Twitter swaps coding terms including master, slave and blacklist for more inclusive language

Twitter says it is changing some coding terms in favour of more inclusive language
Reuters / Dado Ruvic

Twitter has become the latest company to reveal it will replace coding terms such as "slave" and "master" for more inclusive terminology.

The social media giant detailed the changes in a Twitter thread from its engineering division that stressed "words matter".

It stated that the non-inclusive terms, which have been part of programming codes that originated decades ago, were outdated and not reflective of the company's values.

According to the proposed changes "whitelist" will become "allowlist" and "blacklist" will be replaced with "denylist".

Gendered terms will also be changed with "man hours" becoming "person hours, engineer hours" and "Grandfathered" changing to "legacy status".

"Inclusive language plays a critical role in fostering an environment where everyone belongs," said Twitter's engineering division.

"At Twitter, the language we have been using in our code does not reflect our values as a company or represent the people we serve. We want to change that. #WordsMatter."

US bank JP Morgan, software developer Github, LinkedIn divisions and Google Chromium are among the major corporations which are also making moves to drop what they describe as non-inclusive coding terms.

According to BBC News replacing the terms could cost companies millions and the changes could take months.

Twitter's engineering division explained the changes will involve migrating source code, updating documentation across internal resources and the implementation of a browser extension to help it's teams identify words in documents and web pages, and suggest alternative inclusive words.

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The changes come as the death of George Floyd prompted protests around the world against police brutality and racism.

But for Twitter the move towards using more inclusive terminology in its coding started when a black programmer, Regynald Augustin, raised the issue in January, months before Black Lives Matter protests swept across the US.

Last year he received an email about an engineering discussion to restart a secondary process which used the wording "automatic slave rekick".

Mr Augustin said on Twitter: "Seeing it was infuriating. I’ve been used to seeing the word 'slave' throughout my CS education but this was different."

The programmer worked with fellow colleague Kevin Oliver to see how they could make change the terminology that was being used.

"Our goal here is to apply this language to all of eng, and eventually adopt inclusive language across Twitter," said Mr Augustin.

"I know this is a small step, but it’s one that keeps us on the path to improving the industry."

Twitter is proposing to replace the "master/slavery" coding term with "leader/follower, primary/replica, primary/standby".

Twitter's engineering division added: "Words matter in our meetings, our conversations, and the documents we write.

"We know there’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re committed to doing our part."

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