Why I Took A Break From Twitter
It isn’t because of anything Taylor Swift said or did
Folks on Twitter: please circulate this on Twitter, not for my sake, but because things need to change. In the meantime, I returned a week after posting this because Twitter refused to take down imposter accounts, despite many people reporting them, until I was back on and did it myself.
I. The Sequence of Events
I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails from people expressing concern that I got chased off of Twitter by Taylor Swift fans, many of whom became convinced via a game of internet telephone that I had called them all Nazis and/or called Taylor Swift a Nazi. There’s no evidence that I called them all Nazis because I never have. I’ve definitely never called Taylor Swift a Nazi and actually have never had the thought that she was, although I found one of her music videos to be racist and at one point tweeted as much (other people wrote whole articles about how racist it was) and have at other points critiqued what I perceived to be her milquetoast approach to politics. (Like, why not denounce your self-proclaimed Nazi fans? I would.) Nonetheless, Twitter accounts with large followings persist in spreading this rumor:
Here’s what happened: back in December, in an exchange with someone I know via Twitter, I said that I thought that Tarana Burke should have been on the cover of Time and that Taylor Swift didn’t deserve that spot more. An apparent Taylor Swift fan who didn’t follow either of us jumped into the conversation and started arguing with us — mind you this was a mentions exchange, not appearing on either of our profile’s main timelines. So I pushed back a little before deciding to mute the person because there was no point in her or me wasting our time arguing. We don’t know each other; there’s no reason to talk.
Then, accounts I don’t follow started filling my mentions. Some of them just sent Giphys of Taylor Swift, thinking her image really upset me (it doesn’t). Some of them did this not just in my mentions but also the mentions of anyone I was talking to, effectively disrupting conversations, many of which were about social justice issues. Some people called me “bitch” or used racist terms. Others used a tactic that previously, in my experience, had been reserved for white supremacist harassers: making fun of my nose. The mentions harassment became significant enough that I started blocking the users who did this. Then I started using a Chrome extension called Twitter Block Chain to block the followers of the accounts that harassed me because I checked out some of their accounts and noticed that they were encouraging their followers to harass me (as well as other Black women who had criticized Taylor Swift, including Lara Witt).
Then I tweeted about how the only two groups of people I had ever had to use block chain on were white supremacists and Taylor Swift fans. Because it’s true. No other people who had a shared interest had pushed me, in large numbers, to use the function on them. And they are the only two groups to ever have a subset who spent a ridiculous amount of their own personal time thinking about my nose. At the end of that tweet, I said, “Venn Diagram that as you please.” A lot of people have interpreted this to mean, “All Taylor Swift fans are Nazis.” In fact, what I was referencing is that there is some crossover. This is a documented fact.
So, honestly, if G-Dragon, my favorite K-pop star whose given name Ji-Yong and Twitter handle @IBGDRGN inspired my own handle @IBJIYONGI (with a capital “I” not a lower case “L”), had a large following from a group strongly associated with white supremacy, rather than yelling at the people who noticed, I’d be yelling at my fellow fans, because that’s fucked up.
But apparently a large and vocal number of Taylor Swift fans feel that in fact the best way to address Nazis in their midst is not to yell at Nazis but to yell at anyone who talks about it. Then to complain loudly about how they have been blocked from effectively yelling. From what I can gather, this turn of events was driven initially by a particular twitter user, handle @GlobeLamp, who started complaining about how I was blocking people, how this was an affront to freedom of speech, and how I was hurting people who had never heard of me and who had never said anything about me by blocking them from seeing my words. She started encouraging her followers to get my tweets put on T-shirts and images of their block pages on T-shirts.
She made it a meme to try and get blocked by me. I thought this was kind of funny and indulged people’s requests. “Block me! Block me!” they tweeted at me, usually each account doing this between three to six times. I indulged them, I did, especially once I realized that Twitter wouldn’t remove Tweets, even ones that are evidently a violation of their terms of service by doing things like suggesting I endorse products that I don’t, like this one:
Anyway, this all died down in December 2017. Until on February 8, 2018 someone decided to bring it back up again by taking a video I had posted of myself and modifying it to include Taylor Swift music, suggesting that I was endorsing the commercial product that is Taylor Swift music. (Can I just add for the record that I actually have zero strong feelings about Taylor Swift music, either way? Really never gave her much thought until she was on the cover of Time instead of Tarana Burke, who is the sister of a dear friend of mine.)
The mentions harassment began again. There had been an occasional trickle previously, which I had just ignored. Then Tuesday February 13, they attacked the mentions of a tweet where I told Nazis to fuck off. (Am I the only person who sees the irony here? They’re upset about being connected to Nazis but hundreds of people decided to pile onto a tweet where I told Nazis to fuck off?) This time they used a mentions attack that was so vicious that I couldn’t read my mentions without turning on my Quality Filter. I don’t like having that on because then I can’t see tweets from students and others who sometimes contact me via mentions. It made it hard for me to exchange ideas with people about anything, whether it was about gender and racial discrimination in science (probably the most frequent topic) or the fact that Nazis are killing people.
This continued through Wednesday February 14, which was a day of national trauma for Americans as 17 people were murdered at a high school in Florida. On that terrible day, Tweets like this garnered thousands of interactions which likely means over one hundred thousand impressions:
And it was taken up by what I would call a “follow factory”:
Accounts like this should be banned on Twitter, just in general, but Twitter refused to take it down despite many requests by me along with many, many requests from many other people. I appreciate that Medium and Medium Staff for example actively don’t want spam on their service, and I wish Twitter shared their commitment.
Because large follower accounts like that one were accelerating the harassment, I continued to block people in an effort to make my account usable. In the meantime, some people started defacing my Wikipedia page. (And this possibility was actually one reason I had never really sought to have one.) Then I turned the account private. And then people started flooding my follower requests. By the end of all of this, tens of thousands, no exaggeration here I really mean TENS OF THOUSANDS, of Twitter users had tried to get into my mentions or follows. People I had never heard of were writing whole Twitter threads about the injustice that was me blocking them. They were also convinced that I was doing all of it, one by one, which makes me chuckle a little. I appreciate their belief in my superpowered fingers, but alas, it’s just computer code.
Underpinning their behavior: a complete sense of entitlement that I should make myself available to them and their followers, possibly for abuse. This is wrong, for the same reason that you can’t read my e-mails. Why can’t you read my emails? Because I send them to whomever I choose to send them to and not to the whole world. You’re not entitled to read someone’s Tweets. They have a right to block you. They have a right to make their account private. They have a right to control the audience for their ideas. Reading my tweets against my will is not a human right by any stretch of the imagination.
Later, when I decided to temporarily shut down my account, I saw one tweet that helped me realize that some people were really, really concerned that what I was blocking them from seeing was all of my tweets trashing Taylor Swift. I’m sorry to report that those tweets don’t exist. I spend little of my life thinking about Taylor Swift. Although now I’ve spent a couple of weeks thinking a lot about her fans, especially the ones in Brazil, who made up the majority of the most aggressive harassers.
II. What made me think about suspending my account
So here’s the thing: as a verified user, I can control my mentions so powerfully that all of this could go on, and I would never know about it. It’s true that it would cut into what I value about Twitter, the ability of young women of color to find me and engage with me, even when I don’t already follow them. It’s true that the experience helped fortified friendships that I had built through Twitter, such as with fellow #STS thinker Michael Oman-Reagan, who took a lot of hits for writing several Tweets about the harassment:
While Taylor Swift fans thought they were harassing just me, they inadvertently ended up harassing everyone else for whom communicating with me held value. But I actually, the whole time, had the power to completely silence them from my view, forever. Their noise is not why I left. Not quite anyway.
The first thing I have to say is that Twitter doesn’t give a flying fuck about organized harassment campaigns on their service. This was very evidently one, and we could barely get impersonator pages taken down when there were lots of people reporting it, 20 users or more. Almost all of the tweets I’m sharing in this post are still publicly available, which is why I am able to embed them. And while it’s true I could silence the harassment, that didn’t change the fact that it diminished the value of the service for me. I could no longer do the public outreach I wanted to do and be open and accessible in the way that I wanted to be. By aggressively blocking the harassment from view, I’d also have to block people who were actively looking for help, support, and community — people who unlike those I had blocked, had never followed a user who would go out of their way to harass a stranger on the internet.
And as I’ve mentioned before, Twitter is a business that isn’t really profitable and which relies on users to be its products. So Twitter wants me to help them profit while also accepting that they will do nothing to stop people (and their pet bots) from harassing me, or importantly, others who are far more vulnerable than me. Can you imagine being 16 and experiencing an orchestrated harassment campaign? That is the stuff that suicides are made of. Should I be on Twitter and therefore suggesting to young people who look up to me that Twitter is a good place when this is the business arrangement we are in?
And then there was that: how young people who might look up to me understood Twitter as a platform, as too powerful of a platform. One young man who actually knew how to e-mail me, rather than doing so, pestered a thread of women scientists about how I had no right to make my Tweets unavailable because Twitter is where people communicate. For various reasons, this has led to him having a conversation with an administrator at his college. So: 1. I hate this outcome. He’s probably too young to have fully appreciated that things he does on Twitter can have repercussions in other arenas. And probably this is the case with many young people. 2. I was very concerned that he was intimately familiar with my writing about discrimination in science but still hadn’t developed a strong relationship with the idea of consent. It made me wonder if I was being effective enough.
And that gave me pause. And that was when I started thinking about suspending my account. I think this was heightened for me when I had a conversation where someone questioned the handling of that incident, including my role in it. So much had started to make me feel like a pawn in other people’s plans, conversations, and agendas, and none of it felt useful. On top of that, I had my concerns about Twitter’s business model.
And I have a question for Taylor Swift (and her team): given how much harassment you must experience, why don’t you tell your fans to stop? Are your advisors telling you that this kind of activity is an important part of your business model?
Assuming these aren’t bots that Ms. Swift’s production are paying for (what a terrible thought, but I prefer to think she’s just this popular), these are real people, many of them probably young, who think that a good use of their time is reading through tweets that come up in a Twitter search for “Taylor Swift” and trolling anyone saying anything critical.
I have an archive of all of my Tweets, and nowhere in them is there a tweet directed to this account. Also if you search Twitter for “dyinginagetaway IBJIYONGI” it doesn’t actually pull up any tweets to me either. Just ones about me, spreading this rumor — that December tweet above is in fact the oldest one. And while people had lots of theories that I was trying to get attention by tweeting about Swift — these tweets seem like actual attention mongering, now that I know there is caché in writing angry tweets about people perceived to be Swift haters. (Coincidentally, Swifties have a choice about how much attention someone gets for their views about Swift. They are the ones who decided I should get a lot, not me. When I search my archives of all the Tweets in 12 years that mention Taylor Swift, there are 81, and almost all of them are about her fans, and not about her. And of course, almost all of them were written after they started harassing me.)
But all of this made me start to worry about young people, who exaggerate the importance of Twitter as if it is the stage on which life is lived. It’s not. If I’m contributing to them believing that it is, I need to stop and think about that. This is especially disconcerting given, again, the free pass that Twitter gives to harassment. I’ve spoken to other women of color who have been harassed by @GlobeLamp and yet that singer (I think she’s a musician) continues to have a (verified!) account, even though she uses it to incite harassment towards other users. She apparently never quite stopped tweeting about me:
Here is a tweet from December (from my archives) where I describe the nature of her intense focus on me, which included going out of her way to try and read my tweets after I blocked her:
And what’s interesting and sad to me about this is that I get the impression that she’s been a victim of some terrible violence and harassment in her life, but also seems to be married to the narrative that people harassed by fandoms are to blame. I’m saddened to see a fellow victim of violence engaging in an act of victim blaming.
She also joined the hundreds (thousands?) of people who harassed Michael for writing Tweets in support of my right to use Twitter harassment free.
Of course, it’s definitely the case that @GlobeLamp isn’t the only person bizarrely focused on me, but this person probably wins the award for being most consistently focused on me. And as recently reported, it’s become increasingly normal on Twitter for fandoms to attack perceived “enemies”:
When I was in high school people did this in groups on the school yard, but they definitely could not do it on large scales with thousands of other people. How does it change a child to be part of such a mob?
And I’m concerned about the press. I was told by one music journalist that music journalists are afraid to upset fandoms by questioning, for example, why Swift doesn’t shut down vicious fandom behavior, because if their social media becomes unusable, their careers are over. That’s fucking terrible. Meanwhile, tech journalists simply haven’t pushed Twitter nearly hard enough. Maybe the fact that tech journalists largely let Twitter get away with this has to do with some crossover with Gamergaters or at the very least, a certain homogeneity among tech journalists. (White dudes.) Women, and women of color in particular, experience tremendous amounts of harassment — this is hardly news in 2018. Gamergate made clear that there were problems with the system, and Twitter was initially unresponsive and to this day is continuously minimally responsive.
But this begs the question: how high quality can the working environment at Twitter be if Twitter’s ethos is to let random people on the internet treat women like shit? Can a woman who thinks this is wrong get very far in the Twitter decision-making tree? Or is Twitter for bros only? What does this tell us about the future of women in tech? And for the record, 90% of Twitter employees are white and Asian, and about 2/3s of them are men. It’s statistically impossible for the 1/3 who are women to be primarily Black or brown. In other words, Twitter doesn’t really employ Black and brown women (and who knows about East Asian descent women), but it has built a whole business that in part relies on people harassing them.
So. For a little while at least, maybe just days, I’m sitting this out and thinking about it. I’d like you to think about it with me. In light of what happened on Wednesday in Florida, it is clear that Twitter can be a useful platform for young people to get their voices heard on important issues. But that same platform can be used by young people to do anything, even get themselves into trouble with people they respect. By refusing to do better at curbing harassment by implementing algorithms similar to the ones that Google uses to minimize spam or giving us better options like being able to stop people from Tweeting at us if we don’t follow them and they don’t follow us, Twitter takes a good idea and diminishes it. (And I think such an option would preclude the need for something like Twitter Block Chain. Right now we can mute people who don’t follow us, but that still allows them to harass anyone we retweet.) (Folks wondering why I didn’t change my handle: you lose your verification and some of your privacy protection powers if you change your user handle.)
In October the New Republic asked, “Does Twitter Really Want to Solve Its Harassment Problem?” The answer is very evidently no. And the other thing we know is that kids are killing themselves because of online bullying that makes use of social media services. Does Twitter want children dying to be part of its business model? This question gets depth when we consider that Donald Trump, who has access to nuclear weapons, has been using Twitter’s service to threaten to start wars where certainly children, among others, would die in large numbers.
Ultimately, if Twitter wants to be the public sphere, it needs to act like it, by working to create an environment where all voices can be safely heard. — Debbie Chachra in The Atlantic
At the end of the day, “That’s just Twitter,” isn’t a good answer and neither is, “Abolish social media.” It’s ridiculous. Things don’t have to be this way. But, of course, I expect my comments section on this article to fill up with harassment or people trying to say that I’ve misrepresented the fandom. Happily, Medium has in my experience had a pretty good policy of taking down comments that are unproductive, and I expect to be able to do that here to some extent.
Before closing, I also want to give props to the two Taylor Swift fans who wrote to me — after I announced I was leaving or had left — and said they were sorry about the harassment I had experienced.
Part of our fan community has been awful towards you and, as much different opinions as we may have or not, it got out of hand to extents that crossed the limits of respect and decency. On behalf of most of us, I’m so so sorry.
It was not lost on me that the first one was a Black woman.
Unfortunately, a shocking amount of Taylor Swift fans are immature and have decided to lash out on you for your opinions; which I happen to think is incredibly immature, considering she must get hundreds of hate tweets a day. I honestly don’t blame you for blocking people; I’m someone who’s been blocked, but it’s been disgusting me to see people saying nasty things about you, someone who’s clearly an educated woman . . . I hope that you’re doing okay throughout all of this, and that this mess somehow blows over soon.
Love and light.
Coincidentally, she expressed both love for Taylor Swift and frustration about her silence on Black Lives Matter. Will fellow fans show up for Black women like her? That seems so much more important than trying to @ me. She seems lovely, and I know that when I return to Twitter, I will for sure be unblocking and following her. ❤
Update: to include the only public call-out of this behavior that I saw from within the fandom, coincidentally also by someone apparently presenting as African descent. Bravo, Rosalinde!
Update: I see that an account is now trying to make someone else the newest target of the same strategy. Twitter really needs to update it’s TOS so that posting content about someone who has blocked you is a violation. It’s really that simple.
Update: Here is an imposter account that is using a similar Twitter handle but with a lower case “L” on the end rather than the upper case “I” that is in my handle, very clearly impersonating me, and despite the efforts of my friends, hasn’t been taken down.
This account is impersonating me and misleading people while also harassing my husband.
