignores what hate speech actually does.

 

[Tridus]

I've been awfully baffled and appalled by all the hating going on for LGBTI people. I have wondered why, where it's come from, what the motives are, and so on. For I have been unaware, in the blissful ignorance sense of unaware, until the flaky far-right Christian lobby here started behaving as if the sky was falling. Not "about to fall" but actually falling. This at the same time that the Royal Commission into sexual abuse of children was shining a light into decades of sexual abuse of children by Churches, particularly the Catholic Church but not limited to them. Very few people are members of political parties in Australia, but the flaky churchgoers are joiners. This has meant that the Liberal Party (this is Australia's conservative party) have a far-right faction who are picking up U.S. political concerns that most Australians don't give a rat's arse about. The echo chamber is amplified by Murdoch's satellite TV channel which turns into something weird at night with a Fox News talking heads thingy called Sky After Dark. It has 60,000 viewers but seems quite influential. The upshot is that the cost of living is going up greatly but - so some people hereabouts want to persuade us - perhaps the greatest problem facing Australia today is people self-selecting their preferred gender?!

I have learned from this Ars thread that Musk is a totally inadequate parent who Has Views.

Because he owns the big amplifiers of Twitter and wealth I can see why his shitfulness enters the public discourse.

Musk perhaps is a symptom as well as a cause. Same with the US Republican Party and its rivers of money, and it's capture by the Religious Far-Right. Is there more to where and why this vilification came from than this? Mine is a genuine question and not sealioning. Have any sociologist or modern historians done the "here's a step back and take a look perspective at this hateful state of affairs"?

Well, we know where its coming from because we have the emails: https://maia.crimew.gay/posts/the-emails/

Here's a summary version in case you don't want to read all 2600 pages: https://www.motherjones.com/politic...e-ban-legislation-bill-minors-children-lgbtq/

This is an orchestrated campaign by a fairly small group, but Republicans always do their best when they're creating an "other" to attack and blame everything on with their base of constantly scared, angry people who don't realize that they're the cause of most of their problems.

 

[Tridus]

When they're throwing it in everyone's face like fucking Jehova's Witnesses, it DOES have bearing. Nobody's stopping them from living their way. Fucker quoted me, I responded. Let it go.

So Christians, then? Talk about throwing it in everyone's face constantly. And Republicans constantly trying to make government small enough to fit inside womens bodies.

You're either a troll, or you are dangerously lacking in self-awareness. Probably a troll.

 

[Thering]

You're still doing better than us, in England they are used as punching bags by every single nationwide party. To the extent one of our major newspapers this morning has MPs from the top 2 parties standing together in a big picture on the front page to announce how they're going to use them as punching bags even more.

To be fair, the Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, has only shown hers transphobic views since she was last elected. Various Labour organisations have asked for her to be kicked out the party and she herself has complained about being blanked by party leadership and left out of invitations to things. She also skipped the last party conference out of "security concerns" because of the number of threats she's received for her TERF views, which, while harassment and threats are always bad, is an indicator that her views are very controversial. Also that she's so minor a figure in the party that she can skip the party conference with no issues. I'd expect she doesn't manage to be selected by Labour for the next election

 

[balthazarr]

If you follow the science… then you‘d see that the “emperor“ of transgenderism has no clothes on. These people should receive compassionate care to help them accept reality, not affirmation of their fantasy. Those who have detransitioned agree, and there are many of them.

Even if what you say is true - and I'll admit I tend to agree, personally, I think the idea of surgical transition is no real treatment.. but three points:

1) It has nothing whatsoever to do with you or I, so it's none of our (or anyone else's) business;
2) Whatever treatment a person chooses is between them and their medical care team; and
3) Being a bigoted, discriminatory arsehole is certainly not helping those that are transgender.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Let the record show that BrainDroppings followed my quote back to last year's Joe Rogan thread just to post something abusive there, too.

 

[Hopefully Smarter]

Seriously, there is nothing that this bag of flaming shit contributes to humanity.

I simply can’t abide with anyone who supports him or his products.

 

[IncorrigibleTroll]

You're not entitled to have your weird choices respected anymore than the religious loons, people with excessive tattoos, human pin cushions, or any other group. Get the fuck over it.

Just putting it out there that transphobic bigotry is a weird choice that deserves no respect whatsoever. Go crawl back under your rock and wither away.

 

[Numfuddle]

That anecdote has really stuck with me. Among other things, I think it's one of the first I've read to lay out the everyday misery of trans people who have to exist in a society where they can never fully trust the people around them not to resent them just for existing. Nobody who is trans asked to live with it. Nobody chose this. It's not something they can just change about themselves.

That quote really threw me for a loop there because I didn't realize you were quoting something from a different forum thread and when I clicked on it the whole comment view of this article switched over to the original article's comments which I didn't realize.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

 

[azazel1024]

Legally, hate speech is legal in the United States, almost up to the point of death threats.

Morally, it shouldn’t be legal, and there are hate crimes laws in other countries that could be used as examples of how to do it without “slippery sloping” anything.

Like, say, Canada.

First, they came for my hate speech. And then they came for the other half of Fox, OANN, and Newsmax content (the liable and defamation part)!

/s

 

[IncorrigibleTroll]

oh, is "weird" about to be a banned word everywhere like "retard" now? I lost track. Do you prefer "strange" or "non-standard" or some other whitewashed generic fucking term for fucking "DIFFERENT?" Either you took a lot of dodgeballs to the face in school or not nearly enough.

Oh, I apologize; I thought you were arguing with people here, not the voices in your head. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Carry on then. But maybe somewhere else.

 

[azazel1024]

It may be that it's a conversation worth having, but the problem is that when the conversation starts with "the First Amendment doesn't protect hate speech" then that means you're talking to someone who has Strong Opinions about the law that are completely removed from what the law actually is. It's often quite difficult to get people like that to even acknowledge basic facts about First Amendment caselaw; as I mentioned upthread, I've already attempted multiple conversations on the subject with aerogems and ultimately determined it was a waste of my time and he is a person who refuses to learn.

Like my neighbor who posted on the neighborhood social media page?

"Leave it to the controlling MD Gov. to get the cops to nail folks for going a bit above the speed limit and letting hard criminals loose and not concentrating on catching the real criminals!! I just spent 3 months in the South and they have much more freedom than we do here. They are free to roam without being harassed. Did you know that cops giving tickets is Unconstitutional anyway? They go against our Constitutional rights to "travel freely"."

A couple comments later she said "ha ha, farther South. Yeah, I got a ticket going 80-82 in VA in the Richmond area on my way home from Florida years ago and they said anything over 80 in VA is considered "wreckless driving". I had to take a driving safety course and go to Richmond for court! You are so right!"


Nice outing yourself for driving a LOT faster than that. VA code says 20mph or more above the posted speed limit, or speeds in excess of 85 regardless of the posted speed limit (so 86mph). She later said it was a 75mph highway.

She replied trying to claim that no, it was for doing 80-82mph and she got a reckless driving ticket and it is unconstitutional BS!

Same neighbor who the day before let everyone know in the neighborhood she HAD to post no trespassing signs every 10ft all the way around her property because of "the mortgage fraudsters. They will not win! But all my friends and neighbors know you are still welcome"

No trespassing signs are needed because of mortgage fraudsters? I am guessing she got a foreclosure notice and the bank/deputy sheriff posted an eviction notice and notice of proposed auction or something like that for failure to pay her mortgage....

So might not be my neighbor too much longer.

 

[mpfaff]

When they're throwing it in everyone's face like fucking Jehova's Witnesses, it DOES have bearing. Nobody's stopping them from living their way. Fucker quoted me, I responded. Let it go.

Are trans people knocking on doors and approaching you at the grocery telling you their pronouns? I thought they were just kind of existing in the world and correct people when they get something a bit wrong.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

What ever happened to "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me."?

It turned out to be bullshit.

 

[mpfaff]

What ever happened to "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me."?

It's a bullshit thing adults tell children on par with Santa and the Easter Bunny. When you grow up, you realize words can cut deeper than most physical harms and leave lasting scars.

 

[moddrift]

Can Ars write an article about staying on Twitter despite all of this crap? What's the use case? What are Ars' engagement numbers? What is the perspective of a business that is still on twitter despite being intimately familiar with every musk shenanigan? I'm not razzing Ars. I'm genuinely curious and I think a lot of readers are, too.

 

[Litazia]

p.s. You whiny clowns have been reporting me since you discovered this was like my 4th account. You're the ones who can't handle any opinion counter to your own and just keep scrolling.

Let the record show this is the second time this guy has admitted to being a ban-evading troll in public, in addition to being a whiny loser who can’t deal with the fact he’s been told multiple times that he’s not wanted here (why would you want to continually return to a place where you’re not wanted? Is there something wrong with your brain?), which is also in addition to being a generally abusive ass and now revealing themselves to be a transphobic bigot (which, honestly, doesn’t surprise me).

If you want to know how pathetic this person is, I can point you to his previous accounts, or his psychopath blog, but honestly, you don’t need that negativity in your life.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

It's a bullshit thing adults tell children on par with Santa and the Easter Bunny. When you grow up, you realize words can cut deeper than most physical harms and leave lasting scars.

I absolutely guarantee that anyone who thinks "words can never hurt me" has never been subjected to the kind of constant, relentless abuse that certain folks will encounter increasingly on places like Twitter.

It's not trivial, it's not harmless, and people suicide over it.