Organizer for Front End North, @katiefenn@front-end.social:
Last week the LGBTIQA+ Greens, the officially affiliated liberation group for the Green Party of England and Wales, lost its Twitter account for unknown reasons. It was suspended. It was appealed. The appeal went nowhere.
I cannot state enough that trans people need to urgently divest from Twitter. The network is actively hostile to us now.
Maintaining a presence is fine, but we must move the centre of gravity for organising onto other platforms.
I’ve been off Twitter for two weeks now, and I’ve gained a bit of perspective about how much organising still happens on the platform.
The Twitter thread is still our primary source of news and information. All this becomes inaccessible the moment you move off Twitter. And as more and more people quit Twitter, our community is fracturing and becoming less powerful.
I think this really hit us hard when the Cass report was published. Our adversaries are organised, and we are scattered.
Rest of the thread
When I’ve shared this in some private forums, I’ve been told that those with serious mental health or safety concerns “are better off not on Twitter”.
I argue that this is an argument for excluding some of the most vulnerable in our community, and we should treat Twitter as an inaccessible space for organising.
It’s the people staying on Twitter to the exclusion of other networks that is causing the problem.
We MUST do better than this.
@emilygorcenski
@katiefenn but our enemies don’t organize with Twitter, they just use it as the conduit to project their organization. The conclusions of that study were already determined when it was commissioned. The channel must be severed.
@emilygorcenski That’s true. It shows that they were organised ahead of time when it came out. They’d briefed sympathetic and influential people, and made sure that critics were spending the whole day reading the damn thing while they were giving interviews.
In fact, I think the fact that the earliest criticisms were based off of an easily refuted, leaked press briefing really hurt us.
We should be doing the same - organise off the platform, and channel it through Twitter.
I agree with her, queer organizing on a platform that is openly, expressly transphobic is just an awful idea. There's already been cases where Musk gave fascists mod rights with free access to people's DMs and everything. It's hazardous af to be there.
I hate twitter, it just seems hard to find places that have news on eg. Palestine when the media is so heavily controlled. Is there a better site you’d recommend for that kind of thing?
I get most of my Palestine news on TikTok. The kids are alright.
Tiktok is unfortunately limited for the trans community as a result of many people suffering voice and passing anxiety problems that clash with a video+audio format. It's fine for the confident but a significant proportion of trans people are anything but.
you probably shouldn't ask me, hexbear is the closest thing to social media that i use apart from group chats and local discords.
Telegram
I started using Telegram a couple months ago and I was like a boomer who just found Facebook, I binged hard for a while.
I thought telegram was geared towards the right? I don’t think my brain can take any more far right hot takes than I already get on twitter
Like all social media, it depends what accounts you follow and if you read comments under posts
https://t.me/FotrosResistance is what I follow for West Asia
It can be, but unlike Twitter, you have to choose to entere those toxic spaces, rather than having them simply forced on you
It's not really geared toward anything, it's just a chat app with some social features. Moderation is very loose, so many on the right are using it though. Institutionally/structurally I haven't seen anything about it being biased one way or another, and I would be surprised if it came up since it's very inaccessible to the US intelligence apparatus.