I’m a verified Twitter user with 11k followers. Here’s why I’m quitting the site.
Content notification: This post contains screenshots of sexual assault threats.
This has been going on for over a week. The tweets shown here only include this user’s mentions of my username. He’s also been harassing anyone who interacts with me or who has a conversation with me on Twitter.
If these interactions look one-sided, it’s because they are. After the first rape threat, I stopped responding to the user. I was not responding or interacting at all for the pages of tweets that follow. In fact, the user had me blocked (and therefore unable to file further abuse reports).
This is only part of the story. Under threat of being reported for abuse, he deleted many of the worst tweets before I could screenshot them.
Edit: I’ve become aware that some people are under the impression that I don’t know where the Block button is, or how to use it. I assure you that is not the case. My blocklist can be found here. Yes, it does include the user in question.
Update: As of the evening of August 31, this user has finally been suspended from Twitter. However, as the harassment was ongoing, Twitter was very well aware of what was happening — I had had conversations with Twitter employees about the ongoing abuse, and several employees escalated my reports about this particular user — but the account stayed up. The user was suspended after I wrote this post, and after BuzzFeed picked it up.
