Twitter - I should never have looked

[AndStand]

There have been so many links to Twitter that I couldn't fully read because I didn't have an account that I bit the bullet and made an account.

I'm regretting it. The amount of hate on there has quite upset me and I think I'm a reasonably strong woman.
The vitriol against women from TRA has left me speechless and a bit scared to be honest.

Have I been living in a bubble?

Find decent people to follow and you'll be shown better stuff. The algorithms are showing you what they think will draw your attention.

But yeah, this is what people find it hard to believe. The blatant misogyny. Even if half of it is just teens internet shitposting it's still abhorrent.

There's racist, Islamophobic, homophobic disgusting stuff on there too. But also funny and wise stuff.

Agreed OP. I often back away from twitter threads as I feel grubby having been exposed to so much vitriol and abuse of women by so many trans extremists (and others).
I am in awe of all the courageous women and men who do so much to challenge this but am protective of myself and use my account just to view. I never comment, I never like, I just read

Twitter is its own bubble really, I don’t believe half of what’s on there is representative of the real world

i follow many feminist accounts and my timeline is a delightful mix of women standing up for women

Twitter is an absolute cesspool

Twitter is OK with death and rape threats against women but will permanently ban you for stating that a trans woman is genetically male. So it's not surprising it's full of hate against women.

I cannot understand why anyone bothers to look at twatter and mebook
Also cannot understand how anyone can get upset by anything on them

Twitter is hugely influential not because it’s used by a lot of ppl but because the ppl who do use it - journalists, politicians, charity CEOS, ‘celebrities’ Etc - are generally the ppl with influence. Companies & the media respond to what’s said on twitter because it’s easier than going out & consulting properly, ppl use twitter to organise pile ons because it’s also correspondingly easier than organising any other type of campaign. companies give into twitter vitriol very quickly because it’s easy & public - and so it goes round & round

It’s horrible, OP. The problem is it drives the discourse. Very few people actually agree with the extreme positions you find there, but governments and institutions act like they do.

It's a lazy swamp of misogyny. I came off it years ago and never looked back.

Yes. It's actively traumatising seeing it and reading the absolute vileness, ugliness and violence of what this particular political view point espouses against females on twitter, and to realise that to the powers that be, it is absolutely fine to behave like that towards females. (But the females may not even state reality without punishment.)

Yes, it's sickening. Distressing. I often think of that old trope about look in to the pit of dark long enough and it starts looking back.

But that was the point I really woke up and realised, I cannot sit around in a nice bubble and hope that other women will do the work for me. Otherwise there's going to come a time when females really are fucked under law, because not enough of them were willing to put in the time, effort and unpleasant dirty work to stand up to it. And this was the plan; that this happens quietly, under the radar, and it's all fixed before enough women get angry enough to have a political impact. This is why the UK makes the woke world so angry: the women here did not sit down, shut up and look the other way.

And yes, this has buggered with my mental and physical health at times, the stress and emotional toll is huge. But there's too much at stake for me to walk away.

As I stated, I joined so I could see a full conversation which I couldn't do before.
If you can't understand why anyone would get upset by what's written there then fair enough, but you come across as dismissive that anyone else could be.
I find a lot of it shocking and hateful, therefore a bit upsetting. Because I couldn't imagine me ever writing some of the stuff like I've read. But then I consider myself a reasonably nice average person. It's upsetting to think there's a lot of people out there harbouring such awful things in their minds.

Twitter is a trash pile. Feeds are controlled by algorithms and their job (or the job of the behavioural scientists behind them) is to cause a dopamine release to keep you clicking and scrolling.

People misunderstand dopamine as a "happy" chemical, but it's actually a chemical that rewards you in order to guide your attention. It helps you pay attention to things you should be paying attention to, so things that are pleasurable (sex, food, social interaction) and things that are dangerous (predators, physical dangers, poisons). The parts of our brain that react to dopamine don't know that we're sitting on a comfy couch with absolutely no danger around.

The second best emotion to keep you clicking is pleasure/happiness. This is why there are so many cat videos on the internet.

In first place is anger. This explains why everything on the internet that is not cat videos has a 90% probability of being completely shit.

The best thing you can do online is strictly limit your time in political arenas and use platforms that allow you to curate your experience heavily.

Someone else noted that politicians, CEOs etc. spend time on Twitter, and while I think this is true, they're repeatedly being hit with reality around election time and during earnings calls. They need to learn to ignore Twitter for sure, but I see that as one of the inevitable teething issues that come along with new technologies, and temporary.

It's easy to say "why would you even look" or "I don't care about twitter" but the problem is, twitter and the opinions presented there are very influential in politics and discourse.

“Women have very little idea how much men hate them.” - Germaine Greer

For me, the trans movement was what really brought home to me how much vile misogyny is lurking in the world. Well, that and grooming gangs. I guess I had been living in a bubble but most women do if we’re lucky. It is upsetting when the bubble bursts. And “Twitter isn’t representative” is only somewhat comforting. Plenty of misogyny to go round, on and off Twitter.

I have noticed though that the pushback is a lot greater now. Lots of angry beards tweeting their hot takes about Macy and Bette have been getting ratioed, including by many women in the US. And American men who venture onto threads started by Brits to lecture them are being laughed at. That’s new. It used to be that lots of other beards would join the pile on and the victim would eventually offer a grovelling recantation. Not any more.

Whereas I cannot understand why anyone makes up supposedly amusing misspellings of social media that dads were doing about 15 years ago

Twitter is an education. It shows you what people really think.
Was it Germaine Greer who said we don't know how much men hate women? Well, it's all on Twitter for everyone to see. All the hidden, inner thoughts.

Agree. Twitter opened my eyes, and toughened me up.

I deactivated my account after the JKR furore a couple of years ago. I was surprised by how much it upset me. People I thought were reasonably nice and sensible going absolutely batshit with vitriol for her for saying all the things I believed and still believe. I genuinely felt my adrenaline going as I was reading some tweets. I think they were so vile because a philanthropist with all the "right opinions" who'd created a world they loved was disagreeing on something they felt so important, and that must have felt very threatening. And I suppose the same was true for me when I deactivated - it's much harder to see people you thought were decent behaving so horribly than it is people you never classed as "your group" anyway.

Twitter is run by misogynistic men.
It promotes the views of those men. Just like Reddit.

It's hard. At one point I got my blood pressure checked during my last episode on twitter because I felt so ill. I've gone back on with a very careful account, I don't follow anyone who tweets on this issue and I barely like and never tweet (ok once). That way I'm trying to sidestep the algorithm - so I get to read what the other side say and I don't get blocked. And it's pretty depressing.

The trick is to follow some different accounts, try some museum, art and science pages;

twitter.com/womensart1
twitter.com/Rainmaker1973
twitter.com/nasa
twitter.com/NHM_London

Thanks, I already follow NASA and some archaeology accounts. I'll check the ones you suggest.

I agree @Artichokeleaves . I think we shouldn’t just look away.

I do like Twitter for seeing different perspectives on the news, news items that we don’t see on TV (the BBC is highly selective in what it shows us), interests that I have like science and art accounts), and commentary from some very well-informed and thoughtful people. Plus some very funny accounts (James Blunt!).

I made an account just to follow GC people with a throwaway email address and not using my real name. I don’t follow anyone I work with nor do I ever tweet but I keep being suggested people I know (who don’t tweet about anything to do with this). They aren’t big accounts either. I am a bit unnerved tbh.