Free speech union want Elon Musk to restore gender critical accounts to twitter - But would this actual help women's rights or just bog posters down in a rabbit hole

[IwantToRetire]

Dear Elon Musk

We are writing to urge you to restore the Twitter accounts of all the people who’ve been permanently banned for expressing gender critical beliefs, i.e., that sex is biological and immutable and not a social construct. We applaud your ambition to turn Twitter into a free speech platform, where a broad range of views can be discussed and debated in the digital town square, and welcome your reinstatement of numerous accounts, including that of the Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy. In light of this, there can be no justification for continuing to censor gender critical voices. It is time for Twitter to welcome back gender critical commentators like women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen (@thePosieParker), comedy writer Graham Linehan (@glinner), intersex advocate Claire Graham (@MRKHvoice), barrister Dennis Kavanagh (@jebadoo2), journalist Miranda Yardley (@terrorizerMIR) and philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith (@aytchellesse). ...

We ask you to restore all the accounts that have been banned because they fall foul of Twitter’s content moderation policy that wrongly characterises the expression of gender critical beliefs as ‘hateful’. We have compiled a list of accounts banned for this reason and are happy to share them with you if you contact us on [email protected].

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Personally I have never understood the value of twitter. It seems to become an end in itself, rather than a useful medium to interact with others.

And in fact is one of the least used social media platforms ie in 14th position. Facebook has 5 times as many users. images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b79011d266c077298791201/27a8d59c-b5c7-4973-a0ab-98e6ba3c8637/World%27s+Most-Used+Social+Media+Platforms+October+2022+DataReportal?format=1000w

Although these is no doubt that MSM, which fails to actually investigate news, loves to trawl through and report as though of signifigance to everyone, that there is a twitter spat. A bit like a local reporter hanging out is a seedly part of town and then reporting as news, some drunken brawl at run down bar.

Have never understood why women's campaign groups think posting on twitter is good outreach.

I get the free speech element, but in the long term is this where we should be focusing our energy. Or should we be knocking on the gates of more signifigant public forums to platform our voice.

Facebook has more users, but it is a very different design. People are posting under their real names with their faces visible, which has a stifling effect. Secondly, facebook lends itself to creating hundreds of thousands of little enclaves with zero overlap. I don't really post about women's rights on facebook, but if I did, only about 15 people would see it, and they're all people I know in real-life. I could just email them directly.

I've found twitter really good for raising money for GC causes.... so yes I'd like to be back on the twit

also its fucking OUTRAGEOUS that we are being banned for saying men are not women and cannot ever be and that some have severe mental health conditions.... also twitter is missing my cat and art pics SO THERE

I think people should avoid Twitter, but OTOH I do think the speech element is important to maintain on principle.

I think twitter is far more of a small echo chamber. It only has power when and if MSM amplifies messages. And some users seem to get fixated with getting noticed.

I think that in terms of shared information about women's activities and women's groups facebook is more useful. I try and follow as many women's groups, campaigns as possible. This then allows you to challenge statements made and I have had luck with getting other followers to see that there is an issue of women's sex based rights.

Like WPUK busily promoting the book of one of their directors, but not asking why she and other members of WAFE are not making a public statement about women only services. Neither has Rape Crisis. And that the danger in refuges isn't what MP thinks, but that a whole generation of women have grown up in a TRA culture and are happily not using th EA to implement women only services which the Government has only recently confirmed is a fact.

I'm not saying facebook would be the route to turn back the tider of Gender ID. That is only going to happen by women actively engaging at a local level with women service providers, and when needed give support to groups who are trying to use the threat of a funding cut to stop women's groups being women's groups.

But judging by the chart I linked to looks like there are other platforms have a huge reach.

I just find it strange that some women seem to think twitter if such a useful medium. I wonder if any research has been done about the breakdown of users, ie there's lots of comments about facebook mainly being older people and so on.

Have just found some research which seems to imply that women are the majority of social media platforms, particularly facebook and they aren't in the older age group!

Only twitter has a 50/50 split of male/female. And only LinkedIn has a majority of male users.

khoros.com/resources/social-media-demographics-guide

I watched Posie and Meghan M on Meghan’s podcast the other day and got the impression that Musk is planning some sort of amnesty and reinstating all banned accounts?

Meghan said she got her account back early thanks to Joe Rogan who contacted Elon Musk to request it.

I do agree that Twitter can be a useless time suck but at least all those who have had an enforced break have got some healthy habits during their time off (both KJK and MM said they’d had to start podcasting/YouTubing/Instagramming etc to build a new audience due to the Twitter bans).

m.youtube.com/watch?v=fiphNTbZDTA

the general amnesty will also re-admit a flood of people who were banned for good reasons, who will far outnumber the reasonable GC voices who were banned unjustly. it will be a mess.
lots of active tweeters I know are migrating to other platforms and intend to be gone before it happens.

it’ll be a process that will result in accounts being banned under a different set/new set of rules and will take a while to pan out to it’s eventual conclusion, definitely.

But all social media loses favour eventually and younger people tend towards TikTok/Snapchat/Instagram/Discord anyway.

I think Facebook is utterly useless for GC outreach. Nobody under 30 uses it, for a start. Also as a PP said you can't be a anonymous and I don't really want my great aunt etc seeing all the trans stuff as it would upset them and they wouldn't understand.

As PP said they are different platforms for different purposes and different audiences. There are problems with both,

But no, not hard to understand why campaigners want to be able to make the point that only adult females are women on a communication channel.

I think there is a great deal of benefit in using platforms such as twitter over facebook.

I would never use facebook to participate in these discussions. Because I have had to mute friends who become focused on one topic, whatever it is, and that is the close to the only thing they post. Facebook still has a different usage because it is personal. It also is so intertwined with Instagram etc. and interacts with search algorithms etc.

Twitter and twitter like platforms allow the speedy dissemination of news and I don’t know many people who use Twitter to keep up with family for instance.

And the use of the hashtag on Twitter means it is easier to follow a wide range of contributions from people you have never heard of (and may never want to hear of again) and easier to skim read through. Often without images, and videos embedded.

Facebook comments are not easily read as well. Particularly if it has hundreds of comments. The way those comments are presented is also cumbersome.

So, yes. There is s place for somewhere like Twitter. I use it as a news service and discussion board. It is limiting but that is fine, the real life discussions happen on closed group social media or places like MN. It doesn’t really matter if it is like an echo chamber for the passing on of information because the wide range of information is still getting out there. It is quicker and easy to find with the right search or hashtag.

Different styles of platforms add needed. If this discussion was on Facebook, I would not be anyway as informed as I am now.

Different styles of platforms are needed.

not add. Sorry.

EM has said the amnesty will exclude those who have “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam”.

@SmartWatch if you look at the link I gave it seems it is a total myth about facebook only be for old people. Probably spread by twitter.

In fact the figures are: 86% of people ages 18-29 use Facebook

Just to clarify, I am not saying facebook (or any of the many other much more popular social media platforms) provide the option to discuss as a forum does (why isn't mumsnet talk threaded though).

But I was really think in terms of groups and campaigns, some of whom only have twitter accounts. Seriously!! Only having a twitter account is like living in a town and thinking I know the best place to do outreach to women in the area is to go to the dingy dives along the back streets.

I wonder who much of this is down to the false narrative that the MSM loves to push about twitter, which turns out to be totally untrue. Not forgetting they probably dont want us to know what is really going on, so just making twitter as somehow the source of knowledge helps them perpetuate the myth.

Also, not that I think facebook is brilliant (some of its settings etc are just stupid) but if it is the most used social media platform it is crazy to ignore it. And you dont have to use your own name. I know loads of women who dont use their own name because they dont want their personal interactions to be linked to their work.

Although in one instance someone I know was told by facebook they wouldn't accept the name she had signed up under and that she is known by, so she just made up a name and they accepted it! (This seemed to be much more to do with the techie types who take these decisions that are hidebound by their white eurocentric culture)

I do think it is good that the Free Speech Union is petitioning twitter about not censoring GC voices, but would hope they might also take on political parties, the Guardian, work places, schools and so on!

Women between 19-29 absolutely definitely use facebook. However, this is the age-group that actually has the most to lose, e.g. social ostracism, from being gender-critical under their own name.

And yes, I know we could set up wholly new Facebook accounts for the sake of being dissident on facebook, but it's never seemed worth the effort to me, because people use an account's number of facebook friends as a metric of reliability. Not sure how to build up a facebook account from scratch for a fake identity.

Well judging by my experience of my children 13 to 18 years old and their peers then FB are about to drop off a cliff in terms of numbers once the older ones at the top age out as my teens and all of their friends (including my friend's teens) literally would not be seen dead on FB. They call it Oldbook.

Even without the younger generation coming through, it's the wrong place for critical or political discussion imo. You don't want to discuss feminism, sexual predators in women's spaces etc with your kid's old primary school teacher, your Nan, your MIL, that couple you met on holiday 5 years ago, the bloke in the pub who fixes waching machines etc. - at least I don't.

All SM platforms are flawed but Reddit, twitter, KF, Tattlelife, Ovarit, Whatsapp, Telegram etc all allow and facilitate discussion by subject matter, annymously if desired. I have no idea what Snapchat is like fo rit as I am too old but that is the platform of choice amongst teens.Insta just seems like a showing off platform to me.

Well I dont know anyone who uses facebook to be in touch with teachers or whatever. They're all doing that on Next Door.

Or if they are then they must have an FB account with different lists of friends. ie one for local chit chat and the other for discussion.

Or I've only made facebook friends with women who are interested in feminism and other politics.

Although alerting local teachers to creeping gender id seems like a good opportunity.

So again without saying it is brilliant, if facebook has the largest number of users, including the largest number of young people (irrespective of your family's habits) why wouldn't you, or groups doing out reach, use it?!

I think they should restore all accounts where the original reason wasn't serious enough to warrant suspension regardless of politics. They should leave those who had done something worthy of losing an account. They should basically look again at appeals and make a non partisan judgment based on the actual rules.

It don't know how much it will actually help gender critical activism but they should do it anyway.

One good reason for being on Twitter is the opportunity to influence.

Politicians, Government Depts, NGOs, Charities, etc. all put out information on Twitter and sometimes even respond to tweets and engage in conversations.

Journalists take notice of what is "trending" on Twitter, maybe more than they should but they do.

ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA

MORE evidence emerges how Twitter influences the news agenda — and can do so in a disproportionate way.

New research by the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, based on analysis of nearly 2bn tweets, has found a perhaps not surprising correlation between the number of tweets about an event and the likelihood it will be reported on by the media. “Twitter sets the agenda of media coverage in a quantitatively meaningful way,” it concludes.

But additional data from the Pew Research Institute, meanwhile, suggests that in the US only around 23 percent of adults use the platform. This means the news agenda there is being skewed by a relatively small proportion of people - the importance of whose opinions is exaggerated by a permanently online class of journalist who is addicted to Twitter.

Private Eye Issue 1578, 11 Aug 2022

That Private Eye story refers to this research:

Social media influences the mainstream media
Nicolas Hervé, Béatrice Mazoyer, Julia Cagé / 9 Jul 2022

cepr.org/voxeu/columns/social-media-influences-mainstream-media

Twitter is also only an "echo chamber" if you allow it to be. Test it. Make a Twitter List - it can be private - of accounts outside of your usual area of interest and then look at your feed for that list. Engage with some of those tweets. When you go back to your unfiltered feed it should include tweets from your "List accounts" and related accounts/tweets.

Did you hear about this ?
Taken from The Times today -
‘A charity event to push for an end to male violence against women and girls has banned discussion about single sex spaces.
Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, is scheduled to give the main speech to the 30th anniversary gathering by Zero Tolerance in Edinburgh today. The charity‘s core belief is that male violence should not be tolerated.
A note sent to attendees said it wanted “to create a safe and supported environment for our guests and ask you to support us in this aim by refraining from discussions of the definition of a woman, and single sex spaces, in relation to the gender recognition act”.
It added: “As feminists we have strong opinions on these subjects, but this is not the place for that conversation.”
According to the event page, it has been organised “for those who are committed to ending men’s violence against women and girls but particularly for senior managers in government and national public bodies, elected representatives, local authority officials, civil servants, and senior managers and policy officers working in the third sector”.
Sturgeon’s speech, due to be delivered about halfway through the event, is expected to last be about 20 minutes. is due to deliver the main speech, which is due to last 20 minutes, around half way through the event.
The decision might have been made to “save the blushes of the first minister”, suggested Marion Calder, director of For Women Scotland.
She praised Zero Tolerance’s work but said: “Thirty years on, Scottish women must be wondering what has happened to this organisation.”
A final vote on the bill, which would allow people to change the sex stated on their birth certificate without a medical assessment and lower the transition age from 18 to 16, is expected to be held at Holyrood next month.’

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