Elon Musk May Change Anti-Trans Hatespeech Rules

No one is a stranger to the thought that Twitter is not the best social media platform. This is doubled by Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of the website, with many Twitter users planning a move to Tumblr.

Beyond all the uncertainty looming around Twitter currently, a few things are certain: Elon Musk has expressed some transphobic sentiments before, and his being the current owner does not bode well for the future.  Recently,  there has been a surge in misinformation and hate speech, and Twitter’s moderation team has been locked out of the moderation tools they use to curb accounts that promote such.

Bloomberg reports that, “Twitter staff use dashboards, known as agent tools, to carry out actions like banning or suspending an account that is deemed to have breached policy. Detection of policy breaches can either be flagged by other Twitter users or detected automatically, but taking action on them requires human input and access to the dashboard tools.”

The anonymous sources also stated that portions of the Twitter rules were also under review, including the portion about misgendering and transphobia, or more specifically, “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” It is incredibly unclear if this portion of the rules will be rewritten or removed entirely.

It seems that there is a theme in changing policies that help people due to personal views in the world recently. Elon Musk has tweeted in the past that “pronouns suck,” and that putting pronouns in a bio is an “esthetic (sic) nightmare.” While this could easily be confused as a hatred for grammar, Musk meant that classic transphobic rhetoric, that he will not accept any pronouns that differ from the ones that were assigned at birth. This is the man who now owns one of the largest social media platforms and has called for the rules to be put under review.