After calls for Twitch to address antisemitism on the platform, the site’s hateful conduct policy now includes “Zionist” as a potential slur. Twitch specifies this is conditional: you’re allowed to discuss the political movement of that name, but not “attack or demean another individual or group of ...
I know there's a lot of Christians involved but how do we know it's the majority? Young Israelis are raised largely around Zionist propaganda after all.
There's about 100 million evangelical christians in the US, and a LifeWay poll in 2017 showed that about 80% essentially considered themselves zionists. That's 80 million. There's 15.8 million jews worldwide. So the non-Jewish zionists outweigh Jewish zionists by a fair margin. Heck, they outweigh the zionist and the non-zionist jews taken together by a beefy margin, even.
If you had looked at the link of this post, you would have read:
Twitch specifies this is conditional: you’re allowed to discuss the political movement of that name, but not “attack or demean another individual or group of people on the basis of their background or religious belief.”
I.e. nothing is masqueraded here as long as they keep to this. This seems to be a reasonable policy. I've seen a couple of instances of people being derogatorily called zionists just for supporting the people of current Israel not being pushed away out of their now decades-old homes, which is hard to still call Zionist if they don't support any further expansion and any offensive military action.
There's almost never anything gained to use "Zionist" on someone as if saying "asshole".
Twitch specifies this is conditional: you’re allowed to discuss the political movement of that name, but not “attack or demean another individual or group of people on the basis of their background or religious belief.”
Zionist is a political term, it has nothing to do with one’s background or religious belief.
But see if the political view is only held by members or a certain religious group (even if not all members of said religion accept said political thought), it's easy to conflate it, so that you can ban anyone opposing said political thought based on "they're discriminating against me because of my religion".
I've heard homo being used in a derogatory way as an insult. That usage should not be tolerated.
Retarded is just a medical term, yet you can use it as an insult as well.
That is what this "specification of conditional" aims at. It's fine to use the word in a descriptive way, you're just not allowed to go around angrily calling people "fucking zionist"
I guess my pessimistic lens is a little strong and I generally don't trust large companies to act in good faith. So maybe I'm over scrutinizing here and being a bit of a curmudgeon.
I think your perspective is fair, and it's likely this is akin to a high school faculty dealing with some random word or idea becoming a meme of sorts and causing problems. So they have to write some new rule that sounds ridiculous or weird.
It sucks there's so much racism and bigotry driving forces in the world that it's hard to not be dubious of everything. You always kinda wonder about the actual motivation behind things like this.