Twitter is preparing to make the social network even more inclusive. The next goal of the company — adjustment of potentially offensive terms that uses engineering unit. Under the eye were words like “master” (master), slave (slave), “whitelist” (white list) and “blacklist” (blacklist).
It is important to mention, that the claims of the term appeared early in the century. In 2004, the monitoring group Global Language Monitor has named a bunch of master/slave the most politically incorrect term of the year. This occurred after the County of Los Angeles demanded that manufacturers, suppliers and contractors stop using the words in respect of computer equipment, stating that they are unacceptable and insulting.
Pushed Twitter to radically change the two engineers Reginald Augustine and Kevin Oliver. Together, they contributed to the approval of the managers of social work in addressing the problems in the Department and expanding it to the terms related to discrimination based on sex, age and disability.
Although formally the company began the process of renaming the terms in January 2020, the recent protests against racism in the United States after the death of George Floyd reinforced the desire of developers to be more inclusive.
All that has happened recently, only helped the realization very quickly spread throughout the company — says Augustine.
Dictionary of synonyms
The elimination of terms that are actively used in the documentation of everyday speech, the program code and configuration files — the ultimate work complex. The purpose of Twitter is to complete your engineering project by the end of 2021 and to share its details with those who are trying to make similar changes.
Our code should reflect the people we serve, — said Oliver in an interview with CNET.
According to the engineer, team Twitter working to change terms related to race, gender and abilities, and company leaders fully support them. Some of the recommended substitutions are as follows:
whitelist (white list) becomes allowlist (allow list); blacklist (blacklist) — denylist (ban list); Master/slave (master / slave) — leader/follower (leader/follower), primary/replica (master/replica) or primary/standby (primary/backup); generic pronouns (for example, guys or boys) — folks (guys), people (people, people), you all or y'all (all you people); generic pronouns (e.g., he and his; he, or it) — they (they are) or their (them); man hours (man-hours) person — hours and engineer hours.
In a letter to employees, chief engineer of Twitter Michael Montano wrote that inclusive language aims to treat all people with respect, dignity and impartiality.
It was created in order to collect the sunex in the group and no one is excluded, and it is important to create conditions in which all feel welcome, he said.
Twitter is not alone in his impulses. The Google Chrome team came to a similar decision and begin to get rid of the concepts, hinting at racism. The developers will be removed from your browser terms like “blacklist” and “whitelist”. Against the background of recent protests against racism in the United States after the death of George Floyd Google Chrome changed the code and replaced the above words in more inclusive terms a “blocklist” and a permission list “allowlist”. In total, the developers will replace more than two thousand references to the term “black list” once the updated code is reviewed and adopted.
