Ive made this post public due to the importance.
A lot of people are missing the point of the twitter boycott. Ok here's how twitter works, they sell your data to advertisers for money, any interactions, good or bad are data they can sell.
All that harassment women get? That makes them money. All the call outs, all the toxic shit, all the fights with bad people? Makes them money.
They have a vested interest in creating engagement and nothing does that better than anger. They keep the bad people around because they know you will fight them. Thats data, they can sell that and then market to people just like you.
While they market to the people who want to abuse you too.
*Not using twitter* is literally the only way to hurt them.
Anything you think of that involves you staying on the site makes them money. Anything. Even giving them fake data, using curse words and hating nazis. You think people can't market to hating nazis?
Anything you do. ANYTHING. CAN. BE. MARKETED. TO. AND COOPTED.
Do you think if you scream loud enough on twitter that twitter will actually change anything? People tried this, the trust and safety team was made.
AND ABSOLUTELY NOTHING CHANGED FOR THE BETTER.
Twitter has no interest in changing anything. They make a shitload of money from you staying on twitter and arguing with each other, so of course they want to keep encouraging that as you give away your data, your viewpoints and political stances so number crunchers can figure out how to microtarget you for ads.
There's a lot of wonderful threads by women of color about the abuse they suffered that was ignored, and they make a lot of great points! But all that did was give twitter more data and more engagements. That made them money. And rewarded them for keeping things just like they are right now. Because you made complaint threads about twitter...on twitter.
Now as to where to go and what to do about this?
There this open source software called mastodon. Its a lot like twitter except anyone can create an instance. And the admins of instances can block other instances. So you could have a black server, or a trans server, or an lgbt server.
These servers can talk to each other, the users can interact and if the admins find many or most of the users of a server are toxic and the admins will do nothing? You can suspend their instance from interacting with yours.
Thats right, you can ban the nazis, and there's no algorithm! Posts show up in chronological order and there's no robots auto moderating. There's real human beings who care, and if they don't care you can find an instance that does care.
Nobody is selling your data to advertisers. The users help support the instances directly in a lot of cases, and some admins just host them for free just because we think the instance should exist.
Anything you can create on twitter you can create on mastodon. The default characters is 500 instead of 180 like twitter and my instance has 2000.
You can thread posts if you want to, you can ask for donations! Many people do. There is no reason to keep using twitter. None at all. Nothing you do short of leaving the site will do any harm to twitter. Nothing.
So this is the cold truth. A lot of the blue checkmark squad on twitter are against this boycott because a shift to a place like mastodon would be the end of their grift. There's no "verified users" on mastodon and no plans to implement this feature. No self absorbed twitter celebrities there.
There's just people talking to each other. Are there arguments? Sure, arguments happen. Were all still human, but nobody is profiting off of our suffering there.
I know this boycott was only supposed to be there for a day, but honestly im just done with twitter. Ive had my old account that i had for years banned for standing up to people who want me dead, while those same people have a huge platform and a blue checkmark.
And no, nobody famous went out of their way for my sake to try to get me unbanned. So yeah i glommed on to this event hoping, just hoping people would be clever enough to do the same and actually *hurt twitter* and force some changes.
But no people made even more tweets and more threads and more data that twitter profited off of. They made money on our suffering. Again. And you helped them.
The site is beyond redemption and i will not return to it.
Find me on https://mastodon.starrevolution.org
Create an account there or on one of the many other instances! Or make your own! Please. Twitter cannot be saved. It cannot be reformed because its business model prevents it. It must be abandoned.