Twitter "What Is A Woman" Censorship Controversy

Overview

Twitter "What Is A Woman" Censorship Controversy refers to Twitter's decision to temporarily restrict access to Matt Walsh and The Daily Wire's controversial documentary What Is A Woman. Jeremy Boering, the co-founder and co-CEO of The Daily Wire, shared news about Elon Musk's Twitter canceling a deal to premier the film on the platform in early June. Additionally, Twitter also began to censor the documentary from the platform on account of the film violating Twitter's rules against hateful conduct. Following the fallout from the initial events, Twitter's Head of Trust and Safety Ella G. Irwin resigned from her position, and the film was shared by Musk with no content warnings or censorship flags on June 2nd, 2023.

Background

On March 24th, 2022, Matt Walsh's YouTube^[1] account posted a trailer for the documentary film What Is A Woman. The video gathered over 1.8 million views in a year (seen below).

On June 1st, 2023, The Daily Wire co-founder @JeremyDBoreing posted a thread of tweets^[2] detailing a series of events in which Twitter purportedly agreed to distribute the film What Is A Woman, before deciding not to go forward with the deal. Twitter also relayed to Boreing that the documentary would be censored if shared on the platform and unable to be shown to both followers and non-followers (seen below). The initial tweet gathered over 35,000 likes in a day.

On June 1st, 2023, Matt Walsh tweeted^[3] "one of the scenes" from What Is A Woman that Twitter qualified as hate speech and received a "sensitive content" banner on this tweet. The tweet gathered over 23,000 likes in a day (seen below).

The content warning banner was then subsequently removed shortly after (seen below).

Developments

On June 1st, 2023, Elon Musk's official Twitter^[4] account responded to @JeremyDBoreing's tweets by saying that "this was a mistake by many people at Twitter. It is definitely allowed." Musk went on to add that he personally uses people's correct pronouns as a matter of having "good manners." The post gathered over 89,000 likes in a day (seen below, left). Shortly after, @JeremyDBoreing responded^[5] to Musk in a tweet that gathered over 16,000 likes in a day (seen below, right).

On June 1st, The Daily Wire's Twitter account then uploaded What Is A Woman in its entirety (seen below).^[6]

It’s the movie they really don’t want you to see: #WhatIsAWoman?Watch the explosive documentary starring @MattWalshBlog FREE on Twitter for 24 hrs. pic.twitter.com/qDi7thCNid

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) June 2, 2023

Also on June 1st, 2023, Twitter^[7] user @robbystarbuck posted a series of tweets detailing the censorship blocks placed on Matt Walsh's clips from the film and The Daily Wire upload of the entire movie (seen below, left). Roughly 10 minutes later, Musk then responded to @robbystarbuck saying that the film will only be allowed to be shown to followers of The Daily Wire's account (seen below, right).^[8]

News about Twitter's Head of Trust and Safety Ella G. Irwin's resignation began to spread soon after the aforementioned events took place.^[9]

On June 2nd, 2023, all censorship blocks on the video were lifted, with Elon Musk also notably retweeting the film himself. Musk's retweet^[10] gathered over 100,000 likes in a day, eventually bringing the video's total viewership to over 11 million in a day (seen below).

Online Reactions

Due to the controversial nature of What Is A Woman, the documentary's appearance on Twitter and the viral debate surrounding its censorship resulted in numerous reactions from Twitter users in early June 2023. For example, on June 1st, 2023, Twitter user @halomancer1 posted several tweets from both Matt Walsh and Elon Musk regarding the film being censored and uploaded to the platform, ultimately mocking Walsh's "big plan" tweet and receiving nearly 28,000 likes and 1,300 retweets in 15 hours (seen below).

lmfao i guess this was his "big plan" pic.twitter.com/CHmZ5N20NP

— jenny_tightpants🪑 (@halomancer1) June 2, 2023

Also on June 1st, Twitter user @JUNlPER posted a series of notable conservatives reacting to the censorship controversy on the site, poking fun at them and accumulating over 32,600 likes and 1,100 retweets in roughly 24 hours (shown below).

mods?? mods????? pic.twitter.com/Nez25Hhf36

— pudding person (@JUNlPER) June 1, 2023

Search Interest

External References