 Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, he claimed that his support for free speech was unequivocal and that he even wanted his worst critics to remain on the platform once he took it over. Remember that? Yeah, I do too. Fast forward to today, however, and his actions have thoroughly proven that that is indeed not the case since LGBTQ inclusive language is now seemingly being censored across the entire platform and nobody really knows why. As Pink News reports, on Saturday, April 1st, Twitter users and LGBTQ plus activists spotted that tweets shared by direct message no longer show a tweet preview if they include certain words. Sharing a tweet via DM should automatically bring up a preview of the tweet's contents, but now users are seeing just a plain link if the tweet contains the word trans, lgbt, lgbt plus, or BLM for Black Lives Matter. More concerningly, tweets that feature terms that are widely regarded as slurs by the lgbtq plus community, including trans identified and tslur preview as normal. As do tweets mentioning the trans exclusionary term lgb. The concern around censorship in Twitter DMs is echoed by the UK based Trans Safety Network, which reported that preliminary testing indicates that the platform is quote deboosting tweets containing words. They include the words trans, gay, lesbian, queer, and bisexual. Now I for one have actually experienced this too, so a lot of people will DM me lgbtq plus news articles that they want me to cover, and I can confirm after looking at their direct messages I am not seeing tweet previews in my DMs. Just the link. Now I can't speak personally to deboosting, but there is evidence that this is happening. But that's just the tip of the iceberg apparently because the trans safety network who conducted this analysis as mentioned by the article also discovered the following quote. We also believe that the word sex is banned, including any reference to sexuality, which is why bisexual without the pound sign also got caught in our initial tweet. We can also confirm that whilst any reference to sex triggers this filter, the word fslur does not. Our testing suggests this does not capture all words, which contains sex, sex 10 is fine, but intersex is not. Heterosexual is also fine, but homosexual is not. Our current thinking is because of how other partially filtered words, which keeps sex intact, interact, is that anything containing sex is banned but explicit exemptions have been made, not including queer sexualities. Although they say in an important update, we have just found that the filter blocked the initialism GC without punctuation marks short for gender critical is also blocked. The full phrase and acronym TERF are not. Also gender identity is banned, gender ideology is not. So this is pretty brazen. It appears as if they are deliberately targeting specific queer terms, but they are excluding slurs and right wing dog whistles like gender ideology, which is extremely suspicious to say the least. Now it's entirely possible that this change was not made for nefarious reasons. Pink News continues, while this could simply be a Twitter glitch, it is perhaps unsurprising that LGBTQ plus users are concerned as under the tenure of the platform's owner Elon Musk, posts mentioning the anti-LGBTQ plus groomer narrative have soared by 119%. In February, researchers from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Twitter is on track to make up to $19 million a year from ads on just 10 vitriolic anti-LGBTQ plus accounts reinstated by Elon Musk since he announced his general amnesty policy. Now we also shouldn't let Elon Musk off the hook as well because he's posted anti-LGBTQ plus things on Twitter, especially anti-trans things. And we just, we don't know why this is happening. There's no explanation for it, but it is indeed happening that's been proven. And queer people are now the deliberate targets of Twitter censorship. This is a new phenomenon, it hasn't happened before. But this change comes with other bizarre changes on Twitter. Now we can't tell which verified users pay for Twitter blue or legacy verified users because clicking on a check mark now just says this account is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter blue or is a legacy verified account. And now most verified legacy users are seeing this, although for some reason when I checked mine, it says that I'm verified because my account is quote notable in government news entertainment or another designated category. So at least at this point in time, people won't suspect that I'm a motherfucker who pays for Twitter, but the goal seemingly is to make Twitter blue users indistinguishable from legacy verified users. So we stopped making fun of them for paying for Twitter, although that change hasn't affected all of us because again, my check mark doesn't say that. I just, I thought that all check marks were going to go the way of the dodo on April 1st. Turns out that didn't happen. And the one account that lost their verification that we know of is the New York Times because they said that they weren't going to pay. But apparently it's very difficult to just remove all check marks. And you have to kind of do this manually one by one. This is the reports, I can't verify that I'm not an engineer. So this is why perhaps it hasn't happened. But this change doesn't affect all of us. One change that has affected all of us is that the Twitter logo has now been replaced as of Monday with the Dogecoin logo, which comes as Musk tries to get his $258 billion Dogecoin lawsuit dismissed where investors are suing him for his alleged involvement in a pyramid scheme meant to boost the value of Dogecoin. So I guess he made this change to rally the troops. I don't know. This is another change that nobody asked for. But unlike other changes, simply replacing the Twitter logo with a crypto coin based on an ancient meme is probably the least offensive change that Elon Musk has made to the platform since taking it over. So I'm not necessarily bothered by this, although aesthetically it's not that pleasing but I can live with it. But when it comes to him claiming that he was going to liberate the platform from the previous owners who were sensorious tyrants, well, he has failed categorically in that regard because free speech has not thrived on the platform since Elon Musk took it over and nobody who's been paying attention is surprised by that. But one thing that will continue to not surprise any of us who've been on the platform for years is more dumb changes that are instituted for seemingly no reason. But you know, you can scoff at or make fun of the stupid changes that he makes but censoring an entire marginalized community on Twitter when they're desperately trying to get their message out there amid an international hate campaign. That can actually do real harm. But again, we can't prove nefarious intent, but we can prove that it's happening. So regardless of why it happened, it needs to be fixed. But when all of the engineers are gone and there's nobody to report these issues and when Elon Musk is seemingly in agreement with this change, if not the one who green-lighted it, we all know that there's really nothing that can be done about this. So hate will continue to proliferate on the platform and marginalized voices will continue to get drowned out because this is the new status quo with Elon Musk. It's just going to continue to circle the drain until hopefully it gets so bad that Elon Musk sells Twitter to someone else who's at least a little bit more competent. But who knows? So for now, we'll just have to wait and see, but I'll continue to report on this. As for now, LGBTQ plus people are being censored on Elon Musk's free speech platform. Bada! Bada! Bada! Bada! Bada! Bada!