Sherrilyn IfillThis morning I posted on Twitter some thoughts about how seriously we should regard the dismantling of that site. I’m re-posting my thoughts here in what I hope will be a thread (if those exist here!).
Twitter played a powerful role in sustaining & strengthening the fight for racial justice. The truth about racist and violent policing in America - a truth that Black people have lived with and known for a century - was exposed to the world on Twitter.
The posting of cell phone videos of brutality and murder by police which challenged “the official story” has forever changed the narrative and created space for reimagining what public safety can and should be. And that is the first step of real transformation.
Remember when people kept saying that w/a Black President & AG we no longer needed civil rights activism & lawyering? First images of #MikeBrown’s body, then videos of #WalterScott, #PhilandoCastile & too many others showed what many of us had been saying. There’s another America beyond the DC optics.
The Ferguson uprising was the first sustained civil rights protest in the U.S. in which Twitter played a central role. Don’t think they didn’t notice.
Twitter was essential to sustaining a cohort of millions of ordinary people, policy leaders, influencers, activists, lawyers, artists, committed to democracy during the Trump years. It was a main conduit of communication, information sharing, education, & encouragement.
Hard to imagine how we would have made it through COVID - with all of the uncertainty and fear, and with the deliberate disinformation churned out daily by the President - without Twitter. We are in an age of pandemics and will need to ensure we can communicate as robustly.
The exposure of everyday racism & the willingness of white pol - often women - to call the police on Black people for walking, barbecuing, birdwatching, watering flowers, entering their own homes, shopping, was exposed to the world on Twitter.
This was significant. Ending the plausible denialibilty of ordinary white ppl who expect the benefits of white supremacy and are prepared to call police when Black ppl do not follow their commands - was a critical contribution to the understanding of how racism works in the U.S.
Don’t think that all of this wasn’t seen & understood. Don’t minimize the significance of the brutal dismantling of this site. It is of a piece w/the overall attack on the health of our democratic institutions by forces that have no use for or interest in democracy.
Jos Schuurmans (EN)As @ifilljustice points out, we should worry that the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater.
Despite all its flaws and toxicity, as a mass #media site, a home for political discourse and a tool for grassroots interaction and communication, Twitter has been an essential cog in the machinery of modern democracies.
The way it is currently being dismantled is reminiscent of the demise of Russian mainstream media.
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Crossing the mark of 6 million users today, the federated #Mastodon network accommodates perhaps 5 percent of the active Twitter population.
That is not enough by far!
Democratic governments and institutions, including the media, educational institutions, corporations, not-for-profits and everyone else, should do everything they can right now to facilitate the digital migration from centralised, privately controlled social media platforms to the federated web.
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That means co-funding and co-creating the technical infrastructure, supporting the people running it, and informing the public about this transition and how to be part of it.
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