Twitter Restores Anti-Trans Accounts and Fuels Hate, Groups Say
(Bloomberg) -- Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk is restoring a string of accounts previously suspended for harassing transgender people, rolling back protections for the LGBTQ community as the country confronts the aftermath of a shooting in a Colorado gay club that left five people dead and dozens wounded.
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Advocates say the shooting on Saturday highlights the potential real-world violence that can stem from rhetoric against the trans community. They noted that anti-trans abuse has been mounting on the platform since the shooting.
“Creating this environment of relentless attack and permissible hate, it results in the kinds of things we saw Saturday night in Colorado,” said Cathy Renna, spokeswoman for the National LGBTQ task force. “We cannot carefully step around the fact that you can draw a straight line between these things.”
The accounts that were reinstated, before and after the shooting, include Christian news satire site Babylon Bee, writer James Lindsay and Canadian self-help author Jordan Peterson. The alleged shooter was charged Monday with murder and hate crimes.
Musk had announced he planned to pare back some preexisting policies against targeting the LGBTQ community after he took control of Twitter last month. For instance, he specifically asked Twitter’s trust and safety team to review the company’s policy against “deadnaming,” the act of using the name that a transgender person was given at birth, Bloomberg News reported.
Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, said the nightclub attack comes “at a time where anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is hitting a fever pitch.”
Anti-LGBTQ activity including demonstrations and violence increased fourfold in the US in 2021 compared to 2020, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. Rhetoric against the trans community is escalating across the country, from online forums to Republican political campaigns. Over the past year, white nationalists have protested drag queen story hours and children’s hospitals have faced bomb threats over their transgender care.
Musk himself has made derogatory remarks about the trans community. One of his daughters, who is transgender, said in a court filing that she doesn’t live with or “wish to be related to” Musk. Musk blamed their rift on “communism” within elite colleges in an interview with the Financial Times. “I have very good relationships with all the others,” Musk said, referring to his other children. “Can’t win them all.” Musk also previously tweeted that pronouns for trans people are a “nightmare.”
The Babylon Bee, which has almost 2 million followers, was locked out of its account in March over a tweet misidentifying the gender of US assistant secretary for health Rachel Levine, a transgender woman. Lindsay, the writer, was suspended in August for calling a Harvard professor a “child sexualization specialist” over her work advocating for the LGBTQ community. Lindsay popularized the epithet “Ok, Groomer” on Twitter, pushing the narrative that teaching children about LGBTQ equality is akin to pedophilia.
The phrase “Ok, Groomer” was trending on Twitter on Monday as more accounts suspended for anti-trans harassment came back online.
Peterson, a right-wing commentator, was locked out of his account earlier this year for using the incorrect name to refer to actor Elliot Page, the star of Jason Reitman’s 2007 film “Juno.”
Melissa Ingle, a former senior data scientist at Twitter, has received extensive harassment and even death threats on the platform this past week as she spoke out about her experiences being laid off from Twitter under Musk. Ingle, who is transgender, has faced abuse from some accounts that were previously banned, including from Lindsay.
“You can talk to any trans person on the platform and they’re scared,” Ingle said. She added that before she left Twitter, a colleague shared a study that showed there was a 50% increase in abuse reports from Twitter users the day after Musk purchased the platform compared with the day before.
Twitter also reinstated the account of Protect Texas Kids, a group that protests drag shows and LGBTQ events in Texas. “Protest your local ‘kid-friendly’ drag show,” the account posted on Monday.
“This is really, really dangerous,” said Ari Drennan, LGBTQ program director at advocacy group Media Matters. “They’re looking at a fire and pouring on some more gasoline.”
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