Twitch declares “Zionist” a slur — and a bannable offense
Twitch declares “Zionist” a slur — and a bannable offense
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 ...
The same way I don't think we should capitulate to framing "cracker" as a slur, or to framing "black lives matter" as a racist thing to say, I don't think we should capitulate to framing things like "from the river to the sea" or "zionist" as antisemitic.
But, as a thought experiment, let's indulge in this doublespeak trash. What is a good alternative? So far I've got:
- Israeli colonizers
- Jewish supremacists
- genocidal sacks of shit
- Israeli apartheidists
- Isreal expansionists
- Israeli warmongerers
- people in favor of the genocide and apartheid committed by Israel (in full, every time you need to say zionist)
- modern day nazis
- zionazis (technically not zionist!)
So all of this liberal crybaby nomenclature trash aside, I actually do think "zionist" is in itself a fairly useless term for the Israeli apartheid question (as Norman Finkelstein and Judith Butler do too). While one faction of zionism pursued the nakba and massacres from fairly early on, and while this faction has been quite successful, there are other notions of zionism which do not entail murdering children or colonizing a country. When Netanyahu and Chomsky can both legitimately refer to themselves as zionists, I think it's clear that zionism is too broad a term to be useful in the current ongoing genocide and the ethnic cleansing that has been going on for the better part of a century.
I wish I could upvote this more.
Edit: a word
Do a lot of slurs have a wikipedia page?
sooo twitch declares the Zionist movement offensive? and should only discussed in sn academic sense? /s
wow twitch, very brave!!
Once genz matures, public opinion on Israel will shift. I hope Israel enters the "and find out" stage.
Fuck 'em, disgusting parasites leeching on US might to commit a genocide. Americans will pay for this too...
next 9/11: why would anybody do this to us 🤡
sad reality many of us did not sign up to fund the genocide but AIPAC was able to infiltrated state and corpos from within while avoiding foreign agent registration.
our spooks are fucking useless...
But Zionism isn't a religion, it's a nationalist movement.
Never used it and never will, but maybe we can make Twitch become a slur?
TBH people should talk about zionism and zionists much more.
This might be out of context for the article, but once we are in /c/technology get this: GIMP is a slur, and their slogan during startup is "we glitch because we twitch" which makes me want to kick them in the nuts every time I use the fucking software.
Good thing I'm an anti-zionist then I suppose.
How about "genocidal assholes?" Can they still say that?
Calling zionism what it is shouldn't be discouraged with dog whistles masquerading as conduct policies.
At the same time I'd like to remind folks that not all Jewish people subscribe to Zionism.
There are a couple Jewish lead organizations that fight for the freedom of Palestine and have been very critical of Israel for many years.
Jewish Voices for Peace is one group. I wonder how they'd feel about Twitches new policy. I'm genuinely curious what their opinion would be.
Edit - corrected Jewish Voices for Peace
At the same time I’d like to remind folks that not all Jewish people subscribe to Zionism.
Further to this, the majority of zionists are christians.
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".
which is hard to still call Zionist if they don't support any further expansion and any offensive military action.
Your 'if' is doing a lot of heavy lifting. And is fucking hilarious given they keep expanding and pushing people out of their decades old homes.
Funny how that part seems to be ignored in defense of zionists....
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.
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.
Is this why we should not delegate the control of hate speech to the state, because it will always blow up in our faces?
Twitch is not the state
Sure it isn't. Let's review this when the state does the same thing lol.
Next, "apartheid" will be anti-Semitic.
Are they gonna lock up genocide joe for hate crimes?
Hey everybody has a right to a racist ethnostate how dare people criticize the idea.
From the link of this post that you could have clicked on:
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.”
but not “attack or demean another individual or group of people on the basis of their background or religious belief.”
Yeah, how dare people try to demean someone just because they checks notes hold dehumanizing beliefs and support a government and movement bent on removing the people from their land so they can steal it and build new homes while ethnically cleansing the existing population.
smh my head.
It's great how people are gathering and having discussions under heavily censored platforms owned by billionaries, just amazing.
And on top of that, pretty much all the platforms, even all the way down to this one, are censored in at least one increasingly-relevant way.
At least we can still talk about butt stuff in peace.
Friendly reminder that selfhosted streaming exists (Owncast) or online alternatives like PeerTube.
I'm willing to get this will increase the amount of actual ethnic slurs.
It's their goal. They want to conflate jewishness and israel because they need the world to be antisemitic.
Otherwise people would just leave.
Can we make Twitch a slur for terrible tech companies.
All tech companies eventually enshitify and we would never be able to remember all of them if they all became slurs. Lol
OK, so people can use the definition instead. In fact it might be more useful.
Twitch has become garbage anyway. I’m more on Kick for streams nowadays.
Anyway wasn’t “Zionist” suppose to be a good term for these murderers? Whether they make it a banable word, screw them. Those who defend Israel, their genocidal actions and claim that the land “belongs to them, the colonizers” are Zionists.
Twitch is garbage, so you moved to a platform ran by a gambling company, where rules practically don't exist, and the majority of the userbase is vehemently sexist and racist? That's a level of mental gymnastics I genuinely will never understand
Yeah, totally!
Even technologically Twitch has always been shit. For all the hate YT rightfully deserves, I'm kinda glad they just said "ok we do livestreaming now too" one day and it works so much better. Simply so I never have to use twitch ever again.
The issue with YouTube is, I don't see many people on it to Stream (or I just don't look in the right direction?). I barely to not use Twitch these days, sometimes Kick but that's about it.
Ewww