Rose McGowan is a sexual assault survivor of Hollywood’s infamous Harvey Weinstein. A traumatizing hotel room incident in 1997 caused her to obtain an influential voice in the matter, fighting for the women who experience sexual assault everyday. She shares her voice on many online platforms with Twitter being the major one (Chan). On October 12th 2017, McGowan tweeted about Weinstein’s maltreatment to speak out against the issue. Twitter then suspended McGowan’s account, with their reason being that she violated one of their policies by including a personal phone number in the series of tweets, as reported from The New York Times. After posting on Instagram that her account had been suspended, she called on her followers and anyone who wanted to join the fight to “be her voice” (Chan). In this case she had no voice because of Twitter, so other women decided that they weren’t going to either. #WomenBoycottTwitter started trending on October 12th and the next day, Friday October 13th, women’s voices were silenced in protest against the platform (Zhang).
“Participatory culture”, defined to be “a range of different groups deploying media production and distribution to serve their collective interests”, is directly linked to fandoms as described by Henry Jenkins in his article “Why Media Spreads” (2). McGowan’s fandom, referred to as the “Rose Army”, was a force not to be reckoned with due to the power they held in circulating the same media, which was the thousands of posts using #WomenBoycottTwitter (Jenkins 1; Bonazzo). McGowan created a social dynamic from participatory culture that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible without the existence of social media. Her voice on the online platform made it possible for people to come together in such large masses and stand up against this societal issue instead of shying away from it. There would be a definite lack of communication and numbers needed to speak out against people like Harvey Weinstein and to stick up for his victims without social media platforms like Twitter. In McGowan’s case, Twitter acted as a positive and negative factor. It gave a portal for people to share opinions and band together to start conversation but it also acted against that conversation. Twitter shouldn’t be silencing individuals who are creating conversation about serious issues of sexual harassment, especially in this day and age. Their response to the controversy was deceiving and lacked personal touch, like they copied and pasted it from their library of automated responses: “Twitter is proud to empower and support the voices on our platform, especially those that speak truth to power. We stand with the brave women and men who use Twitter to share their stories, and will work hard every day to improve our processes to protect those voices.” (Twitter). Twitter or any platform of social media may or may not attempt to protect the voices of their users but if they choose not to, they will face the forceful social dynamic of their own users in protest.
Works Cited
Bonazzo, John. “The Biggest Twitter Storms of 2017.” Observer, 26 December 2017, https://observer.com/2017/12/social-media-controversies-year-in-review/. Accessed on 1 November 2018.
Chan, Melissa. “Here’s Why Rose McGowan’s Twitter Account Was Suspended.“ The New York Times, 12 October 2017, http://time.com/4980004/rose-mcgowans-twitter-harvey-weinstein/ . Accessed on 1 November 2018.
Jenkins, Henry, Ford, Sam, and Green, Joshua. “Introduction: Why Media Spreads.” NYU Press, 2013.
Twitter Safety, 12 October 2017, https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/918502757102903296?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E918502757102903296&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Ftime.com%2F4980004%2Frose-mcgowans-twitter-harvey-weinstein%2F. Accessed 1 November 2018.
Zhang, Laura. “Banning of Rose McGowan prompts a Twitter boycott by feminists.” The Independent, 13 October 2017, http://theindependent.sg/banning-of-rose-mcgowan-prompts-a-twitter-boycott-by-feminists/. Accessed on 1 November 2018.