Twitter has phased out insensitive programming terms that reference slavery after a petition by employees. According to a report from CNET, engineers successfully convinced Twitter to nix the terms 'master' and 'slave' which are commonly used in programming language to describe the interaction between different processes. The policy shift and subsequent call to change insensitive language was prompted by an email sent to employees titled, 'automatic slave rekick.' That includes changing from 'man hours' to 'person hours,' instead of 'blacklist' using the word 'denylist,' and changing 'grandfathered' to 'legacy status.' In a tweet, the company endorsed the engineers' efforts and said it had revised language in its code and documents as a result.

Source: Daily Mail July 02, 2020 23:07 UTC