Twitter Is Silencing Women

It all started last November, when I saw a tweet that stated, "Men's suicide rates are far higher than that of women in almost every country," pop up on my feed. Attached was a graph that compared suicide rates between men and women in selected countries. According to the information on the graph, the data was from 2016 and sourced from the World Health Organisation. The tweet was accompanied by "#WhyMenNeedABreak," a hashtag that men were using at the time to speak up about how traditional gender roles and "toxic masculinity"— a term used in psychology to refer to traditional cultural masculine norms that tend to be harmful to men, women and society overall—affects their mental health.

As a scientist and a mental health advocate, the data was easy for me to interpret. Given that the International Survivors of Suicide Day (November 23) was nearing, I decided to tweet in response. "This is the suicide gender paradox," I wrote. "Women often have more suicidal thoughts than men, but men commit suicide more frequently. Moreover, mental illnesses like depression and anxiety are more common in women than in men. Why do men die more, then? Because of toxic masculinity."

This explanation—that traditional gender roles and ideas of femininity and masculinity are to blame for the suicide gender paradox—is one espoused by experts, including mental health experts and advocates, researchers and social scientists, and is supported by plenty of evidence. While men are socialized to "man up" and be "macho," women are socialized differently. They are much more likely to ask for help (even though, ironically, being a woman means you're less likely to be taken seriously, even by doctors.)

But despite this scientific evidence, no sooner had my tweet gone live than a legion of angry twitter users, mostly men, came baying for my blood. I was deemed "controversial" and "anti-men," and my thoughts "toxic feminist bullshit." Another said I was "trying to sissify the world." Sexist slurs were thrown at me. I had committed the deadliest of Twitter crimes: I had "brought" sex and gender into a discussion that "had nothing to do" with either. Never mind that the original tweet was a comparison of suicide rates between men and women.

My point was that if we as a society are truly serious about addressing mental health, illness, and suicide, then we need a complete upheaval of society's views on gender, femininity, and masculinity. This is also the point the original poster was discussing with their Twitter users. What made my tweet drastically different was that I had named "toxic masculinity." Mental health advocates were campaigning against toxic masculinity in a bid to save men's lives. Still, these men were choosing misogyny over their own lives, preferring death as opposed to what they call "sissying up"—they wouldn't give up misogyny even when it's literally killing them.

I had to mute the tweet due to all the vitriol I was getting. Additionally, I reported and blocked some of the really nasty accounts. Even when I did, though, some who couldn't get to me on Twitter followed me to other social media platforms such as Facebook. When interest in the tweet finally died down in January, it got picked up again by a group of white men, and the bashing became racialized, on top of everything else. In mid-January, Twitter locked me out of my account because my tweet had supposedly "violated Twitter's policy against hateful conduct." At the behest of male users, the phrase "toxic masculinity" is hate speech against men. Ah, the irony.

This was the first time I was locked out of Twitter, but not the first time I have faced such abuse online. I was targeted when I was at the forefront of an online campaign for women's sexual and reproductive rights that saw the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Sicily Kariuki, un-ban Marie Stopes. I was targeted when I supported the move to repeal sections 162 and 165 of the Penal Code, which are used to criminalize same-sex relations. I was targeted when I talked about the importance of upholding the two-thirds gender rule. Yes, there's a theme.

In Kenya, where I live, online abuse is underreported and not widely studied. However, it was recently reported that the Communications Authority of Kenya pulled down 30 million social media posts last year over cybercrimes, including indecent exposure of minors and online sexual harassment.

In the May 2019 World Press Freedom Day Summit held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, journalists from all over the world testified that women bear the brunt of online abuse. According to Amnesty International, online abuse against women is a human rights issue. When the organization called on Twitter to release meaningful information on the scale of the abuse against women and other protected groups, Twitter refused to do so.

Amnesty International undertook a crowdsourced study into the issue in 2018 and found that 7.1% of tweets sent to 778 women journalists and politicians in the US and UK in the previous year were abusive or problematic. Additionally, women of color were 34% more likely to be targets of harassment than white women, and black women were targeted worst of all—1 in every ten tweets sent to black women was abusive or problematic, whereas, for white women, it was 1 in 15. Results from a similar study in India that analyzed 114,716 tweets mentioning 95 Indian women politicians from March to May 2019 showed that the women received over 10,000 problematic or abusive tweets every day amongst them, with Muslim women receiving 94.1% more ethnic or religious slurs than women politicians from other religions.

Amnesty International also found that Twitter has inadequately responded to this abuse, and that has had a chilling effect on women's experiences on the platform; women "self-censor what they post, limit or change their interactions online or are driven off the platform altogether," according to the report.

Sadly, I am just another statistic in this Twitter experience. Twitter's own policy against hateful conduct acknowledges that women, people of color, LGBTQI+ persons, and other marginalized and historically underrepresented communities are disproportionately targeted with online abuse. Yet, here I am: black, African, female, and forcefully exiled from Twitter in favor of my male bullies.