by Ari Hoffman at Becker News
The second round of Twitter Files revealed that the social media giant had actively blacklisted conservative commentators such as Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino. Yet the company claimed in 2020 that it had banned the term “blacklist.”
In July 2020, during the riots that followed in the wake of the death of George Floyd, Twitter had pledged to use more inclusive language in its programming code, and vowed to drop terms like “master,” “slave,” “whitelist” and “blacklist.”
The company’s engineering team claimed at the time that the platform had begun phasing out potentially-offensive terms that are often used in computer programming, and replaced them with what they considered more socially acceptable language.
This is despite the terms referring to computer terminology. For example, “master” in the community refers to the main version of a piece of code, while “slave” is used to describe the code it controls.
“Blacklist” refers to code that is not allowed and “whitelist” describes code that is approved for use…
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