Drag queen, porn, groomer, innocent, trans, LGBTQ, police, non-binary, ugly, and Amen are just the first 10 words I found that will sink a post's monetization on X. Designed to be a social media platform, rebranded under Elon Musk to be a free speech site, Twitter (now X) is not done controlling speech.
When posts use these words, ads are not shown in the replies. Only when the words are censored, either with asterisks or numerals replacing letters do the ads reappear under posts with these apparently troubling words.
Let's break it down. Drag queen is likely offensive because many of those who post about drag queens post about what's called Drag Queen Story Hour, an event founded in San Francisco and designed to "queer" early childhood education. When the phenomenon became known in conservative circles, liberals basically said it wasn't happening, then they admitted it was happening, then they decided it's a good thing for men to parade around in women's underclothes and dance provocatively for children. The common consensus in progressive circles was that anyone who disagreed is hateful.
Porn is readily available on X. Porn stars have accounts on the site where extremely explicit acts are shown. But apparently, you can't even say the word, even without any visuals.
James Lindsay likely gets credit for the tumult surrounding the word groomer. After Ron DeSantis passed the Parental Rights in Education Act in Florida, which ensures gender ideology is eradicated from the curriculum, the Biden administration and their Democrat acolytes began to call it the "don't say gay bill," because they falsely claimed that it prevented teachers from saying "gay" in schools. It simply prevented teachers from grooming students with gender ideology and non-age appropriate sex lessons. Lindsay pointed this out, repeatedly and started the “ok groomer” trend. Now you can't say groomer on X and get ad rev.
Innocent? This one is perplexing. Do they simply not want those of us who are engaged in child-safeguarding to not point out that children are innocent? And trans or non-binary, with the amount of recognition that the trans community and activists are looking for, it's surprising that their allies at Twitter would demonetize content that appears alongside that word. What happened to "recognition matters"?
Police is nonsensical, ugly is just confusing. Are people that sensitive? Are other insults also demonetized? We will find out. By far the most shocking is the prohibition on the word Amen.
Amen is a word of prayer. It's a word that brings with it reverence of a higher power. But our culture is so obsessed with the self that we collectively cannot even fathom the concept of there being anyone or any entity that is larger, greater, and more powerful than human beings. Amen is an affront to the self-obsessed religion of the west, and while the algorithms that demonetize posts of prayer may not be "aware" of it, the machine learning that is feeding them would guide those algorithms to those conclusions.
Under the old Twitter regime, led first by founder Jack Dorsey then Parag Agrawal, Twitters users had their suspicions as to what speech was permitted on the platform and what absolutely would be disallowed. Accounts like Meghan Murphy's were banned for saying "yeah, him," in reference to notorious trans agitator Jessica Yaniv. The Babylon Bee pointed out that Dr Rachel Levine is a man, and got their account banned. Jordan Peterson called an actress by the name she was born with, before she underwent a double mastectomy and decided she was a man, and also was banned.
Now the system is different. Instead of outright bans, the platform under Musk's leadership simply shows ads alongside certain content or not. But companies have taken issue with their ads being shows alongside certain types of content.
Of course, this did not happen organically. In fact, the process through which companies complained at X to limit their ad reach based on content was anything but. Companies didn't complain until they were told to by activist entities that seek to limit the speech of conservatives and make it harder to find content that skews from the progressive narrative. The companies who listened are under the false impression that roughly half of the American population, the 72 million who voted for Donald Trump, aren't worth their time or attention.
According to Elon, The ADL, which has attacked me voraciously, contacted companies to "alert" them to the fact that their ads may be appearing alongside content that the ADL objects to. The ADL frames any disagreement with their positions as antisemitic, and companies listened, striking some 60 percent of the ad revenue on the platform.
Musk saw my posts. He's vowed to make changes. I hope he does. I believe he will. We deserve our rights to free speech, and of course to freedom of religion.
