Twitter quietly edited its hateful conduct coverage to drop transgender protections

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Earlier this month, Twitter quietly eliminated transgender-specific protections from its hateful conduct coverage, drawing criticism from advocates who say there was a spike in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric since Twitter CEO Elon Musk took over the platform final 12 months.

An archived model of Twitter’s prior coverage, dated April 7, clearly said that Twitter prohibited “concentrating on others with repeated slurs, tropes or different content material that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce destructive or dangerous stereotypes a few protected class. This contains focused misgendering or deadnaming of transgender people.” (“Deadnaming” refers to calling a trans particular person by their former identify.)

However on April 8, the coverage language modified to strike that final line. That edit successfully eliminated transgender-specific protections that have been first carried out in 2018 to handle a disproportionate quantity of hate speech concentrating on transgender customers, The Verge reported that 12 months.