Twitter Won’t Say If Dehumanizing Language About Whiteness Violates Rules

Twitter failed to respond to repeated requests for comment about a tweet from the Root that compared whiteness to a disease, refusing to say if the tweet violates its policies against dehumanizing language.

The social media platform updated its policy on hate speech in December last year, with a specific focus on dehumanizing language.

“Our primary focus is on addressing the risks of offline harm, and research shows that dehumanizing language increases that risk,” said Twitter in a statement announcing the change.

Yet a tweet stating “whiteness is a pandemic,” from a verified account with over 600,000 remains on the platform.

In the linked article, the Root blogger Damon Young makes extensive comparisons between white people and disease:

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Those rules specifically state that users of the platform may not post content “that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes” about people on the basis of race, ethnicity, caste, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and a number of other categories.

To justify the December expansion of its hateful conduct policy, and its renewed focus on dehumanizing language, Twitter cited a blog post from the far-left Dangerous Speech project, which argued that language comparing people to diseases often precedes “outbreaks of mass violence.”

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