Twitter says it removed thousands of tweets showing a banner promoting a “trans day of revenge” protest in support of transgender rights in Washington, DC, on Saturday.
Ella Irwin, Twitter’s director of trust and safety, said in a tweet on Wednesday that the company automatically removed more than 5,000 tweets and retweets from a banner promoting the event.
“We do not support tweets that incite violence, regardless of who posts them. “Revenge” does not imply peaceful protest. Organizing or supporting peaceful protests is fine,” Irwin wrote in the tweet.
In removing the tweets, Twitter said it used automated processes to do it quickly at scale, without considering in what context they were fragmented. Because of this, both tweets criticizing and supporting the protests were removed.
This seemed to anger many conservative Twitter users who said the rules were unfairly applied to them because they were posting the image of the protest flyer to speak out against it.
But trans activists were quick to point out that the "trans day of revenge" is a meme that has been around in the trans community for years and is not a call for violence, and they said Twitter is wrong in its reasoning for removing tweets in support. of the protest
Evan Greer, director of the nonprofit liberal advocacy group Fight for the Future, said Twitter’s actions are "the latest example of big tech companies employing double standards in content moderation".
“It’s slow to moderate content aimed at trans people, but quick to silence us when we speak or respond. ‘Trans Day of Revenge’ is not a specific day or a call for violence. It’s a meme that’s been around for years, a way to express anger and frustration at the oppression and violence that the trans community faces on a daily basis,” Greer said. “Context is everything in content moderation, so content policies need to be grounded in human rights and applied consistently, not shift rapidly based on public pressure or news cycles.”
The poster in question is a largely text-based digital brochure. At the top it reads "we want more than visibility"followed by "trans day of revenge" and "stop trans genocide"as well as the date and time of the planned protest.
Many of the tweets that Twitter removed were from conservative users who shared an image of the flyer in an attempt to connect the planned protests to the recent shooting at a school in Nashville, Tennessee. In the aftermath of the shooting, some right-wing activists and commentators have taken advantage of the shooter’s gender identity to denounce transgender people and advocates, call transgender people violent, and "wicked", and insinuate that they plan to engage in violence. US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, was among the Twitter users whose account was affected.
The shooting is still under investigation. As of Wednesday, police have shared no evidence that the shooter’s gender or gender identity played a role in the shooting.
On its website, the group organizing Saturday’s protest said it does not condone violence. In a statement posted to the site, the Trans Radical Activist Network and other organizers also strongly rejected any connection between the Nashville school shooting and Saturday’s protest, which organizers say was planned before the shooting occurred.
“Revenge means fighting back vehemently,” the protest organizers wrote on their website. “We are fighting against false narratives, criminalization and the eradication of our existence.”
Twitter, currently under Elon Musk and before the billionaire bought the company, has long banned incitement to violence in tweets. In early March, Twitter announced what it called a new policy that prohibits "violent speech" on its platform, though the new rules appear similar to the guidelines against violent threats the company had on its books before Musk took over.
Among the updates, Twitter had expanded its policy to include a ban on "coded language"which is often known as "dog whistles", which is used to indirectly incite violence. He also added a rule that prohibits “threatening to damage civilian homes and shelters, or infrastructure that is essential to daily, civic, or business activities.”