LinkedIn Removes Hate Speech Protections for Transgender Individuals ⇥ opentermsarchive.org

Matti Schneider, documenting this for Open Terms Archive:

LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited conduct. While “content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action” is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore.

Via Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

This follows the now-familiar playbook we’ve seen from Meta, YouTube, and others. Meta rewrote its policies in January to allow content calling LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” and portraying trans identities as “abnormal.” YouTube quietly scrubbed “gender identity” from its hate speech policies, then had the audacity to call it “regular copy edits.” Now LinkedIn is doing the same cowardly dance.

Any one of these platform changes is dispiriting and upsetting; that it is part of a pattern to, I guess, avoid scrutiny from a government demanding subservience is pretty obvious. But there is something about it being LinkedIn — the lukewarm social network for middle management to broadcast their “work” — that makes it a specific kind of evil. Now professional connections can harass people for who they are. Appalling.

Also, worth a reminder that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and profile information can be integrated into Microsoft 365.