Manal al-Sharif: We need a new social media, Twitter is a trap: Why I deleted my Twitter account
Themes: Online harassment, propaganda, misinformation silencing tool of governments, dictatorships, and tyrants.
Decentralised, non-advertising-based media are required.
Also:
Social media ‘aids oppressors’, says Saudi rights campaigner
Manal al-Sharif, a leader in the fight for Saudi women’s right to drive, claims Twitter is used to harass activists
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/28/twitter-facebook-saudi-oppression
Transcript
Good morning everyone. I am in Stockholm, Sweden, and yesterday in Singularity U, I decided to delete my Twitter account live on stage in a protest of how this tool that once saved my life is now being used to put my life and the life of a lot of human rights and activists in danger.
If you look at world wide trends today it is ... I am Arab, and Mohammed bin Salman represents me. This tells you who is in control now of Twitter: Twitter is being controlled by trolls, by pro-government mobs, and by bots. Those are being paid by pro-government [agent]s who want to silence, intimidate, harass, dissidents and anyone who speaks the truth. Twitter today is being used by the same governments that we spoke against to disclose all the violations against human rights. It's being used by them to silence us, and not only to silence us but to propagate their propaganda, to also push for disinformation, and to harass and silence every single true voice.
People I know, people I trusted -- people I'd thought were friends, and who have critical thinking -- they've been brainwashed by the messages being pushed by the pro-Saudi government (voices), in a way that is horrendous. I ... I wonder is this really happening? Is this really true?
Ali Alzabarah), the Saudi Twitter employee, who had close ties with Saudi Intelligence, had had access to private accounts of Saudi activists providing this information to the Saudi government.
Day by day, more and more, we know about "influentials" -- Twitter influentials -- who were harrassed, sent to prison, and even disappeared. Reports by companies like McKinsey -- _The New York Times talked about that [hhttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/20/us/politics/saudi-image-campaign-twitter.html] -- really make me worried.
Twitter is now becoming a trap, and it's being used in a very efficient way by these governments, and dictatorships and tyrants to silence us, and not only that, but to spread their own propaganda, their own hate speech, their own misinformation and disinformation. This is why I protested yesterday by deleting my Twitter account, and will not go to that platform. Now I'm also deleting my Facebook account, because I don't feel safe being on these accounts.
This is a call -- if you are a Tech Maker -- this is a call for people who believe that freedom of speech safeguards all other freedoms.
We need to create a blockchain-enabled social media. We need to create social media that is decentralised, that can be used to push for the truth, and cannot be bought. That doesn't have the business model of Twitter which is based on who pays, and they don't care about anything but how many people are signing up for accounts.
[Twitter] deleted 70 million fake, malicious accounts this year. Where were they since the company started, and since Saudis began using Twitter to push for human rights?
In 2011 when I joined [Twitter], I remember a friend of mine who told me that he'd joined because his mother joined to follow our campaign to enable Saudi women the right to drive. He felt so embarrassed that he didn't have an account on Twitter, and so he joined. That year, the number of Twitter users was 60 million, today it is 380 million. People joined Twitter and these platforms because they believed in these causes, and they believed in the things that we called for. But if the same tools that we used for liberation once are being used to oppress us, are being used to undermine us, are being used to spread hate and fake news -- I'm out of these platforms.
I'll continue speaking up because tyrants and dictators are the ones who should be afraid, not us.
Lightly edited for continuity and clarity, otherwise as close as possible to the original.
#twitter #onlineMedia #decentralizedWeb #federation #decentralization