Sorry but if you're not a member of the tribe, you can't possibly interpret the tribe's book. (said in jest to point out the problematic response)

Criticizing a religion is not the same thing as dehumanizing its followers.

Dehumanization is a defense mechanism which helps us avoid feeling the pain of realizing that humans sometimes do (subjectively) abhorrent things. It's seductive to define such people outside the bounds of humanity as it allows us to excuse treating them poorly. It is nearly always a mistake to do so, because people are, in fact, people.

This is the important point everyone seems to be missing. If you look at the example tweets they all have some aspect of making the [Religious Group] out to be less than human: rats, virus, maggots, etc.

People can still freely express their distaste for any and all religion on twitter so long as they don’t dehumanize the people who follow that religion.

Application will be different from stated intent. How much you want to bet ?

haven't we all seen this in practice long enough now to know how this little routine goes?

This kind of attitude with respect to rules and regulations drives me nuts. Guess what? Every time you have a human applying a rule you’re going to get results that aren’t entirely consistent. Have you ever managed a team and given the exact same task with the exact same instructions to two people? Did you get the exact same work product in return? I very much doubt it.

Rules & regulations should be written, evaluated, and revised the same way code is. Code doesn’t always run as we intended but we (usually) don’t crucify the developer. We learn from the misunderstanding, fix it, and then re-evaluate when the next inevitable misunderstanding comes up. We get feedback and we iterate. That’s exactly what Twitter is doing. Their first policy didn’t work out as planned and this is their next iteration based on the feedback they received on policy v1.0.0

And will Twitter update this policy yet again once they’ve had time to work out some of the kinks? You can bet on it.

> Criticizing a religion is not the same thing as dehumanizing its followers.

That is all in a matter of perspective. To you it might not be.

> What if someone's holy book contains text that dehumanizes people on the basis of religion?

Then they probably aren't allowed to tweet their holy book.

What if, as part of a developing story, a journalist quotes a government official making such statements?

Is it dehumanizing to report that someone else made a dehumanizing statement without endorsing the statement? I don't think so.

You are essentially asking “will Twitter make use/mention distinctions in enforcing this policy”. While it is of course impossible to state for certain in advance, I don't see any particular reason to believe they would either be disinclined to or incapable of doing so.

My guess is it will depend on whether or not the journalist is considered part of the mainstream media.

I guess you can't post those quotes on twitter then.

Bingo. In that case you have to pick a winner and loser. Then you suppress the loser and promote the winner.

Which is the whole point.

These issues of free speech have been around for a very long time, especially with regards to religious speech, which is at the bedrock of free speech, and the Western liberal tradition espouses free speech principles not because it didn't realize someone might get offended, but because it's better than the option of having powerful people/institutions pick winners and losers and decide what is acceptable to say.

Under current rules, if enforced across the board, a modern Martin Luther's 95 tweet stream would be banned because it hurt someone's feelings or criticized their religion. Exposes of Jehovah's Witnesses would be banned. Atheist tracts would be banned. The whole system is unworkable, which is why it wont work -- it wont be enforced across the board. What will happen is that Twitter will adopt de-facto 'protected religions' that cannot be criticized -- say Islam -- and then it will pick the losers -- say Christianity.

No. It's only if it dehumanizes the other. Criticism of the thoughts, ideas, practices are perfectly fine. Dehumanizing the practicers of any particular religion is what's not fine.

You're over-reacting to what the linked post from twitter actually says.

Define "de-humanizing". If you look at how previous twitter anti-dehumanizing policies were enforced, this was used to ban NPC memes -- which were not memes against a person but against ideas. It was used to ban people who said things like "men can't get pregnant" -- which is an idea/belief.

I really can't follow you. I spent a few minutes googling and it looks like 1) Twitter punishes 'dehumanizing tweets' 2) One author on kotaku argued that the NPC meme could be considered 'dehumanizing' 3 ???

The ban on 'dehumanization' was in response to NPC memes. It was introduced in mid October 2018 after the NPC memes became popular. They banned over 1500 accounts -- for a while they were banning every account with a NPC face in the avatar. Recall that the NPC meme originates from the (joke) that some people are robotic in their thinking, and the NPC memes are faces running a program. As this was not a violation of any twitter rules, twitter made up a rule as an excuse to block these memes.

But if you think about it, the NPC memes were not arguing that some specific individual was not human, but rather than certain types of reasoning was robotic -- e.g. atavistic, primitive, and automatic. So this was an idea that was being blocked.

Going back to religion, the whole point of religious arguments is that they offend people and challenge the core of their identity. So of course this is going to be used as a weapon against religious views. Especially if your religion includes beliefs that some people are followers of false prophets, children of the devil, etc. Religion is used in many ways as a dividing line over who is favored and who is not.