Lily is a twenty-something American woman who says she has “been socializing on the internet since Compuserve days.” She started out on message boards, listservs, and LiveJournal when she was just a youth, but these days she mainly finds herself on Twitter, which she joined in 2009. Lily calls Twitter a “kind of a gathering place for my internet friends from various eras of my life” as well as a place where she has made new friends. But Lily is young and clever and attractive and funny, and soon she found herself with more followers than she ever expected. “Like,” she says, “too many.”
Tweeting to her friends, old and new, was one thing, but with an upwards of 4,000 people reading Lily’s tweets, her relationship to the platform transformed. “Once you have a lot of strangers reading what you write, it changes how and what you can tweet about,” she says. Even though her Twitter account doesn’t include her last name, she felt vulnerable. “Anything I write could potentially come back to haunt me in the future.”
So Lily took the next step prescribed by Twitter itself: she locked her account. A locked account lets the user vet their followers, only those the user approves can see their tweets. But there are some things – like sex or drugs or selfies or sadness – that even the most plugged in millennial only wants to talk about with friends, real or virtual, and not discuss in polite company. And when that polite company includes not only the neighbors, coworkers, family friends, and the other often awkward real life acquaintances who follow the average Twitter user, but thousands of faceless strangers – strangers who want to comment on your sex life or drug use or selfies or sadness – those topics become even less approachable. The lockdown didn’t provide a barrier between Lily and the thousands of people who had already followed her account, so she didn’t feel free to tweet with abandon. Lily had been an active LiveJournal user, and recalled their post-by-post privacy settings with fondness – she wanted a forum where she could tell what she wanted to who she wanted, without apology.
Some of Lily’s online friends had started creating “alt” Twitters, private accounts with curated follower lists, where they felt comfortable speaking without self-censorship. Lily thought that this seemed unnecessary – her account was already locked, after all – but she tried it anyways.
And the result? “It’s been GREAT,” Lily says over Gchat, caps blazing, “It's a little bit like starting over, I get to populate a new social world for myself with just people I super like and trust.” While what Lily calls “the social contract” required that she let everyone and their brother (or her brother, as the case may be) follow her locked account, she didn’t feel that the same contract applied to her “alt.” She tweeted out her new handle to the followers of her old account, but carefully considered who would be allowed into her new world. She barred some requesters and says, “I didn’t feel bad rejecting them.” She even instituted another follower prerequisite: no boys allowed.
While not all “alt” accounts are gender-segregated, Lily says that many are. Her own reasons for keeping her feed women-only are two-fold. For one, she feels that she can tweet securely about things like her body or her crushes in a space where men aren’t listening. But the other reason, which Lily calls a “cool, powerful thing about alt twitter,” is that it is a place where women online can “get advice on Is This Dude Who Just Slid in My DMs Okay or What is His Deal” and warn one another about “Bad Dudes.”
Much has been discussed – on this blog and podcast alone, never mind the whole internet – about gender relations online. It’s great for a thinkpiece or a soapbox or a rant, but functionally, interacting with men on the Internet can be tense and confusing for (young, clever, attractive, funny) women like Lily. Of course, of course, #Notallmen are “Bad Dudes.” But some are. And finding out who is Bad and who is Not Bad can be a slippery thing.
Many men can’t sympathize with a woman calling a man out as a “Bad Dude” on public Twitter. It’s damning, it’s his character, it’s slander, it’s he-said, she-said. And that’s all true. But it puts a high burden on each individual woman to sniff out creeps for herself. On alt Twitter, a call out doesn’t have to be the equivalent of a full public shaming; it can function as the sort of backchannel, female-to-female warning system that women have employed in real life for time immemorial. It’s the kind of network that women in Canadian media used to whisper to one another about Jian Ghomeshi. It’s delicate and subjective. As Lily says, “I don't trust men to be privy to that type of information exchange and keep it confidential/not use it in an unsafe way.”
Lily appreciates that her alt Twitter is safe space from abuse and harassment. “When I was unlocked I would just get the most random, gross harassment all the time… I couldn't post a selfie without a random guy popping out of nowhere to say something gross to me.” And, she recalls, “anything feminist I said would draw some MRA trolls out of the woodwork.” And, not as egregious but deeply annoying, she was inundated with the “nice guys” of the Internet – what Lily calls “mentions pests” – male followers who respond to every single tweet with a “boring or inane comment.”
But it’s not just the Bad Dudes who Lily wants to keep out of her alt: it’s the good ones too. Lily says that, because her followers include exes and old flames and current flames and possible flames, she feels “weird” talking about her love life on Twitter. But she also says, dating and romance are “a huge part of my life, and I love being able to talk about it with my girlfriends.” On Twitter, she can make that joke about a crush or bad date, as well as “certain darker facets of [her] life,” that she might not want to blast out to a former or prospective manfriend, or a real life casual acquaintance for that matter, like tweets about mental illness or sexual assault.
Most of Lily’s tweets still come from her main, locked account, appropriate for a wide audience. But her private thoughts now have a home online. While she says that it can be “a bummer” to read a feed full of complaints or bad feelings, Lily doesn’t think it’s necessarily “a bad thing.” She doesn’t want to see alt Twitter “burn out because everyone's just talking about bummer stuff all the time,” but she finds the outlet helpful. “I try to tweet funny secrets, things about my crushes, selfies that are a little too risqué for my main,” but just as her main Twitter account isn’t a complete picture of herself, neither is her alt. It’s her semi-public version of a semi-private life.
There is something lost in all of this locking down – women’s voices. Lily agrees: “I know women who have more followers than me, and unlocked accounts, kind of feel this duty to be unlocked because they think what they're saying is important… it does really suck to basically capitulate to abuse by locking it down.” For Lily, the freedom to tweet her selfies and jokes without being subject to harassment and the ability to connect and commiserate with other women online is a win-win. But it’s a loss for anyone on the wrong side of a follow request, a loss for an Internet that just can’t have nice things.