Twitter was once an exceptional website because it allowed minorities not just a place to speak, but a place to speak *without concern for feelings of oppressors*. We joke that “you could tell a king to go fuck himself” but that was an invaluable thing. Marginalized groups are so often in offline life levied with expectations of exceptional civility and kindness to people who mistreat us day in and day out. Twitter was a space where we could say “actually no, pound sand you bigot” and flip the conversation to focus on systems of oppression being perpetuated.
Black twitter. Gay twitter. Trans twitter. We loved these spaces we created where we could finally speak our minds without facing serious material consequences. We had the ability to punch up every day on there. A vital ability for the advancement of human civilizations.
In the late 2010s conservative groups co-opted the idea of unfettered “rudeness”. The Trump campaign ran on “speak your mind” but for racists. Angry bigots who felt social progress had gone too far, in increasing numbers, figured out they could also use twitter as an outlet for their rhetoric. They began using the website to bully people who are hurting instead of lashing out at perpetrators of oppression. Eventually a meme culture grew around taking delight in such a thing. Confrontation on Twitter increased as both of these diametrically opposed groups grew. In the wake of things coming to blows, liberal and centrist fence-watchers offered the unhelpful advice of “hate is hate”, burying the core issue which was our society’s inability to platform its most vulnerable members and how twitter had filled that void, but was beginning to lose its ability to do so.
In some sense Twitter peaked in 2020 when videos posted their allowed us to see a side of the George Floyd protests that was not being seen on cable and network news media. Cable and news outlets were taking videos from afar, which had the effect of just making things look scary, and failed to capture what exactly was actually happening between police and protestors/rioters. We’d see violence but who struck first? It was assumed the Otherized rioters initiated things by viewers of cable and network news. But this wasn’t true.
It was game changing to see footage from the ground, footage captured of police inciting riots, of police beating random New Yorkers, of police running after peaceful protestors in many areas. Cable news got their footage from afar, which had the effect of just making everything look scary and distant, rather than capturing the nature of what was actually occurring. This was game changing and the state was not happy about it.
Twitter also had the chance in 2021 to purge its website of fascists but did not because the algorithm they developed, it felt, would have deleted “too many republicans’ accounts”. This was one of the first signs that those running the company had terminal American centrist brain, it fell hook line and sinker for the idea that good politics comes from long discussions between republicans and democrats, rather than from fighting uncompromisingly against systems of oppression.
It was clear by 2021 that what Twitter *did* prioritize was not protecting marginalized voices, but sanitizing its own image in the wake of growing civil unrest it feared the US would blame on it. Twitter approached this via a blunt force approach: just amp on bans and suspensions for generalized insults. This seemingly neutral choice had the effect of amplifying conservative advantages on the website, because bigoted dogwhistles went untouched by the new policy and now could be spoken without someone telling you to shut the fuck up.
Twitter to the end of Jack’s run only countered bigots through bans on explicit hate speech. And conservatives, with their ever bottomless appetite for privilege, said that even this was a suppression of their free speech. Eventually Elon Musk bought the company, legalized explicit transphobia, and the rest is history.
The website we loved is dead, and frankly, everyone who said the problem with the website was rudeness in general missed the entire fucking point. Twitter was great because it challenged your idea of a “rude minority” and gave that person a voice you couldn’t just ignore. Twitter died when it allowed the rude bigot to drown that voice out.
annaxmalina
pixelskylines
jacobvanloon
kianamaiart
2087
jbbartram-illu
yousharknotpass
