Twitter is cracking down on hateful slurs, and words and slurs that are aimed at other Twitter users. But now, however, bigots are finding new ways to get around the blacklisted slurs. Hateful slurs are not allowed on Twitter, as part of Twitter's rules on hateful conduct, abuse and harassment, abusive profile information and hateful imagery policy, with limited exceptions made - in those cases, people can use slurs to reclaim those words (as a part of their culture as what the slur is associated with), or to condemn the word, and those who use them willfully. However, now that trolls, bigots and Nazis are seeing this, as more of their accounts are getting banned or they are being made to delete their tweets, they are finding new ways to get around Twitter's policy. And Twitter is doing not a lot about this. Take the N word tower, for instance, where Nazis post a single letter, starting with the letter N to start the N word tower chain. After the letter "N", trolls then reply with a single letter until the full word is formed. In some cases, media - such as memes, videos and imagery - is used instead of a single letter tweet. This is one of the tactics the trolls employ to get around twitter enforcement actions, such as being made to delete the tweet, being placed in a timeout, or a permanent suspension. This is because it is very hard to report a single letter as hate speech - Twitter will just take it as a letter and will ignore it, in most cases. The most you could do is report the tweet as spam, or being tweeted out by a fake account. It is more likely to be actionable on spam, especially if the sender has been suspended previously, or is a fake account. While single letters may seem harmless in a single tweet, it is the user's intention of posting that letter is what is causing concern. Additionally, the single letter is being used to form a hateful slur using the reply function. Sometimes, the first letter of a slur is posted as a tweet, rather than being used in a reply. In the case above, the troll who started the word tower has an intention to attack black people and be abusive. Other ways of getting around blacklisted slurs is using an asterisk (*), in place of a letter, to censor a word. Similarly, numbers, symbols and even letters can be used in replacement to censor a word, or to disguise a word. In other cases, emojis can be used to replaced some letters of a word, or even a whole word. And those emojis can also be used to form an abusive phrase, or even a sentence. And yet, in other cases, media such as memes, gifs, imagery and videos are used to hide slurs and hateful phrases or sentences. Sometimes, words have their letters replaced to mock the subject or the definition of that word or degrade the definition of a particular word. These are often aimed at women, the LGBTQA+ community, religious groups, ethnic and indigenous groups, as well as other marginalized groups. In other circumstances, words may have extra letters to exaggerate the definition of a word. It is also not uncommon for trolls to replace a name of a gender, religious group, gender identity, sexual orientation or an ethnic group with a word they use to refer to the group they are targeting in question - sometimes these words can also be abusive, as the replacement words sometimes are those that describe the group that they target as "inferior", or the replacement word is that of one that is associated with a particular group - and that word references morals, inferiority, and intellectuality. Often, they directly reference racist or sexist tropes - words such as "banks", "goblins", bananas", "cheap", "gold diggers" etc. In the case of Anti Semitism, trolls use the echo symbol, in place of the word "Jew". Twitter doesn't seem to take action against this kind of behavior, and specifically so under hateful conduct or abuse and harassment. While disguising slurs as innocent words and using the reply function to form hateful slur chains goes against the rules of platform manipulation and spam (and rightfully so, as these chains can disrupt people's experience in conversations on Twitter), Twitter does not see this kind of behavior as falling under hateful conduct and abuse and harassment - even when it clearly does so. Twitter clearly needs to develop an algorithm in which they can detect hateful slurs through the use of word or letter chains, such as the N word tower chain, and take action against those who use the reply function to create a hateful slur. The rules on platform manipulation and spam, as well as hateful conduct and abusive behavior policy needs to be updated - to include a rule stating that users may not use the reply (or quote tweet) function to post solitaire letters or any kind of media containing solitaire letters to form hateful or abusive words, slurs or phrases. Additionally, they need to develop an algorithm to detect words that are being used to replace hateful slurs, or hateful and offensive slurs that are disguised as a normal word. Sometimes, an asterisk is used to censor words such as women, Muslims and blacks, in order to attack people belonging to those and other groups. An asterisk also allows trolls and bigots to get around the Twitter rules using slurs, which is problematic - and Twitter needs to implement an algorithm to detect this behavior as well.
And finally, Twitter needs to develop an algorithm designed to detect disguised slurs - in the form of words, emojis or media. This all includes optical illusions designed to hide slurs in the form of media, using a mixture of numbers, letters and symbols to form a hateful slur and replacing single letters in a word. This is certainly not exhaustive. Twitter also needs to implement a better reporting system - and update it, too. They should include a broader range of issues, including using manipulative tactics to get around the Twitter rules, which should fall under platform manipulation and spam, in addition to including more issues as to how the person is being abusive or hateful. And finally, Twitter needs to act swiftly on these reports and take them seriously.
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