Issa Rae in the new Twitter ad campaign, #HereWeAre.
As double Oscars nominee Mary J. Blige took to the stage last night to perform a lavish rendition of “Mighty River” from the film Mudbound, staff at Twitter HQ uploaded a tweet that read: “We stand with women around the world to make their voices heard and their presence known. To bring them front and center, today and every day. Join us as we say, #HereWeAre.”The tweet was accompanied by a minute-long video featuring New York-based writer and performer Denice Frohman reading a specially composed poem, accompanied by footage of women of different ethnicities and ages, including filmmakers Issa Rae, Ava DuVerney, and Julie Dash.“When a girl pronounces her own name, then there is glory,” Frohman recited. “When a woman tells her own story, she lives forever.” The new ad campaign, which also premiered on the Oscars telecast on ABC, urged users to tweet #HereWeAre in solidarity with women around the world.Twitter’s message of female solidarity and community empowerment didn’t go over well with many users, who pointed to the site’s continued failure to prevent women and marginalized groups from harassment.Many users highlighted Twitter’s failure to ban neo-Nazis and far right groups from the platform. “I loved the poem. Ban Nazis. Thanks,” replied one user. “I’m aware of the irony, but Twitter marketing is either disconnected from reality or extremely tone-deaf with their Oscars ad," said another.Indeed, even as Twitter celebrated women, A Fantastic Woman star Daniela Vega—the first transgender woman to present an award at the Oscars—was receiving transphobic abuse on the platform."On the night that Twitter runs an ad celebrating women, they allow absolutely brutal trolling on this tweet about the Oscars’ first openly transgender presenter," tweeted Sleeping Giants, a campaign that aims to stop ad dollars on racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic websites. "Don’t talk it if you can’t walk it, Twitter."In the wake of Me Too and Time’s Up movements, major corporations and tech companies alike are standing up in support of women and minoritised groups. But criticism of Twitter's new campaign shows sophisticated social media campaigns mean little if companies aren’t willing to invest in the infrastructure necessary to protect these groups from hateful abuse and misogyny.A 2015 report from the US nonprofit Women, Action, and the Media found that Twitter only took action against the accounts of alleged harassers in 55 percent of sample cases. A 2016 report from British think tank Demos found that the platform was plagued by misogynistic language, with over 200,000 aggressive tweets using the words “slut” and “whore” sent to 80,000 UK users in a three-week period.From Gamergate to the concerted harassment campaign against Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones, women and marginalized groups have consistently endured egregious abuses on the platform. In 2016, media critic Jennifer Pozner told Broadly that Twitter was consistently behind the curve when it comes to protecting its users from online hate.“There's been a little bit of movement on Twitter's part in the past couple of years to try to popularize and expand their reporting tools for harassment, but they still have a really long way to go," Pozner said. "They need to figure out ways to make sure there is zero tolerance for ongoing harassment and threats to their users."Broadly reached out to Twitter to ask if it was planning any specific new protections for female users as part of the #HereWeAre campaign, but it had not responded at the time of publication.
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