Wow, Twitter.

[conuly]

They've still yet to do anything about their infestation of Neo-Nazis... but apparently they're right on top of banning Jewish users for saying "goy" and "goyim."

Wow.

Shows where their priorities are, doesn't it!

Comments

[quantumcupcakes]

Sounds like they're singing from the same hymn sheet as tumblr - no porn but all the neo-nazi/hate speech you could possible want. What a world we're living in :(

[kengr]

What's funny with tumblr is that two of the "porn" tumblrs I was following only got banned yesterday, and several others are still going strong.

Oh well, I'm using TumblRipper to archive all the images, audio and video from them, so it's merely annoying.

[eva_rosen]

WT-even-F. Though is purely a conversational expression, no level of bigoted or racial idiocy from those companies surprises me anymore. Why are we even using them still? Let them yell their hatred into the void.

[robby]

The neo-Nazis definitely link this word to the most negative of connotations. They cite quotes from Rabbis that would curl your toes.

It's become (regardless of the true meaning) a really loaded word.

[conuly]

Real quotes? Because I find that suspect.

[robby]

Who knows? Probably wildly out of context.

[conuly]

I suppose that individual rabbis can be as bigoted as anybody else, but it's not likely to be terribly mainstream.

[zesty_pinto]

We're stuck back on that "both sides" argument. It's really akin to people who keep getting banned on Facebook for showing posts where they received death threats from others.

Social media deserves to die.

[workday_dreamer]

This is weird and creepy. I've heard similar things seem to get suspend more quickly than straight, white men (that was a little while back, so I might be misremembering the particulars) and I can't quite tell if Twitter is deliberately supporting the alt-right, or if they're just playing nice with the side most likely to send bombs to people they don't like. Which kinda amounts to supporting the alt-right.

[nostalgia]

O_O

[chelseagirl]

WTActualF? I had never heard of "goy" being considered offensive. When I taught a few classes at Yeshiva U. I used to jokingly refer to myself as "the goy in front of the room."

[conuly]

I mean, any term for a group of people can be offensive, but as Jews don't have any sort of meaningful collective power throughout the West it's not a term with any force behind it even if it IS being used offensively.

[elf]

A few years ago, shweta_narayan had a post that explained the "insult" in terms like goy: Let's talk about category structure and oppression!

A[n] albatross is more like a robin than a robin is like an albatross; a queer WOC is more like a cishet white man than a cishet white man is like a queer WOC. Which characters in stories count as "relatable"?

Everyone is expected to relate to a cis straight white anglophone American man. We're all like them, they're just (default, category-central) people after all! But they're not like us. We're the albatrosses, here. How can the poor robins be expected to relate to us? This is why they think it's so ludicrous that they should be expected to read about marginalized characters (who are nothing like them!!) but think it's normal and fine that marginalized people should be expected to read about category-central characters.

Terms like "goyim" or "cis men" or even "white people" - which define an "other" that happens to be part of the default-assumption category-central group - automatically push them out of the central focus. These terms make them not the default, because the default doesn't need a label. The supposed insult isn't in how the word is used or whether it's derogatory; the fact that it implies they might need a label at all is considered insulting.

We don't need to mention "I saw a winged bird" or "I have a human friend." Bird implies wings; friend implies humanity - you only need to mention exceptions to these. Saying, "I spoke to some goyim," some non-Jewish people, implies that people are not innately non-Jewish. It implies that "not Jewish" is not a default trait--that they are not part of the central norm for "people."

None of this explains why Twitter is banning the term; that's because Twitter supports right-wing white supremacists. But the central/default categories thing is why the racists get upset over it; they hate even the implication that their identity is not the assumed default for all humans.

[silveradept]

...I'm not sure how to make a "This is my surprised face" emotional reaction, but that's basically it. I'm so (un)surprised.

[conuly]

I know, it's just shocking, right.

[wembley]

I was raised to not use “goy” and to think of it as an insult, but the issue is of course power! It’s like “cracker” vs the n-word. Ugh, Twitter. (I’m addicted to it, but that isn’t a good thing, and neither is how they’ve handled their Nazi infestation.)

[conuly]

My sense seeing other people use it is that it's not primarily pejorative, though of course any term for a group of people can be.

[dewline]

I'm having trouble deciding between "infestation" and "infiltration" re: Twitter and Nazi-Klansters.

[mme-n-b.livejournal.com]

Aren't everyone's priorities right around there nowadays? I mean, one can't even attend a gay pride parade.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

So you're saying they're not banning anyone for saying 'kike' or whatever the currently-popular hate-word is for Jews? Wow.

'Goy' is a hate-word when it's used as one, and it often is used as one, e.g. "It'll kill your grandmother if you marry a goy."

(A personal note: the word applied to me in that particular sentence - very long ago - was not goy; it was shiksa, which most definitely is a hate-word.)

*shrugs* Groups that use hate-words invariably deny that that's what they are, and present a bunch of bullshit rationalizations to back up their denial. The group to ask whether something is or is not a hate-word is the group that's getting called that.

Maybe Twitter can just cut to the chase and ban ALL name-calling. Yeah right. Anyway, last I heard, Twitter was not a branch of the government, but a private company with the right to make whatever rules they want for use of their site. People who don't like their rules are free to not let the door hit their asses.