Thread by @bennessb

anyway I’ve been subtweet central lately specifically because I’ve been working on the updated void # explanation for the website for A While and so this larger conversation about disability communities & social media & accountability mechanisms feels very Timely.

I don’t think there’s any point to relitigating individual conflicts because I’m pretty sure we all get annoyed sometimes & we all annoy other people, but if we’re trying to use this platform to build care webs then we need to be really really honest about our curation choices.

it’s not like blocking or dog piling on people in your own community is unusual on twitter at all, but it’s maybe more unusual to have that mixed in with policy shaping & mutual aid efforts that people rely on to survive. especially housebound people. especially in a pandemic.

the void # & RT account exist for a lot of different reasons, but one of those reasons is to separate me as a person from the conversations & info-sharing that happen here.

my personal safety needs are different from the community’s safety needs. same tactics have diff impacts.

and like whether or not you think there’s anything to criticize about, for ex, the way MC uses twitter, I think it’s worth looking at how many people are expressing hurt right now and why and maybe get curious about how we can hold mutual safety as a community value going fwd.

I guess I’m trying to parse out the space between “personal accounts can block whoever they want” (which I agree with) and “personal accounts can dogpile anyone & unleash hostility within their own community with zero open acknowledgment” (which is not a great norm).

there’s also an undercurrent to this conversation that’s worth naming directly which is that for a lot of people, ability to clarify is an access need (and on twitter personal accounts this can conflict with individual capacity limits for exponential growth of clarifying Qs)

so if we’re fighting for accessible comms on social media, that necessarily means supporting both [the need to clarify] and [the need to not always be the person responding] just as we fight for captions, alt text, AND better tools for creating accessible content while foggy.

on top of which, asking endless clarifying questions can be an intentional form of trolling called sealioning, so, that sucks.

I think sometimes we need to have these conversations not because some bad actor is violating norms and deserves to be punished, but because there’s growing evidence that these norms perpetuate inequity in maybe unexpected ways and it’s up to us to get to the bottom of that.