Rose McGowan, like many other women in Hollywood, has come out and voiced her harrowing experience with a popular film producer Harvey Weinstein. Venting out her emotions on Twitter, she alleged that Harvey Weinstein had sexually assaulted her.
Interestingly, the social media platform issued a 12-hour ban on McGowan, and this was a cue to the Twitterati that there were powers at play behind the scenes to curb truth. The reason Twitter temporarily suspended McGowan’s account was that one of her tweets mentioned a private phone number. Which they removed saying that revealing personal phone number goes against their policies.
Source: instagram.com/rosemcgowan
Actors and activists protested with the hashtag #WomenBoycottTwitter and urged users to boycott the social media platform. #WomenBoycottTwitter started at midnight EST. It was supposed to last the whole of Friday, October 13.
Many actors and artists felt that this was a failure on Twitter’s part to support the protest against Weinstein. The microblogging website does not shy away from being a platform for protesters and the company has even pointed this out on several occasions. This is also one of the reasons why people feel comfortable expressing their opinions here, be it positive or otherwise.
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Heidi Moore, an editor and advisor, who propagated the idea of the hashtag, expressed her opinion in the following tweet.
I’m in. What day should we choose for #womenboycottTwitter, ladies? Tomorrow? https://t.co/lxam941Pfh
— Heidi N Moore (@moorehn) October 12, 2017
Come on ladies let’s get in formation.
Friday October 13th seems a good boycott day.
Cc @OhNoSheTwitnt @JessicaValenti @feministabulous https://t.co/o2ivS9GmU7
— Heidi N Moore (@moorehn) October 12, 2017
Other celebrities followed suit and tweeted their consent to the protest.
Tomorrow (Friday the 13th) will be the first day in over 10 years that I won’t tweet. Join me. #WomenBoycottTwitter pic.twitter.com/xoEt5Bwj5s
— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) October 13, 2017
In in 🙂 https://t.co/ylX1BQBwDs
— John Cusack (@johncusack) October 13, 2017
My mentions since posting #WomenBoycottTwitter 3 minutes ago #thisiswhy pic.twitter.com/c1GKSmBu32
— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) October 13, 2017
Tomorrow I follow the Women. #WomenBoycottTwitter
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) October 13, 2017
Ok ok Jesus, let me clear this up. #WomenBoycottTwitter will not silence us, but @Twitter will make much less $$ b/c of fewer clicks. I’m in pic.twitter.com/LPEbKJwpgM
— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) October 13, 2017
Responding to the protest, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has pledged to do a clean-up of his company’s service from abuse and threats. In a series of tweets, Jack Dorsey said that the social media platform would deal with the issue in the coming week.
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“We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day. We’ve been working to counteract this for the past 2 years,” Jack Dorsey tweeted. “Today we saw voices silencing themselves and voices speaking out because we’re *still* not doing enough…We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them.”
1/ We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day. We’ve been working to counteract this for the past 2 years.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
2/ We prioritized this in 2016. We updated our policies and increased the size of our teams. It wasn’t enough.
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2017
Twitter responded with its own statement saying on the Rose McGowan ban, “We have been in touch with Ms. McGowan’s team. We want to explain that her account was temporarily locked because one of her Tweets included a private phone number, which violates of our Terms of Service. The Tweet was removed and her account has been unlocked. We will be clearer about these policies and decisions in the future. Twitter is proud to empower and support the voices on our platform, especially those that speak truth to power. We stand with the brave women and men who use Twitter to share their stories, and will work hard every day to improve our processes to protect those voices.”
Rose McGowan thanked the people for the support.
to the women who boycotted, and the #woc who spoke up: I commend you for your disruption, dissent, and for hearing we who have been silenced
— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) October 14, 2017
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