#WomenBoycottTwitter was on the 13th of October. Many women i know, and a fair few men, stayed off twitter, to protest against (non transparent rules) that suspend those who protest against violence, and spare those who do, or threaten to do violence.
It is almost as though the suspension of Rose McGowan, from posting, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Women across the board have complained about rape threats, murder, personal vilification, morphed images floating around – as ‘humorous’ memes. And nothing has happened. Personally i didn’t expect too much of the boycott – but, i joined in out of solidarity, and because i believe that extremely violent ideologies are using the rules of free speech against the rest of us. And, most of us, because we believe in free speech, are nudging to make space for calls for hatred and ‘otherisation’ – i have seen tweets to a jewish person talking about the efficacy of gas chambers. and, i have seen tweets to black people in words that will make you cringe. I have heard slurs about dalits, and women. Muslims, and Hindus. About pretty much every grouping you can think about. Vitriolic vileness. Stuff that is so bad, that Microsoft shut down it’s AI chat bot, which went from relative innocence, to being a hard core bigot in a span of 15 hours.
But nothing has happened to shut down hate at that level. But, voices like you and I – people who neither say nor do violence – can be shut down, because the haters move in packs, and we walk alone. And, ‘we’ is not ideology specific.
Yesterday, we walked together. Again it was not, for me, based on ideology. It is based on showing my acute displeasure to corporates who want me as consumer, but dont’ protect my rights.
In the aftermath of #WomenBoycottTwitter, @jack (Jack Dorsey, who is CEO, and cofounder of twitter, had this to say (or tweet)
1/ We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day. We’ve been working to counteract this for the past 2 years.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
2/ We prioritized this in 2016. We updated our policies and increased the size of our teams. It wasn’t enough.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
3/ In 2017 we made it our top priority and made a lot of progress.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
4/ Today we saw voices silencing themselves and voices speaking out because we’re *still* not doing enough.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
5/ We’ve been working intensely over the past few months and focused today on making some critical decisions.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
6/ We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
7/ New rules around: unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
8/ These changes will start rolling out in the next few weeks. More to share next week.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
This is, what, i call a good beginning.
i oppose government censorship, in any shape and form, and there is no compromise on that.
At the same time, i have issues with private platforms that run sans an code of conduct. To give you a real life analogy – if you had private clubs where the law didn’t apply – and you could snort coke, have sex with minors, and beat up women, gays, and minorities. It may be fun to some, but most of us will be threatened by it. I am glad that Twitter has taken cognisance of this. Hope that other platforms follow.