This is where the fake social media friendship is especially deadly. When you vent your anger and despair, it feels like you’re screaming into a docile void, the digital equivalent of screaming into a pillow. Who cares about “organizing strategies”? You’re in pain, dammit, fuck everyone else, you just need to scream, cry, scream. The problem is that you’re not screaming into the void, you’re screaming where everyone else can hear it. And your words will affect them.
The insidious thing is that the drafts of social networks us in spreading the gospel of imminent death. Social media doesn’t just show us sources of despair. it shows us living desperate. That creates a dark resonance effect, feeding back and amplifying itself over and over again, until it’s all some of us can hear.
“I wonder,” Branstetter continued, “if people lose sight of the frame and get lost in the picture.” The framework, of course, is the emphasis of bad news on social media. He added that people, especially trans people, risked “not seeing the ways in which they are being steered towards certain ends. [by Twitter].”
This has always been a problem on Twitter, but it’s exponentially worse now that the platform doesn’t even claim to moderate or control bigotry. For example, I’ve noticed many people reporting an extraordinary amount of far-right bigotry on the new For You tab on Twitter. I haven’t seen the same on my own, but I don’t post anymore, except to promote my work very occasionally. Still, the far-right attack never materialized for me. Part of that probably has to do with the fact that I don’t ask the platform to show it to me. But others may, without thinking, go out of their way to tell Twitter’s dying algorithm to show them ever more exotic sources of misery.
it’s hard overcome the impulse of algorithmic suppression, but our hearts and minds remain our own. Us can defend them against colonization by hate activists, who feed on our despair like a demon in a German fairy tale.
What is needed instead of relentless harbingers of doom is a constant reminder of what we are fighting for, especially for those trans people who rely on social media for any sense of community, a point Branstetter often returns to. It’s especially important that they get to see what trans prosperity looks like. Especially our youth. As the sociologist Tey Meadow put it over a decade agowe need “inspiration for the children who are still here… They need stories of teenagers like them who are safe and happy now.”
That way, all the trans people who have ever posted a cute selfie are doing their part. But beyond that, there are weddings, graduations, parties, new homes, families, smiles, and beauty that the transition made possible. It’s important for people to see, for trans people to be reminded that their lives are worth living, and for cis people to see that our lives are more than just tragedy and precariousness.