Twitter is infamous for allowing harassment, abuse, Russian bots, racism and white supremacy to dominate its platform. I’ve been attacked at least twice, most notably when a couple of popular bloggers encouraged their followers to harass me in 2014 and last year when paid propagandist Louise Mensch doxed me and was temporarily suspended.
While the company has made modest new efforts at cracking down on abuse, they remain slow and mostly ineffective. Last months, Russian bot accounts spiked popularity of the #ReleasetheMemo hashtag. This week, it “suspended” instead of banning white supremacist GOP candidate Paul Nehlen. The historic record of Twitter’s passivity and weak enforcement is long.
As part of my Politics of Possibility project, I’ve created a Block Together list of top Twitter advertisers to assist groups that would like to put pressure on Twitter to take stronger steps at securing the platform from harassment, hate and foreign election influence. They can continue using Twitter while having a big impact on the revenue that Twitter can gain from its top advertisers.
By encouraging their followers to subscribe to the Block Together list, they will effectively block high revenue ads from appearing in their feeds and reduce the benefit to Twitter. For any accounts in the list that their followers follow, BlockTogether takes no action on those individual accounts. There are currently more than 2400 advertisers on the list.
If you haven’t used it before, definitely check out the Block Together home page.
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