(Headline USA) Twitter says it has removed thousands of tweets showing a poster promoting a “trans day of vengeance” protest in support of transgender rights in Washington, D.C., on Saturday.
Ella Irwin, Twitter’s 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.
“We do not support tweets that incite violence irrespective of who posts them,” Irwin claimed, despite the platform’s long history of selectively condoning violence involving left-wing terrorist groups and those outside the U.S., including Muslim extremists in the Middle East.
“Vengeance does not imply peaceful protest,” Irwin continued. “Organizing or support for peaceful protests is ok.”
The move followed shortly after Monday’s tragic school-shooting in Nashville, during which a trans-identifying woman targeted a Christian school, killing three adults and three 9-year-olds before being neutralized by police.
The massacre, along with Saturday’s planned terrorist event in the nation’s capital, helped to fuel a growing dialogue about the threat posed by radicalized leftist within the LGBT community.
That proved too sensitive and politically incorrect for the still-left-leaning Twitter, despite its recent takeover by red-pilled billionaire Elon Musk, who promised to restore free speech to the platform—much to the chagrin of anti-freedom Democrats.
In addition to its automatic removal of the “trans day of vengeance” tweets, Twitter censored other post critical of transgender terrorism.
A post from a Headline USA writer calling on California Gov. Gavin Newsom to disarm all transgender individuals, in response to Newsom’s calls for stricter gun control, resulted in a 12-hour lock on the account.
In removing the tweets, Twitter claimed it used automated processes to do it quickly at a large scale, without considering what context the tweets were shared in.
Sharing information surrounding media that we have determined will not be allowed based on our policies. This thread is intended to cover the most common questions being asked.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) March 29, 2023
Because of this, both tweets that were critical of and those that supported the protests were removed.
This roiled 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.
Among those censored were Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and investigative journalist Andy Ngo.
Trans activists rushed to claim “trans day of vengeance” was a meme that has been around in the trans community for years and insisted that despite the obvious implications, it did not endorse violence.
It is “a way of expressing anger and frustration about oppression and violence the trans community faces daily,” claimed Evan Greer, director of the far-left Fight for the Future. “Context 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.”
The poster in question is a largely text-based digital flyer. It reads “we want more than visibility” on top, followed by “trans day of vengeance” and “stop trans genocide” as well as the date and time of the planned protest.
On its website, the group organizing Saturday’s protest insisted 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’s protest, which organizers said was planned before the shooting took place.
“Vengeance means fighting back with vehemence,” the protest’s organizers claimed. “We are fighting against false narratives, criminalization, and eradication of our existence.”
In early March, Twitter announced what it called a new policy prohibiting “violent speech” 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 “coded language,” which is often referred to as “dog whistles,” used to indirectly incite violence.
It also added a rule that prohibits “threatening to damage civilian homes and shelters, or infrastructure that is essential to daily, civic, or business activities.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
