Chrissy Teigen, Sarah Paulson, and More Boycott Twitter to Protest the Silencing of Women
You won’t be seeing any of Chrissy Teigen‘s delightfully acerbic wit in your Twitter timeline today. On Friday, October 13, Teigen and other celebs are joining a widespread day-long boycott of the social networking platform to protest the rampant silencing of women.
The boycott was proposed on Thursday, after Twitter briefly suspended Rose McGowan’s account from tweeting for violating their terms of use. This came after she had spent the previous few days tweeting about the Harvey Weinstein scandal and calling out Ben Affleck’s apparent hypocrisy after he released a statement on the matter. Onlookers —and McGowan herself—took the suspension (which only lasted a few hours) as yet another example of women being silenced while men are allowed to say and do whatever they want without consequence.
“What if women boycotted Twitter for a week? A day?” one Twitter user wrote in reply to a tweet about McGowan’s lockout. And thus the idea for a boycott was hatched, using the hashtag #WomenBoycottTwitter.
Later on Thursday, many celebrities announced their intent to join the boycott. “Ladies. Let’s do this. #WomenBoycottTwitter. Not because of hate but because I love this platform and know it can be better,” Teigen wrote. “Tomorrow. No secret timeline checking, no tweets, no clicking the bluebird square. They need to see we matter.” She continued, “I’m boycotting for many reasons. To stand with the victims of sexual assault, online threats and abuse. And to boycott the fact our demented, pussy grabbing president can tweet nuclear threats of war I can’t even see.”
Debra Messing, Amber Tamblyn, Alyssa Milano, and countless other celebrities, including several me, joined Teigen in relaying their reasons for participating in the boycott and then bidding the platform adieu. Others, like Ava DuVernay, expressed conflicted feelings over the boycott, which seemingly serves only to further silence women, an undesirable effect for women of color in particular, who are silenced more often and in greater numbers than white women. “Calling white women allies to recognize conflict of #WomenBoycottTwitter for women of color who haven’t received support on similar issues,” DuVernay wrote.
Twitter has yet to comment on the boycott, but when asked for comment on Thursday regarding McGowan’s suspension and the proposed boycott, a representative for the site reiterated its initial statement about McGowan’s lockout, which read, “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.”
Related: Rose McGowan Was Suspended on Twitter for Posting “a Private Phone Number”
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