What if someone's holy book contains text that dehumanizes people on the basis of religion?
Dehumanization is a defense mechanism which helps us avoid feeling the pain of realizing that humans sometimes do (subjectively) abhorrent things. It's seductive to define such people outside the bounds of humanity as it allows us to excuse treating them poorly. It is nearly always a mistake to do so, because people are, in fact, people.
People can still freely express their distaste for any and all religion on twitter so long as they don’t dehumanize the people who follow that religion.
haven't we all seen this in practice long enough now to know how this little routine goes?
Rules & regulations should be written, evaluated, and revised the same way code is. Code doesn’t always run as we intended but we (usually) don’t crucify the developer. We learn from the misunderstanding, fix it, and then re-evaluate when the next inevitable misunderstanding comes up. We get feedback and we iterate. That’s exactly what Twitter is doing. Their first policy didn’t work out as planned and this is their next iteration based on the feedback they received on policy v1.0.0
And will Twitter update this policy yet again once they’ve had time to work out some of the kinks? You can bet on it.
That is all in a matter of perspective. To you it might not be.
Then they probably aren't allowed to tweet their holy book.
You are essentially asking “will Twitter make use/mention distinctions in enforcing this policy”. While it is of course impossible to state for certain in advance, I don't see any particular reason to believe they would either be disinclined to or incapable of doing so.
Which is the whole point.
These issues of free speech have been around for a very long time, especially with regards to religious speech, which is at the bedrock of free speech, and the Western liberal tradition espouses free speech principles not because it didn't realize someone might get offended, but because it's better than the option of having powerful people/institutions pick winners and losers and decide what is acceptable to say.
Under current rules, if enforced across the board, a modern Martin Luther's 95 tweet stream would be banned because it hurt someone's feelings or criticized their religion. Exposes of Jehovah's Witnesses would be banned. Atheist tracts would be banned. The whole system is unworkable, which is why it wont work -- it wont be enforced across the board. What will happen is that Twitter will adopt de-facto 'protected religions' that cannot be criticized -- say Islam -- and then it will pick the losers -- say Christianity.
You're over-reacting to what the linked post from twitter actually says.
But if you think about it, the NPC memes were not arguing that some specific individual was not human, but rather than certain types of reasoning was robotic -- e.g. atavistic, primitive, and automatic. So this was an idea that was being blocked.
Going back to religion, the whole point of religious arguments is that they offend people and challenge the core of their identity. So of course this is going to be used as a weapon against religious views. Especially if your religion includes beliefs that some people are followers of false prophets, children of the devil, etc. Religion is used in many ways as a dividing line over who is favored and who is not.