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Twitter’s cancellation of a deal with conservative media company Daily Wire to stream its gender-critical documentary ‘What Is A Woman?’ was due to an employee error, the platform’s CEO Elon Musk stated on Thursday, amid hundreds of angry comments.
“Many people at Twitter made this mistake.” “It is absolutely permissible,” Musk wrote in response to a thread by Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing, alluding to the film’s purported crimes of “misgendering.” Musk went on to say that while he personally prefers to respect people’s pronouns, he does not believe that failure to do so should result in violence or suppression.
While the billionaire did not elaborate on where things went wrong in the decision-making process, he did say that using the wrong pronoun to address someone was “at most rude and certainly breaks no laws.”
After initially agreeing to stream ‘What is a Woman?’ for free for 24 hours to commemorate one year since its premiere and even offering the Daily Wire a customized promotional package tailored to its needs – an agreement Boreing claimed was sealed with a signed agreement – Twitter staff requested to see the film, ostensibly to understand what parts were likely to “trigger” users so that they could better prepare their response.
After seeing the film, Twitter officials allegedly refused to sell the Daily Wire the package it had first provided, pledging to limit the film’s reach and label it “hateful conduct” due to two incidents of “misgendering.” In one scene, a father refers to his 14-year-old female-born child as “her,” while in another, a store owner uses the “wrong” pronoun during an argument with a trans person.
When told that “misgendering” had been deleted from Twitter’s content policy, staff responded that it was still implicitly included under the topic of “abuse and harassment.” The site allegedly offered the Daily Wire the opportunity to cut the objectionable sections from the film, which filmmaker Matt Walsh declined.
Despite Musk’s assertion that the decision was made in error, Boreing noted that Walsh’s attempts to share video of the two scenes were still classified as “hateful conduct.” As of Thursday afternoon, the share buttons on both posts were still disabled. Walsh further claimed that the company removed ‘What Is a Woman?’ from the popular topics list by hand.
Musk’s assertions of free speech absolutism have been called into question in recent weeks, following the revelation that NBC Universal advertising head and World Economic Forum executive Linda Yaccarino would take over as Twitter’s CEO. The platform has also boosted its compliance with government content takedown requests from 50% prior to Musk’s takeover to 80% since his acquisition.
