This Is What It's Like To Be Banned From Twitter: Meghan Murphy Forges Ahead And Falls Behind In Twitter Exile

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2022

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last week, Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for over 41 billion dollars. This came on the heels of his purchase last month of nearly ten percent of the company. This activity has invited speculation that the platform might shift away from what some users see as infamous censoriousness and into more free speech direction. That's why Meghan invited Meghan Murphy onto the podcast. In 2018, Murphy, an independent journalist and blogger, was permanently banned from Twitter for, as she sees it, a few banal tweets about who counts as a woman, a man or anything else. She was never told what exactly was wrong with her tweets and she lost her appeals to be reinstated on the platform. In this conversation, Murphy talks about rebuilding her professional platform after losing access to most of her audience and why Twitter is especially crucial for independent creators. The two Meghans also talk about whether it's easier for them to speak up about controversial subjects because they don't have spouses or kids who might face repercussions.

Guest Bio:

Meghan Murphy is a Canadian writer, the founder and editor of Feminist Current, and the host of the Feminist Current podcast. She was permanently banned from Twitter in 2018 for questioning gender identity ideology and for referring to a male as "he." She hosts The Same Drugs podcast on YouTube and Anchor.fm. Follow her work on Substack: https://meghanmurphy.substack.com/ and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meghanemilymurphy. She is currently based in Mexico.

Transcript

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0:00.0	People act like it's no big thing.
0:05.0	Oh, it's just Twitter.
0:06.0	But this is where public conversations happen.
0:09.0	This is the public square.
0:11.0	And this is where people access information.
0:13.0	And this is where people learn what ideas are okay to talk about.
0:18.0	You know, Twitter has decided you can't say certain things, certain things constitute
0:22.9	hate speech, certain information is dangerous and you can't publish that information. You know,
0:28.8	they have a huge, huge, huge influence. And this is a corporation. This is a company that is
0:35.0	determining what information we can share and access online,
0:40.3	never mind what we're allowed to speak about.
0:47.3	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dowm.
0:51.3	My guest is another Megan, a Megan spelled with an H, just like me. She is
0:57.2	Megan Murphy, and she's a Canadian journalist, public speaker, and podcaster with a long-time
1:02.9	focus on women's issues. In 2012, she founded the website Feminist Current, which took a notably
1:09.2	second wave feminist stance on third wave feminism
1:12.4	and the lens through which that movement viewed things like pornography, sex work, and the
1:18.0	sex industry more broadly. This never made her popular with extremely online millennial and
1:24.2	Gen Z feminists, but what really got Megan in trouble was when she began speaking out
1:29.1	about the ways she thought the new gender movements could harm women and girls in the name of
1:34.8	inclusivity. Now, by Got Really in Trouble, I mean she was permanently banned from Twitter, permanently.
1:43.1	Not for saying anything outrageous, but for as she sees it, a few seemingly banal tweets
	...

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