In the past few days I watched as a woman deleted all her tweets after her tweet about being queer generated hugely hostile reaction from Twitter goon squads. Another woman, a major Never Trumper, briefly stopped posting because her kids were physically threatened by MAGAs.
This happens more to women than men. I’ve never had assaults like these. Maybe that’s at least partly because the photo on my social media bios shows I’m an old white guy. I dunno, maybe that helps. These attacks are ugly and nasty, that’s for sure.
Sometimes Twitter attacks are spearheaded by high-profile accounts who tell their minions to attack the infidels. The attacks can come from the left as well as the right. For Never Trumpers, bots and trolls can be activated fast and are controlled by state actors. The women who tweeted about being queer wasn’t attacked from the right, but by those in different queer factions from her.
If you are under attack on Twitter, try protecting your account in Twitter settings. In protected mode, you have to ok new followers, your tweets are only visible to your followers, and they can’t retweet. Locking down Twitter like this for a few days or a week will probably stop most attacks.
Some Never Trumpers like Eric Garland and John Schindler have protected accounts in addition to their public accounts so people can talk about things peacefully without being invading by Twitter hit squads.
There are no easy answers here. Twitter is a scorched earth war zone sometimes.