If you are on Twitter, which depending on your background, history and sanity I would either recommend or expressly ask you not to be, you will likely have seen an AT&T advertisement with actress Milana Vayntrub. At least once a day I am served a very normal advertisement featuring Ms. Vayntrub, offering some sort of rundown of the available features of the single-least-differentiated industry in the world.
And then I look at the replies, and I see an entire flume of the horniest, nastiest men in the world rambling about her physical features. No, I’m not quoting them, and no, I’m not going to link to it. However, clicking through just about every account responding with some sort of horned-up missive, I’m fairly quickly able to find transphobic, racist and other bigoted messages.
I’ve reported them all, and yet they never seem to go away.
What confuses me is that Twitter, a company ostensibly worth something in the region of $44 billion dollars, regularly seems to miss blatantly obvious accounts to suspend or ban, despite their extremely conspicuous grossness. It’ss not hard to find these accounts — one simply has to use Twitter’s search functionality and add any of the many disgusting ways in which people refer to LGBTQ and you’ll happily happen upon a fresh crop of moles to whack down. Or perhaps you can simply look at the replies to the advertising spend of one of the largest wireless carriers in the world and think “hmm, a woman is in an advertisement…I wonder if…men…might reply in a creepy…
