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Comment by sdsd | Hacker News Reader

People are downvoting you because you're saying "Twitter okay" and the hivemind says "Twitter bad". Fwiw I had the same experience, I never cared about Twitter (had tried it a few times and just lost interest) and I've immensely enjoyed Twitter recently. So many weird people just putting ideas out there. TPOT and e/acc in particular are full of smart people I can't find elsewhere (I don't live in SF or even the US, so these aren't people I could access in my community).

I also agree that the real source of the drama seems to be Musk. People are annoyed at him so they have to say "Twitter bad" as a matter of principle.

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People are down voting them for this bit:

> I appreciate the efforts Musk has made towards pushing back against the censorship of language that it seems like everyone nowadays wants to enforce, regardless of their background.

Musks censorship is well-documented. There are only two ways one could sincerely make this argument:

- by fully ignoring Musks censorship

- by accepting it as good

Neither option makes the commenter seem honest or well-meaning, hence the downvotes.

Who has Musk censored?

Censoring mentions of Mastodon was indeed a terrible move, but he did backtrack on that.

Was there anything else?

There is a bunch more. Elonjet, that one blogging page, Threads... Hell, he declared "cisgender" to be a forbidden slur!

Musk didn't declare it a forbidden slur. What he declared forbidden was "repeated, targeted harassment" and that cis will be considered a slur by Twitter in the context of assessing whether something is "repeated, targeted harassment". Personally I think that's fair enough. There are countless words which can be slurs when used to harass.

If a transgender woman asks to not be referred to as a man, I would argue that use of male pronouns can constitute a slur. It can be a slur even if it's technically correct that they are still a biologically male person.

Calling an openly gay man "a homo" is widely accepted to be a serious slur, even though it's a term derived from Latin and the factual imputation conveyed by the word isn't in dispute.

It doesn't matter if a person happens to fit the technical definition of "cisgender" because slur-ness is never about technical correctness, or whether a word has Latin roots. It's about the reasons why the word was chosen and the purpose it is serving in the conversation.

I don't think you're right. Musk wrote: > Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.

> The words “cis” or “cisgender” are considered slurs on this platform.

This does mention repeated, targeted harassment, but the "slur-ness" isn't predicated upon it. On Twitter, as it stands right now, "cis" is a slur, as Musk decreed.

I agree with your parsing as technically sound, though I personally have a rule to give benefit of the doubt about nuance and specificity when reading posts on a platform which encourages an off-the-cuff style of writing and is famous for enforced brevity.

The benefit of the doubt I extend is that being "considered slurs on this platform" is a no-op when the platform doesn't have a policy regarding arbitrary use of slur words. So whether a platform considers a word a slur is only relevant when there's a context — in this case, the context of assessing for repeated, targeted harassment.

> The benefit of the doubt I extend is that being "considered slurs on this platform" is a no-op when the platform doesn't have a policy regarding arbitrary use of slur words. So whether a platform considers a word a slur is only relevant when there's a context — in this case, the context of assessing for repeated, targeted harassment.

I can understand this perspective from a non-affected person, but the signal sent to affected minority groups seems very clear to me, and this makes it relevant for any interaction of the minority group with the platform.

There is no such thing as a "non-affected" person. Everyone is the cumulation of a thousand traits; many of these traits make a person some kind of minority when considered from one perspective or another. What changes from year to year is which traits are enjoying attention, and how minority members of that trait are exploiting that attention.

No, there very clearly is such a thing. If I make it illegal to say the word "gay", non-gay people are much less affected than gay people are.

By that logic, if someone makes it illegal to say the word "cis", then non-cis people are much less affected than cis people are.

Why? Trans people have a reason to use the word cis, whereas cis people usually don't, since it's accepted as "normal".

Precisely. Your logic was flawed.

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