PODCAST: Mary Kate Fain has found a woman-centered solution to Twitter censorship in Spinster
Massive social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have come under criticism, of late, for censorship, as well as for failing to support women’s interests. Recently, Twitter has taken to suspending users for criticizing gender identity ideology and for discussing basic biological facts about men and women. We do not have a public social media platform where we are free to challenge and ask questions about the impact of gender identity legislation and ideology on women and girls. People are afraid to speak out, for fear of being targeted, bullied, threatened, fired, or worse, and companies like Twitter are reinforcing this. But Mary Kate Fain has come up with one hopeful solution: Spinster — a woman-centered social media platform that does not allow users to use the term TERF as an insult, but does allow users to say that men aren’t women… The platform launched on Monday, and has been overloaded by users signing up. Mary Kate is the founder of Spinster, a writer, and an engineer. She is currently writing a book on radical feminism for young women, and volunteers with the Women’s Human Rights Campaign. Find her online at marykatefain.com or @mk@spinster.xyz. (And find me @meghanmurphy@spinster.xyz!) In this episode, I speak with Mary Kate about losing her job for writing critically about gender identity ideology and about Spinster — why it matters, what its purpose is, and where she hopes it will go.