This morning I posted on Twitter some thoughts about how seriously we should regard the dismantling of that site. I’m re-posting my thoughts here in what I hope will be a thread (if those exist here!).
Twitter played a powerful role in sustaining & strengthening the fight for racial justice. The truth about racist and violent policing in America - a truth that Black people have lived with and known for a century - was exposed to the world on Twitter.
The posting of cell phone videos of brutality and murder by police which challenged “the official story” has forever changed the narrative and created space for reimagining what public safety can and should be. And that is the first step of real transformation.
Remember when people kept saying that w/a Black President & AG we no longer needed civil rights activism & lawyering? First images of #MikeBrown’s body, then videos of #WalterScott, #PhilandoCastile & too many others showed what many of us had been saying. There’s another America beyond the DC optics.
The Ferguson uprising was the first sustained civil rights protest in the U.S. in which Twitter played a central role. Don’t think they didn’t notice.
Twitter was essential to sustaining a cohort of millions of ordinary people, policy leaders, influencers, activists, lawyers, artists, committed to democracy during the Trump years. It was a main conduit of communication, information sharing, education, & encouragement.
Hard to imagine how we would have made it through COVID - with all of the uncertainty and fear, and with the deliberate disinformation churned out daily by the President - without Twitter. We are in an age of pandemics and will need to ensure we can communicate as robustly.
