A platform for misinformation
The vice-president of the European Commission for values and transparency, Vera Jourova, stated in an interview that X is “the platform with the largest ratio of mis- or disinformation posts” and it’s frightening to see just how true this is.
Formerly Twitter, now X, is a social media platform used by many politicians to share their campaigns. However, the amount of freedom given to politicians on the site is alarming, as it appears they are free to spread hate, intolerance and misinformation with little to no repercussions. Recently, the amount of transphobic misinformation and comments by politicians have grown on X as gender-affirming care becomes a more prevalent political topic in the United States.
Politicians partaking in these actions should be banned from the platform because they not only break the rules of X, but they also threaten the well-being of transgender individuals.
“Now that I think about it. As Dr. Dick Levine advocates for ‘gender affirming care’ for minors, has he undergone the #WeenieChop himself? Or is he just pushing this on children?” This is a tweet by United States representative and rightwing politician Marjorie Taylor Greene, addressed to Admiral Rachel L. Levine, U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the highest ranking openly transgender government official.
The tweet, which includes misgendering, dead-naming, namecalling and hostile and hateful behaviour, was deemed to be in violation of X’s hateful conduct policy, but it was declared within public interest to remain accessible, meaning it is still up. Posts like these threaten the well-being of transgender individuals. They encourage transphobia by supporting the harmful mindset that transgender individuals are not deserving of respect, that they are pushing being transgender onto children, and that they want to mutilate children.
Giving the public the idea transgender people want to do these actions encourages violence and hate crimes by creating animosity toward the marginalized group. X knowing that the posts are offensive but not banning the perpetrator, or even taking the post down, is disheartening.
On March 29, Green posted a quoted tweet, in which she expressed the need to stop child transgender surgeries, puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. The tweet she had quoted was by Republican politician Shukri Abdirahman. Abdirahman included a screenshot from a website which said, to be paraphrased, that Minnesota was proposing to require teachers to provide gender affirming care to students. Abdirahman’s response was “Breaking: Minnesota teachers are now to provide professional gender-affirming care for students … without required medical license, without parental consent, without securing informed consent, without conforming to professional standards of care. Protect your children.”
Many of the commenters believed this meant teachers were now able to provide children with an official medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and that teachers were now able to refer students to surgeons who perform gender affirming surgeries.
Going onto the site from the screenshot, it was full of misinformation, distorted stories and lies. Each politician treating the site as though it was truthful was incredibly irresponsible, because their endorsement means their audience will likely believe it.
Some may argue that Elon Musk says X is a place of free speech, but free speech has limitations when it comes to hate speech, according to both the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the American Constitution. And free speech has never meant freedom from consequences, which is why that argument does not stand.