A colossal piece of cheek
Joan Smith on Twitter v Rowling:
One of the biggest lies about the conflict between feminists and trans activists is that ‘the debate is toxic on both sides’. It’s trotted out in just about every article that takes a supposedly neutral position, even though the authors never produce any evidence for this slur on women who’ve never threatened anyone.
OR called anyone the equivalent of “cunt” and the rest of it.
Team Trans on the other hand is not so reasonable.
JK Rowling is a favourite target and now a music video has emerged in which trans campaigner Faye ‘Trust Fund Ozu’ addresses the author with the chilling words ‘hope you fit in a hearse’. The video also features vocals about ‘killing TERFS’.
JKR tweeted about it in a jokey vein, but the rest of us get to skip the jokey part.
When the actor James Dreyfus reported the post to Twitter, the social media platform failed to uphold his complaint. Even more bizarrely, it claimed that the alleged death threat hadn’t ‘broken its safety policies’. It’s a colossal piece of cheek from a platform that regularly hands out suspensions to women who state facts, such as saying trans women are not biological women, or ‘misgender’ trans athletes like Lia Thomas.
Dreyfus made exactly this point in his response: ‘So, death threats = Good. Saying “women are women” = Bad. Congratulations, Twitter Support. You’ve hit rock bottom. Seek help.’ He’s right, of course, and it’s clear that platforms like Twitter are penalising gender-critical women for what is, since Maya Forstater’s successful appeal, protected speech.
I can add a piece to the puzzle here, because I too reported that tweet and in my case Twitter agreed.
I don’t know why I got a different response – maybe we ticked different boxes. At any rate there’s still a pattern of turning a blind eye to threats and verbal abuse for This One Set of Special People.
What this episode tells us, however, is not just that we are dealing with entitled, narcissistic individuals. We already knew that. It’s becoming clear that there has been a collective decision that trans people are the most vulnerable group in society, regardless of what the statistics tell us, and anyone who speaks for them (or claims to do so) is endowed with the same mantle of victimhood.
Hence they’re given a free pass even if they are gloating about the imagined death of a children’s author or clutching a baseball bat and threatening to murder feminists. I’ve seen it so often that I’m more shocked by the widespread refusal to acknowledge the hateful reality than the threats, which have been documented on many occasions.
Same. People I used to consider friends not only buy into the absurd dogma but also shrug off threats and insults that used to infuriate them when aimed at women or atheists or argumentative bloggers.
I suspect (and this is only a guess, so don’t take it as inside knowledge, because I have none) that there is some kind of scoring system for tweets that is a function of the number of times that they are reported for being abusive. That is to say, if only a few people report it then it will be considered to be “not breaking the AUP”, but if a lot do, then it can reach a threshold where is suddenly IS breaking the AUP.
I suspect this for many reasons (including the fact that this tweet was formerly not a problem, but now suddenly is), but mostly because the culture at Twitter Corp seems to be that it is the group consensus that ultimately should decide the truth or falsehood about whether something is bad, or unethical, or even amoral. It’s a very post-modern identifarian approach to these things, and Twitter is nothing if not a platform for the “reality is what I decided it to be” crowd.
Yes, I thought much the same, albeit in more high school terms.
Though it does seem at times like GC tweets are taken down at the first complaint.
I am up to my fourth deleted Twitter account, simply for being supportive of women.
The most recent account to be banned was because I concluded a tweet with “Fuck off and die”. Apparently, that was a threat, according to twitter. I thought it was simply a recommendation.
Yeah I don’t hold with telling people to die. Not cool.
I have a big id. To appease it I give myself Brownie points for every time I feel like saying it, and refrain.
Anyway, if gender critical feminists spoke to and of the trans brigade the way they’ve normalized speaking to us, we’d never hear the end of it. Even in private, at least in the private GC spaces I inhabit, we don’t wish death on them.
What effect might this have on Twitter?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/04/free-speech-absolutist-elon-musk-owns-9-2-of-twitter.html
James,
That’s certainly the case, partly, I think, for the group consensus reason, partly because it’s very clear that Twitter does have a political agenda but also because moderation on that scale would be impossible without such an algorithm.
Who knows what other variables go into that algorithm?
I would also expect each different group of moderators to have its own culture and tacit working practices, irrespective of any official guidelines. And the same for whatever review panels they have (assuming they do). Any response will surely depend on which desk in which sundry spot of the globe it lands on.
What we don’t know is how much targeted mass reporting goes on. We know it happens a lot for big accounts on the GC side of things but I’ve never seen any GC people discussing which TA accounts to mass block. If it happens on ‘our’ side, then nobody’s telling me about it. There’s no way of telling how much of a role targeted mass reporting plays in the clear bias against women talking about biology and and how much of that is implicit or explicit bias.
A few years ago I managed to convince Twitter to give my group a huge dump of (anonymised) data that contained quite a lot of stuff that would help analyse this to some degree, for academic purposes. I didn’t have chance to have much of a look at it and the others were using it for a different reason. I don’t believe for a moment that I’d be able to get hold of the same kind of data today.