Twitter

Animal liberation charity PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has gone and done it again. Notorious for using cheap shock tactics to make a noise and pull in more donations, the organization sent a press release and posted a tweet within an hour of the announcement that fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld (for whom I personally felt no love) had died: ‘Karl Lagerfeld has gone, and his passing marks the end of an era when fur and exotic skins were seen as covetable. PETA sends condolences to our old nemesis’s loved ones.’ Last year, Lagerfeld, who had long defended his use of fur, conceded to demands that that he stop using fur and crocodile, lizard, snake and stingray skins in his designs.

Canadian feminist writer, Meghan Murphy, who was permanently suspended from Twitter last November, is suing the social media site for deceptive trade practices and breach of contract. ‘Twitter would never have attracted the hundreds of millions of users it boasts today had Twitter let it be known that it would arbitrarily ban users who did not agree with the political and social views of its management or impose sweeping new policies banning the expression of widely-held viewpoints and perspectives on public issues,’ Murphy’s lawyers submitted. Good for her!

It wasn’t so long ago Trump’s tweets were easily the planet’s most important media events. Comedy zingers, outrageous denunciations of the previously undenounceable, white knuckle threats of nuclear apocalypse sent in the small hours… how we hung on the leader of the free world’s every word. But now, suddenly, it feels like he’s phoning them in – tweeting by numbers. Where’s the brio? Where’s the zip? The heart seems gone. I can’t help but wonder if he needs more Executive Time. Sure, the insults and the catchphrases are still there, but they no longer carry the famous Trump bite. Take these tweets – two of his more lively – from the last seven days: https://twitter.

It’s A Song of ICE and Fire! Presumably peeved by the notion that Nancy Pelosi’s return to the Speaker’s chair and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high school musical were dominating the day’s headlines, Donald Trump blew off some steam by posting a load of memes on his social media. Topping the ‘Warren 1/2020th’ picture that he borrowed from the Daily Wire to mock the Massachusetts senator, the 45th President of the United States took to Instagram, to offer his followers this Game of Thrones-inspired image: https://www.instagram.com/p/BsMBeLbFLxd/ In George R. R. Martin’s books, The Wall is a 700-feet high divide that runs for one hundred leagues between the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros and the wild lands beyond.

I met Titania McGrath at the Genderfree Silent Poetry Class I used to attend on a Thursday evening at the Basement Bar in York. I remember her standing out from the rest of the artistes because of the amount of screaming she did. Since her first draft of ‘My Ovaries Are The Devil’s Kidneys’ which she wrote back in 2013, her work has come on in leaps and bounds, and improved with every court summons. More recently she has found her niche on Twitter. She inspires thousands of followers, or dare I say, disciples, with a heady mixture of defiant slam poetry and staunch feminist views. Her poems are raw, unbridled, angry, and often nonsensical. Like Lewis Carroll meets Quentin Tarantino.

I woke up this morning to a private message on Twitter from a young student. She had been warned that her account would be suspended if she ‘violated the rules’ again. Her crime? Tweeting details of Sheila Jeffreys’s book, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. Refusing to accept the mantra ‘Trans women are women’ is, in the eyes of many now, a crime, for which there must be punishment. Everyone from massive corporate social media machines to well-meaning liberals seem to be toeing the line. But some of us resist. Meghan Murphy for example, a Vancouver-based feminist journalist, has been permanently banned from Twitter for referring to a man who identifies as a woman as a man.

No one has mastered Twitter like Piers Morgan. Every day he singlehandedly generates great tsunamis of outrage and ecstatically surfs them onto the beach of global fame. In a time – and on a platform – where self-promotion is king, Morgan’s incredible talent for it stands out. Take this week. Morgan began by offering the opinion that Holly Willoughby, telegenic host of the popular British show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, had ‘very sizzling’ legs. Cue predictable howls of indignation about the sexual objectification of a high-profile woman. ‘But Holly’s legs ARE sizzling, just stating a fact’, he tweeted playfully. That was Monday. https://twitter.

You can call for killing foreigners on Twitter and Facebook, as long as you do it in the gentle language of elite respectability. War is OK — especially if it’s a war to liberate somebody somewhere, even if that liberation in practice means ‘liberating’ the poor suckers from their earthly existence or the burden of having living families. Bombs are a benediction we bestow upon those we love. What you cannot say on social media, safe space that it is, is how much you hate the politicians and propagandists who demand this kindly slaughter. When Caitlin Johnstone, a fractious left-wing critic of U.S. foreign policy, voiced her opinion that ‘the world will be improved’ once John McCain ‘finally dies,’ she was suspended from Twitter.