Katie Fenn (@katiefenn@front-end.social)
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.

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.