Imagining Feminist Social Media
Elon Musk bought Twitter. Here are my thoughts on the news. Plus, some feminist & queer theory on free speech, harm reduction, & transformative justice applied to social media and technology.
Hello there!
For those of you who forgot—I don’t blame you, it’s been a while—my name is Val Elefante (she/they), and I am a queer, sex-positive, feminist researcher, writer, and activist. I am also a co-founder, community manager, and co-designer at Lips, a social media platform for women, non-binary, LGBTQIA+ folks, and their fans without bias censorship or harassment.
You probably saw the news this week that Twitter officially accepted Elon Musk’s buyout offer of $44 billion. Which means that yes indeed, Elon Musk will own Twitter. Musk believes that he has the power to “unlock Twitter’s potential” as the platform for free speech around the globe. I, along with many others, have ~curiosities~ about how Twitter might change.
In this issue, I will discuss these curiosities and also invoke some feminist & queer theory that has helped me think about how we might build digital spaces/technology that actually empower us to work together to solve some of our world’s toughest challenges.
The Elon/Twitter news brings up a lot of interesting avenues for exploration regarding governance of social media platforms, a topic that I’ve been researching for a long time but diving especially deep into since joining the Metagovernance Project Research Collective.
This is my first blog post since joining the collective, and I hope to write more in the future especially exploring the impacts of decentralized, more democratically-governed social media platforms.
Let me know what you think of my first piece!
xx,
Val
!News flash¡ Elon Musk owns Twitter.
What this means, according to Shira Ovide, tech reporter for the New York Times, is that “Mr. Musk will join Mr. Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, TikTok’s Shouzi Chew and Apple’s Tim Cook as the handful of corporate executives who have enormous say over granting or denying access to influential platforms of global discourse.”
So, what are Elon Musk’s thoughts on what Twitter “should” be? Here is his tweet where he gives the broad vision:
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithm open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential - I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
Sounds great in theory, right? In practice, it has proven difficult.
Let’s not forget that even seemingly small decisions made by the executives of the mainstream platforms have massive real-world effects that cannot be understated.
In her piece, Ovide’s follow-up questions for Musk highlighted a few decisions Musk and his team will have to make in the coming months/years, each with demonstrably ginormous consequences:
“What if the speech violates the law in Germany or Turkey but not in the United States? What happens when Twitter and governments disagree over how to interpret laws of expression, including the First Amendment? Pornography is legal in the United States. It’s not allowed now on Twitter, but will it be under Musk’s ownership? How about Chinese propaganda that undercuts accusations of human rights abuses and twists people’s views?”
This one man’s decisions—like Zuckerberg, Pichai, Chew, and Cook’s decisions—will have far-reaching, long-lasting impacts on the fate of our world. And sure, we hope he will seek advice and guidance from experts. But the truth is that the demographic of people who have historically had ownership and control over the way technology is designed, built, and governed have been men. And the dominant perspective built into the technology has been that of cisgender heterosexual white men.
Musk buying Twitter doesn’t change that. So, that’s about where I lose interest in this whole Elon and Twitter fiasco and turn my attention to alternative and more diverse visions of technology that I believe would better serve us all—make us healthier humans, support freedom, justice & democracy around the world, and preserve the planet.
Democratically-governed social media
What Elon Musk isn’t getting when he calls Twitter a “town square” is that town squares are owned and run by the public.
In a piece for WIRED titled, “You—Yes, You!—Would Be a Better Owner for Twitter Than Elon Musk,” Nathan Schneider and Danny Spitzberg, researchers and organizers of the 2016 Buy Twitter campaign, argue that the platform’s essential infrastructure should be controlled by a user-owned democracy:
“With many collaborators and shareholders, we formally proposed that the company study its options for converting to user ownership so that it could be itself a democracy. Juries of users might study and formulate policies for larger groups to vote on. Perhaps users would be able to debate and decide on moderation policies, for instance, and center those who have experienced harm on the platform in decisions about how to prevent it in the future. Perhaps cultivating a healthy public space would become more of a priority for executives than propping up the share price.”
Schneider and Spitzberg also provide a range of examples of platforms shifting power to their communities (like Wikipedia!) as well as emerging experiments, mechanisms, and networks to support diverse ownership transitions including the Exit to Community movement.
As a community manager myself, I have experienced first-hand the benefits of community-ownership and community decision-making in creating technology that better meets the needs of the communities who use it, rather than when those powers are relegated to a centralized group.
My view on what social media should be like..
!Here we go¡ This is where things will get bumpy. I certainly do not have all the answers, but I do have my experiences and research… I hope you’ll appreciate my findings and opinions. And please, if you have thoughts and would like to respond, feel free to do so in the comments section below.
Side note: I will actually talk more about this later on but note the above^. I am **setting boundaries** around how I would like to be engaged with regarding this material. Please respect my boundaries!!! Let’s go.
Conversations about social media often bring up the idea of “free speech,” an idea that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people—not to mention one that gets many of us reallllllyyyyy heated. More specifically, people think that free speech and personal safety are fundamentally at odds with each other—like there’s a seesaw with free speech on one end and personal safety on the other.
I can see where sometimes freedom of speech comes at the expense of personal safety—like when Donald Trump used Twitter to incite a violent storming of The Capitol and over 100 people were injured and some killed (usually what left-wingers argue).
Or, when personal safety is invoked as grounds for censoring relatively benign speech—like when Fox News host Tucker Carlson was temporarily suspended from his Twitter account for supporting tweets that misgendered Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the nation’s highest-ranking openly transgender official (usually what right-wingers argue).
However, I don’t believe this necessarily always has to be the case. I believe that there can be a sweet spot where free speech and safety co-exist together—even preserving and protecting each other—which can be accessed through the tool of a well-governed community.
This is where community ownership and power comes into play. Imagine how these free speech debates and others similar might be handled if they were held in a true digital “town square”—a community-owned, democratically-operated town square where the people actually care about each other, the quality of the town, and its future because they have to live there, together. What sorts of features would this platform have? What if the community could even work together to design the features that would enable them to have these debates?
It might be difficult to imagine being able to contribute to creating features of a social media platform, but this is only because we don’t currently have many models of this. However, we theoretically could, should, and probably will in the near future…
But probably not on Twitter. Because Elon Musk now has the power over the platform’s features. He also has the power over who has a platform, and is likely to bring Trump back. And whether you agree with his decisions or not, it doesn’t matter because Elon has the power now. And so does Zuckerberg, Pichai, Chew, and Cook, and whole lot of other men. Now, I’ll bring in a feminist perspective here..
Many people argue that technology needs to remain—or at least aspire to be—“neutral” or “unbiased,” but the reality is that technology is like journalism: there will always be bias in technology because technology is the product of a bunch of decisions made by people and all people have bias. Feminists argue that, in fact, most of our commonly-held understandings of what is “unbiased” or “neutral” are actually usually biased in favor of the most elite class, namely cisgender heterosexual white men—and this perspective is ingrained in us whether we are members of this dominant demographic group or not.
One way to more easily notice the biases in our tech, is to imagine what it might look like if other groups had more power. What if women, non-binary, LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and disabled folks had the power? Again, not something easy to think about because we don’t have many models, but in the following sections I will describe possibilities of alternative approaches to free speech, harm reduction, and transformative justice on social media - if the tech was designed & governed by marginalized communities.
A brief aside on my definition of feminism: I know feminism means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but in my work, I employ the definition articulated by the Black feminist scholar and activist, bell hooks: feminism works to eradicate "imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy.” Feminism is not just a women’s rights movement.
Therefore, by this definition feminist technology is technology that is controlled by diverse people (by gender, race, class, sexual orientation, physical & mental ability) and actively works to eradicate the systems that oppress them. So, what might feminist social media look like?
Free speech on feminist social media
The feminist utopia of free expression on mainstream social media (and any media outlet for that matter) is filled with diverse expressions of humanity that remove the male gaze as the dominant lens. You might struggle to imagine what this could look like because, well, the male gaze lens on the world is what all of us probably consider “neutral.” But I will now illustrate the difference with my favorite, most dramatic comparison ever—the homepages of two different porn sites :)
Pornhub vs. Crashpad Series
Other examples might include:
Magazines: Playboy Magazine vs. Petit Mort Magazine (designed & run by sex workers themselves)
Tech Platforms: OnlyFans Explore Page vs. Lips Explore Page
TV Shows: Euphoria vs. Submission Possible (by Madison Young)
You get the idea…
Shifting the male gaze means shifting the power into other hands. We are far away from removing the dominance of the male gaze, but you can see it’s not impossible. However, on mainstream social media platforms, we are especially far away because feminist expression is straight up being censored.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you have probably seen statistics I often share about how much important *educational, empowering, health-related* content from marginalized communities gets censored on mainstream social media apps due to incorrect labeling by moderation systems i.e. sex-ed as “sexual solicitation.” For example, did you know that more than 73% of LGBTQ+ content online is flagged as inappropriate?
A platform designed & moderated by marginalized people would better protect marginalized voices - our speech would not be misunderstood and wrongly censored.
Did you also know: nearly ⅔ of social media users say they “often or sometimes” come across racist, sexist, homophobic, or religious-based hate content in social media. Hate speech is a huge problem on social media, and the mainstream platforms are not doing enough to prevent it on their apps. Not only are moderators unable to catch hate speech once it’s already posted, but the platforms have also been designed in a way that enables—dare I say promotes—hate speech in the first place. Engagement-based feeds fuel inflammatory posts, trolls run rampant with few obstacles, little friction, and few repercussions. Oftentimes, the people calling out the hate speech are the ones who get censored for hate speech.
Hate speech is a complicated issue—perhaps I’ll go to law school one day so I can read papers like this one and understand it better. But what I can do right now is imagine platforms that make it even just a liiiiiittle bit harder to do stuff like send death threats, recruit neo-Nazis, spout anti-Semitism, and send unsolicited dick pics.
Proactive harm reduction and reactive conflict resolution systems built into technology
Right now, most of the platforms we use do not grant users very much control over our personal boundaries. *Remember how I set boundaries around this article and asked people to respond in the comments? It’s because the fears I have of being attacked for my thoughts are very real considering all the hate and harassment female journalists receive.*
Perhaps if platforms were designed by people who have been harmed as a result of boundary violations—such as sexual assault survivors, for example—the platform’s features might be much different. Bumble, the dating app where women are the only ones who can message first, was actually founded by an ex-Tinder employee who was forced to leave the company because she was a victim of sexual harassment (yes, you read that right).
Think about your own digital boundaries. Personally, I choose to keep my Instagram profile public, but why does that mean I have to be open to comments and DMs from creepy strangers, spam accounts, and yes, lots of dick pics?! The technology should also be better at detecting inappropriate and hateful messages before a user hits send and adding friction - like the feature Twitter launched in 2020 that asks you if you want to read the article before you hit “Retweet” (if you haven’t clicked to open it). Or, perhaps there could be features—like badges on Discourse— that unlock privileges such as messaging over time through positive engagement within the community.
Even if better proactive features were built in, conflict would, of course, still happen.
Right now, the best case scenario we see on mainstream platforms is that a perpetrator’s account might be deleted (with nothing stopping them from making another), and the victims are left to find resources and heal on their own. There is no conflict resolution.
Some of the queer and sex-positive IRL communities I’ve been part of have effective processes for conflict resolution that, I think, should be used as a model for digital spaces and can even be built into technology. I recently took a “Guardian training” course with Cory Bush, a leader in the NYC sex-positive community, where I learned about how applying a non-carceral, transformative justice-inspired approach to conflict resolution can both center victims, helping them get the resources they need to heal, and also support perpetrators towards learning and growing.
Transformative justice in technology
Our online world is filled with so much conflict and polarization that we know has been fueled (if not caused) by the technology itself. So if technology can drive us apart, might it also be able to bring us back together? How might we program software with incentives that promote de-polarization, empathy, and resolution?
While I am not totally bought-in to web3 or trustworthy of many projects happening in the space, I do see a lot of interesting stuff in this arena happening with DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations. DAOs are online communities on the blockchain where it is possible (though doesn’t always happen this way) to build in an incentive structure that motivates people to care more about each other—to put it plainly—usually because they are working together on a project toward an end goal they both care about. I’ll leave this point there for now, but if you’re curious to hear more I’ll probably write my next newsletter entirely on DAOs.
One last thing I’ll say on transformative justice in technology is that online, just like in real life, we as a society do not place high value on the labor required for such things as facilitating conflict resolution (see feminist activist Silvia Federici’s Wages Against Housework movement from the 1970s). A feminist internet that works against gender inequality would recognize and value this “care work” or “reproductive labor,” often performed by women—and very often women of color.
An alternative to DAOs are DisCos (distributed cooperative organizations). They are the feminist, cooperative and commons-oriented alternative to the mainstream DAOspace.
“DisCO incubates a new cooperative model for the digital age, incorporating care-based cultural practices and DLT-based tools with a global approach that is fair and inclusive, committed to equality, and to addressing the social and ecological challenges of today's world. It was indeed created to promote new economic models that are fair and inclusive.”
I’ll dive deeper in DisCO’s next week too but how freaking cool.. I am completely awestruck😻
The feminist internet is not only possible. It’s happening.
And it starts with having more diverse people—especially women, non-binary, LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, & disabled people—design, build, and run the platforms of the future. All of us together (the cis-het white men too) having more decentralized, democratic ownership and power over our digital world.
Thanks for reading. Happy Friday,
xx
Val