Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Twitter’s sexist hypocrisy can no longer be ignored

13 replies

KindOfAGeek · 28/12/2018 20:37

(Okay, I'll be frank: Meghan sometimes played too much drama queen for me, and Amnesty undoubtedly under-counted the harassment since they don't mention the T word once, but

  • she should not have been banned, and
  • this is worth a read.

Haven't seen it published elsewhere - apologies if it has)

"Last week, Amnesty International released the findings of their “Troll Patrol Project” — “a joint effort by human rights researchers, technical experts, and thousands of online volunteers to build the world’s largest crowd-sourced dataset of online abuse against women.” The study determined that Twitter is a “toxic” place for women, finding that, in surveying tweets received by 778 female journalists and politicians from the UK and US throughout 2017, 1.1 million “abusive or problematic tweets” were sent over the course of the year, equalling one every 30 seconds on average. “Abusive tweets” were defined as “content that violates Twitter’s own rules,” including tweets that “promote violence against or threaten people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

"Oddly, considering that women are so commonly the targets of “abusive tweets,” the category of “sex” is not included among Twitter’s protected categories. Though Amnesty’s study findings fail to mention this glaring hole in Twitter’s claimed attempts to discourage abuse on their platform, the company’s decision to omit “sex” from this list should demonstrate the insincerity in Twitter’s intentions, and the fact that addressing misogyny is not a priority for the company.

"The Amnesty study goes on to say that examples of abusive tweets “include physical or sexual threats, wishes for the physical harm or death, reference to violent events, behaviour that incites fear or repeated slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone.”

www.feministcurrent.com/2018/12/27/twitters-sexist-hypocrisy-can-no-longer-ignored/

OP posts:
MargueritaPink · 28/12/2018 20:41

I don't use Twitter but by "gender" do they actually mean sex given gender identity is also protected?

KindOfAGeek · 28/12/2018 20:43

do they actually mean sex given gender identity is also protected

If they mean that in theory, it doesn't translate at all in practice.

OP posts:
TheCountryGirl · 28/12/2018 20:43

Twitter is such a poisonous hellhole...the sooner it sinks into oblivion, which it will as something better and more sophisticated is sure to come along, then the happier I think everyone will be.

KindOfAGeek · 28/12/2018 20:47

Twitter is such a poisonous hellhole.

Consider that Facebook is worse in many ways.

The only solution to date: stay off social media -- to my ears that sounds a bit like "woman stay at home if you don't want to be harassed/assaulted"

OP posts:
ToeToToe · 28/12/2018 20:54

I hate that "women, stay off SM" is the option so often given, and indeed followed. I am very careful on SM myself - and never post anything controversial under my own name. But I'm a woman in my 40s - young people can pretty much live their whole social lives on SM, it may not be an option for them (if they want any friends at all - social events are arranged via FB, for example).

But without a doubt, twitter and FB are poisonous to women. We are subjected to the most horrendous rape threats and abuse on there, and nothing is ever done about it. Everything a woman does - from saying Transwomen are not women, to just being a famous woman in the public eye - it all seems to be an invitation for abuse.

KindOfAGeek · 28/12/2018 21:02

Toe

That's my point.

If you want to "toughen up" and learn how to troll, I can point you in the right direction.

If you want to learn how groupthink works, you can earn a PhD from researching any social media site.

But, it's a male dominated industry, and men have more in common with other men than they do with women.

And it's men who are trying to deny women access to a public space.

OP posts:
Germ1360 · 28/12/2018 21:39

Have they defined "problematic" anywhere?

KindOfAGeek · 28/12/2018 21:44

They did.

" “hurtful or hostile content” that doesn’t necessarily meet the threshold for abuse "

But whether they included the "T" word, or convo shifts to "men are entitled to sex so prostitution should be legal" is unclear.

OP posts:
PineappleSunrise · 28/12/2018 23:31

Back in the day, women never admitted to being women on usenet - we posted under neutral names, because if you were openly female you'd end up being bombarded with "wannas" (private messages that usually didn't ask more than "wannafuck?").

Recently I've been thinking that we're likely to need to go back to that. Interestingly, quite a few of the "public" women on usenet were men back then, too. Plus ca change, and all that.

HamiltonCork · 28/12/2018 23:37

Twitter is a sewer.
And how Facebook with all its shady as fuck shenanigans hasn’t be shut down is a mystery.

Writersblock2 · 28/12/2018 23:48

I’m so fed up of social media and the drama that comes from it. I wish here was a practical way of not having to deal with it but still managing to communicate with other women.

RedToothBrush · 29/12/2018 00:28

And how Facebook with all its shady as fuck shenanigans hasn’t be shut down is a mystery.

No its not. Its made people rich and powerful.

I was a man on FB for several years. The difference was noticeable when engaging with strangers.

I just can't be arsed with the hassle of FB now though. More stress than it's worth.

DangermousesSidekick · 29/12/2018 02:20

Makes me grateful for mumsnet: one of very few sites specifically set up for women. It shows how we need public spaces set up separately for women too, because otherwise men take over. They frequently try here as it is.

New posts on this thread. Refresh page