Why The April 9th Twitter Boycott Needs To Happen

A woman is abused on Twitter every 30 seconds — Amnesty International.

That is a chilling statistic. Online abuse of women is now so prevalent that we have come to see it as conventional. But it is not normal and we all must stand against it.

The United Nations defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life — United Nations. Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against women. New York : UN, 1993.

What makes online violence against women more insidious is this false dichotomy between our online lives and our offline lives. As of 2019 and 2020, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 145 minutes per day, up from 142 minutes in the previous year — Statista. And of course, considering the pandemic a safe assumption can be made that we are spending way more time online right now. For instance, 16:06 hours are now being spent with digital media by the average U.S. adult daily — Wall Street Journal.

This generation is the first generation that has spent this much time on the internet. Some people even spend more time on online activities than they do offline. Businesses, communities, relationships and organizations have been built entirely online so it is clear how much our online and offline lives are now fast consolidating. A virtual world that has so much influence on our day to day is a world nonetheless.

Abuse of women online causes mental harm to women and has led many women to make their accounts private, engage with anonymous profiles or even leave the platform all together.

Although people of all genders can experience violence and abuse online, the abuse experienced by women is often sexist or misogynistic in nature, and online threats of violence against women are often sexualized and include specific references to women’s bodies. The aim of violence and abuse is to create a hostile online environment for women with the goal of shaming, intimidating, degrading, belittling or silencing women — Amnesty International

Violence against women isn’t new. 1 in 3 women in the world have been subject to physical or sexual violence in their lifetime — World Health Organization. Social media abuse and violence against women is simply taking a familiar social ill and melting it out in a different form — online.

If we care about creating safe spaces for women offline, then we must care about doing same online.

Why Twitter?

The nature of Twitter by default allows for easy cyberbullying through tactics like “piling on” and “sea lioning” women. The pile-on’s are especially horrible. On other social media platforms, people seem to have a little more control since you can delete an offending comment on your page/wall. That cannot happen on Twitter. A tweet is quote-tweeted and then there’s no end to how far it can go. The original poster has to either delete the tweet (self-censor), mute the tweet or embark on a blocking spree — which in itself is exhausting.

Twitter has been a vehicle for drawing attention to social ills and more women have increasingly used the platform to express their views on sexism and misogyny. According to Pew Research, the most prolific twitter users are more likely to be women.

While this abuse goes on across social media platforms, Twitter appears to be the worst offender as it has done very little to protect women from abuse on its platform despite multiple calls to this issue.

Okay, great, why don’t you delete your account or just ignore it.

Harassment and abuse cannot be stopped by simply ignoring it. If I delete my Twitter account as a result of harassment and abuse, it does nothing for the next woman who becomes a target. Of course, I’d encourage anyone facing online harassment to log off the internet but telling them to log off does not solve the problem. Saying “why don’t you just log off?” belongs to the same family as “what were you wearing?”. It is pure victim-blaming.

In my little corner, I’ve been talking about online abuse and harassment for years and a few days ago, I came across Heidi N Moore’s Tweet calling for a Twitter boycott on the 9th of April and I immediately joined in. Since then both Heidi and myself have been approached by women all over the world from India to South Africa on how this is indeed an issue that needs to be talked about more.

Ironically, women are likely to be attacked for speaking up against this online abuse. In one tweet making reference to the April 9th Twitter boycott, I had to block over 100 accounts. Imagine a tweet about harassment being met with even more harassment. No need to imagine it, you can see it for yourself here because it happened. That extra labor being dropped at the feet of women is unnecessary and frankly a waste of good mental energy.

How can you join in?

The boycott is saying no tweets, likes or RTs on Twitter from your handle for 24hours. Your time zone doesn’t matter. DMs are okay because we know of course there are many reasons people might need to send a DM. And I suspect DMs do not have a direct impact on ad revenues.

You could also change your Twitter display picture to the image at the top of this article as well in solidarity.

After the boycott what next?

That is up to Twitter. Twitter is a real-time micro blogging platform that profits (through selling ads) from our presence on its platform so it should do more to protect us. The company’s ad revenue for 2020 alone was $1.6 billion. The success of the boycott is that it happened — that women and men all over the world joined their voices to say “it is enough”. The next steps are up to Twitter to say “we heard you because we care”. If Twitter keeps quiet about it, then we know they do not care about this issue. It is that simple.