Twitter drops 'master', 'slave' and 'blacklist'

This is fantastic!

On Thursday, Twitter’s engineering division tweeted out a set of words that it wants “to move away from using in favour of more inclusive language”. The list includes replacing “whitelist” with “allowlist” and “master/slave” with “leader/follower”.

Last month, GitHub, the world’s biggest site for software developers, said it was working on changing the term ‘master’ from its coding language. The firm, owned by Microsoft, is used by 50 million developers to store and update its coding projects.

Google’s Chromium web browser project and Android operating system have both encouraged developers to avoid using the terms “blacklist” and “whitelist”.

Plenty of alternatives we can use

• Parent/child
• Source/clone
• Original/copy
• Leader/follower
• Allowed/disallowed
• etc

Well done Twitter, GH, Google, Microsoft and all the other companies doing this!