Twitter says it has removed thousands of tweets showing a poster promoting a \u201ctrans day of vengeance\u201d protest in support of transgender rights in Washington, D.C., on Saturday.
Ella Irwin, Twitter\u2019s head of Trust and Safety, said in a tweet Wednesday that the company automatically removed more than 5,000 tweets and retweets of a poster promoting the event.
\u201cWe do not support tweets that incite violence irrespective of who posts them. \u201cVengeance\u201d does not imply peaceful protest. Organizing or support for peaceful protests is ok,\u201d Irwin wrote in the tweet.
In removing the tweets, Twitter said it used automated processes to do it quickly at a large scale, without considering what context the tweets were shared in. Because of this, both tweets that were critical of and those that supported the protests were removed.
This appeared 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 \u201ctrans day of vengeance\u201d is a meme that has been around in the trans community for years and is not a call to violence \u2014 and said Twitter is misguided in its reasoning behind removing the tweets in support of the protest.
Evan Greer, director of the nonprofit liberal advocacy group Fight for the Future, said Twitter\u2019s actions are \u201cthe latest example of Big Tech companies employing double standards in content moderation.\u201d
\u201cThey are slow to moderate content targeting trans people, but quick to silence us when we speak out or push back. \u2019Trans Day of Vengeance\u2019 is not a specific day or a call for violence. It\u2019s a meme that\u2019s been around for years, a way of expressing anger and frustration about oppression and violence the trans community faces daily,\u201d Greer said. \u201cContext is everything in content moderation, which is why content policies should be based in human rights and applied evenly, not changed rapidly based on public pressure or news cycles.\u201d
The poster in question is a largely text-based digital flyer. It reads \u201cwe want more than visibility\u201d on top, followed by \u201ctrans day of vengeance\u201d and \u201cstop trans genocide\u201d as well as the date and time of the planned protest.
Many of the tweets Twitter removed were from conservative users sharing an image of the flyer in an attempt to connect the planned protests with the recent school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee. In the aftermath of the shooting, some right-wing activists and commentators have seized on the gender identity of the shooter in order to denounce transgender people and advocates, call transgender people violent, and \u201cevil,\u201d and insinuate they are planning to engage in violence. U.S. Rep. 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\u2019s gender or gender identity played a role in the shooting.
On its website, the group organizing Saturday\u2019s protest said it does not condone violence. In a statement posted on the site, the Trans Radical Activist Network and other organizers also strongly rejected any connection between the school shooting in Nashville and Saturday\u2019s protest, which organizers said was planned before the shooting took place.
\u201cVengeance means fighting back with vehemence,\u201d the protest\u2019s organizers wrote on their website. \u201cWe are fighting against false narratives, criminalization, and eradication of our existence.\u201d
Twitter, both currently under Elon Musk and before the billionaire bought the company, has long prohibited the incitement of violence in tweets. In early March, Twitter announced what it called a new policy prohibiting \u201cviolent speech\u201d on its platform, though the new rules appear similar to guidelines against violent threats that the company had on its books before Musk took over.
Among the updates, Twitter had expanded its policy to include a ban on \u201ccoded language,\u201d which is often referred to as \u201cdog whistles,\u201d used to indirectly incite violence. It also added a rule that prohibits \u201cthreatening to damage civilian homes and shelters, or infrastructure that is essential to daily, civic, or business activities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n