Imagine considering threats abusive

The Daily Dot tells us, with great indignation, that trans activists are getting Twitter suspensions or bans merely for threatening women they dislike. What is the world coming to when people aren’t free to threaten women on social media?

Trans Twitter has witnessed a spike in transgender users having their accounts suspended or banned on Twitter, and people are searching for answers. Given the apparently related manner in which these suspensions are happening, the community suspects a targeted effort against them. But who?

Some think it has to do with the word “TERF” while others think it takes more than that.

One trans Twitter user, who wished to remain anonymous, shared her evidence with the Daily Dot for TERF itself not being the sole key to this censorship. “Anecdotally I’ve been using TERF constantly without consequence, and so have many others,” she said. She pointed to the Twitter account Your Fave Hates TERFs as further evidence that just using the acronym is not enough to have action taken against you.

Yet the combination of TERF and any keyword that could be considered violent seems to be all it takes to get Twitter’s algorithms to designate a tweet as abusive.

Ohhhh…mere violence. Gee, how dare they.

That and a big push from mass organized reporting. “A tweet that said ‘kick TERFs out of your spaces’ is actionable because of the word kick. They’re mass reporting tweets like that,” she said. Another blatant example of this is the following tweets, which were labeled “abusive”:

We are shown some tweets that talk about giving TERFs some punch and mixing the punch “real good” and giving them straws to make sure they do not choke.

Rather than an explicit policy change, it seems to be TERFs abusing an automated system that sees words like “kick” and “punch,” but not the words that give them context, and certainly not the societal context that informs how trans people talk about TERFs.

Ahhhhhhhh yes the “societal context” that makes it perfectly all right for “activists” to talk publicly about punching kicking stabbing killing feminist women who object to being shoved out of their own spaces, political movements, realities, histories, experiences, everything, to make way for men who are determined to take them over.

Talk about reversing victim and offender.

Discussions of the harm TERFs do to the trans community, or even light-hearted jokes at their expense, might be enough to get someone removed from the platform altogether.

Oh yes those lighthearted jokes about punching stabbing killing women. If only women had a sense of humor, knowutImean?

5 Responses to “Imagine considering threats abusive”