Comment by DeusExMachina | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeusExMachina | Hacker News Reader

> A Twitter spokesperson responded to the new tool saying, “We enforce the Twitter Rules impartially for all users, regardless of their background or political affiliation. We are constantly working to improve our systems and will continue to be transparent in our efforts.”

In the discussion with Jack Dorsey on the Joe Rogan podcast, Tim Pool had a good point: some of the rules are intrinsically biased on one side of the political spectrum.

An good example is the rule against misgendering. Twitter forbids referring to a person using a different gender than the one that person choses. E.g., you have to refer to a male-to-female transgender as a "she".

But to conservatives, referring to someone using a gender other than their biological one is the definition of misgendering.

This is a purely ideological take, and Twitter chose the definition of one side over the other. Then they can apply it "impartially to all users", but its the rule itself that is not impartial.

There's an even stronger argument that Twitter's misgendering rule is ideological, I reckon. See, it used to be that all the right-thinking, connected feminist and feminist-adjacent folks thought that referring to people using anything other than their biological gender at birth was not just misgendering, but misogynistic and patriarchal - and even once this shifted somewhat, folks were expected to defend the people who still held those views until around 2016 or so. For instance, when Wordpress banned someone using wordpress.com to outright dox and harass every prominent trans woman out there, there was a successful campaign to unban her and no counter-campaign, because all the left-leaning groups fighting to make Internet sites ideologically correct supported this back then.

Twitter choosing to act against misgendering now isn't simply the result of some abstract belief about respecting people. It's a direct reflection of the changing views of activists in one particular slice of political spectrum.

In that case I guess it's up to Wheaton's law. It is much less distressing to accept designating people with pronouns one believes to be wrong, than to be designated with pronouns that mismatch one's inner identity. Purposefully distressing people is kind of being a dick, and the amount of dickishness should be curbed, so the conclusion naturally arises.

Tim Pool and JRE are obnoxious. Twitter lets people call each other pedos with no evidence all day long and you think that they enforce calling someone a he/she when they go by the opposite gender? Get real.

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