The social media outlet Twitter has this weekend updated their policies to try to exclude 'adult content' from the site, and in doing so have blocked content from the LGBT+ community, including search results for the term bisexual, bisexuality, gay, and transsexual.
Twitter issued a blog post on 3 November confirming these changes.
'Online behaviour continues to evolve and change, and at Twitter, we have to ensure that those changes are reflected in our rules in ways that's easy to adhere to and understand. Today, we're publishing a new version of the Twitter Rules to clarify our policies and how we enforce them. While the fundamentals of our policies and our approach have not changed, this updated version presents our rules with more details and examples.'
Twitter included a small list of updated areas, including abusive behaviour, self-harm, spam, and adult content.
Whilst these changes aim to crack down on online abuse, members of the LGBT+ community have already found that numerous pieces of content have been removed, including images with the hashtag bisexual, and videos with the hashtag gay.
Where there can at times be adult content with many of these hashtags, the majority of posts using them do not contain offensive materials, and as such, Twitter is being called out for LGBT+ erasure, and Bi erasure in particular.
Whilst there are no image, video, or news results for #Bisexual, #Bisexuality, and #Transsexual, only some aspects of other LGBT+ hashtags have been blocked, such as images for #Gay.
Despite these changes in rules to try to remove 'adult content', Twitter if still filled with pornographic images and videos, with the only content that appears to be blocked so far being unrelated to the areas in which Twitter has said that it wants to police.
Many bisexual users on Twitter have expressed their concerns over this development. With bisexuality having a history of being overlooked in the past the removal of bisexual content is very concerning, as is the possible conflation of bisexuality being linked to promiscuity and increased sexual activity.
Twitter has yet to reverse these changes, or comment on the removal of LGBT+ content.
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