Since Elon Musk’s conclusion of his acquisition of Twitter, my Global North timeline has been in a collective meltdown, with loud claims – primarily by white, left-leaning accounts – that Twitter is finished and they are leaving.
My timeline is also split, once again, almost entirely on racial and geographical lines: few voices from the Global South seem to be seeking other platforms. The same remains true for most Black, indigenous and people of colour in the Global North, who are concerned that the platform will grow worse for us but plan to stay on.
I recognise this divide well, not only from lived reality but long digital experience: just as my experience of the material world is impacted by considerations of class, gender, race and more, so is my digital experience. Twitter has never been safe for minoritised people and, as a woman of colour, my experience of the platform has always been vitiated by an overarching sense of violence: gendered, racialised and sexualised abuse has always been commonplace there. As I have written before, simply being online as a visible minority has long been seen as an invitation for abuse.
