Twitter Quickly Scrubs 5,000 ‘Trans Day of Vengeance’ Tweets

A planned Washington, D.C., protest Saturday titled “Trans Day of Vengeance” has had Twitter censoring more than 5,000 tweets and retweets for the incitement of violence.

“We do not support tweets that incite violence irrespective of who posts them,” Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety, tweeted Tuesday. ” ‘Vengeance’ does not imply peaceful protest. Organizing or support for peaceful protests is OK.”

Twitter used an automated process to remove the tweets in a large swath, which had angered some conservatives like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who had her account temporarily restricted.

The automated process was used to squash the incitement to violence on the platform, so even those denouncing the event were censored.

Evan Greer, director of the nonprofit liberal advocacy group Fight for the Future, said Twitter’s actions are “the latest example of Big Tech companies employing double standards in content moderation.”

“They are slow to moderate content targeting trans people, but quick to silence us when we speak out or push back,” Greer told The Associated Press. ” ‘Trans Day of Vengeance’ is not a specific day or a call for violence. It’s a meme that’s been around for years, a way of expressing anger and frustration about oppression and violence the trans community faces daily

“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.

The protest was planned before the recent school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, but the fact the shooter identified as a trans person raised the rhetoric on both sides of the gender dysphoria debate.

A group called the Trans Radical Activist Network and other organizers rejected any connection between the school shooting in Nashville and Saturday’s protest.

“Vengeance means fighting back with vehemence,” the protest’s organizers wrote on their website. “We are fighting against false narratives, criminalization, and eradication of our existence.”

Twitter, both currently under Elon Musk and before the billionaire bought the company, has long prohibited the incitement of violence in tweets. 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.”

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.