In my pantheon of online annoybots, Lindy West is fairly far down the list. Unlike, say, Anita Sarkeesian, she hadn't
proposed a centralized censorship regime for the Internet. However, she has endorsed the
unprovable standard of "affirmative consent" in rape cases, has a history as a
victimhood miner,
and I suspect a bunch of other fairly middle-of-the-road (for modern
feminists) policy nostrums. For a number of reasons, West has largely
flown beneath my radar. So when I found a
Vox piece on her voluntary exit from Twitter, I was not terribly surprised, given what I had read of hers. What interested me about that
Vox piece was this passage (
emboldening mine):
Rather, her breaking point
— what made her feel she could no longer participate in the platform’s “profoundly broken culture”
—
was that
Twitter has failed to acknowledge and deal with the
alt-right’s use of the social network to spread its racist ideology,
leading to
severe, real-world repercussions:
The white supremacist, anti-feminist,
isolationist, transphobic “alt-right” movement has been beta-testing its
propaganda and intimidation machine on marginalised Twitter communities
for years now — how much hate speech will bystanders ignore? When will
Twitter intervene and start protecting its users? — and discovered, to
its leering delight, that the limit did not exist. No one cared. Twitter
abuse was a grand-scale normalisation project, disseminating libel and
disinformation, muddying long-held cultural givens such as “racism is
bad” and “sexual assault is bad” and “lying is bad” and
“authoritarianism is bad,” and ultimately greasing the wheels for Donald
Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency. Twitter executives did
nothing.
Which is to say,
she very expressly wished Twitter would have shut up those mean people over there
with the temerity to disagree with her, in public, even. This is not a
surprise, and in fact there was at least one significant "tell"
previous that she very much wanted her own echo chamber: her response to
the
Washington Post investigations showing the Rolling Stone story about a gang rape at U. Virginia was a hoax:
Or,
you could just take her word for it:
Whenever I advocate for the safety of marginalized groups on the
Internet, some genius always pipes up to say, “Oh, so you just want to
live in your echo chamber?” And YES. OF COURSE I JUST WANT MY ECHO
CHAMBER, DINGUS. If by “echo chamber” you mean “a space online where I
can communicate in good faith with informed people who don’t derail
every conversation with false equivalencies and rape threats,” then yes,
I’m dying for a fucking echo chamber.
In fact, maybe that’s what we’ll call it: Echo Chamber, the first feminist social network.
Given that presumptive bestie (or at least sister-in-arms) Marcotte is on
Twitter's Orwellian "Trust & Safety Council", her kvetching here takes an interesting color. The subtext is a bitter complaint that, if
they can make Milo Yiannopoulos go away,
why can't they get rid of all these other people she doesn't like, too?
In that, it amounts to a positive sign for the beleaguered Twitter,
which continues to
struggle to find profitability. Chasing those eyeballs out
en masse makes no sense.
Bon voyage, Lindy, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.
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