Fancy Social Media Policy Update
Being on the internet is hard sometimes. Running an internet business is even harder, because not only do you have to deal with all the horrific corollaries to the John Gabriel Greater Internet Dickwad Theory, but your livelihood can depend on how you navigate the pit traps and cesspools of online living. As an online business with minimal income, we rely on free social tools like Twitter, Facebook and others to promote our shows and connect with our audience.
Unfortunately, social media platforms have become a haven for truly toxic behavior. Harassment, white supremacy, violence and hatred, to name just a few examples. Obviously none of this is new to the social media era, but platforms like Twitter, Facebook and others have allowed and amplified groups whose only goal in life seems to be the tearing down of decency and the common good. And for too long, the owners of those platforms have refused to make appropriate and necessary efforts to combat these groups, either out of a sense of unthinking devotion to a twisted form of free speech fetishism or a cynical unwillingness to court controversy out of fear of lost profits.
We at Fancy Pants Gangsters believe firmly and strongly in the first amendment. We don’t believe in government controls on speech. But corporations are not government and as such have no restrictions on policing their own community of users beyond what they themselves feel necessary and right. The only entity in control of Twitter is Twitter, same with Facebook, Instagram and others. We feel that inaction in the face of obvious and counterable evil is the same as association with that evil. And we at Fancy Pants Gangsters are not interested in association with these evils.
So today we will begin voluntarily ending our usage of and association with those social media platforms that we feel are putting insufficient effort into combating the evil within the communities that they have built and maintain. We are beginning with Twitter, in part because we feel that the mechanisms for policing it are stronger and quicker to implement. The accounts of all Fancy Pants Gangsters shows will cease being updated beyond a single update pointing back to this post. This will continue until such time as we believe that Twitter is making a good faith effort to building policies designed to intelligently and constructively combat the poison on its platform and actively begins to enforce those policies. We will also expand this to other platforms as we make judgements and find ways to extricate ourselves from them.
We understand that this is a very low stakes protest. Our influence in the social world is minimal; Twitter will not reel from our absence. And this is not a call for people to abandon Twitter or social media. We also know that these tools are powerful with respect to organizing resistance and making change so we do not begrudge others who continue to use it. We hope that we can find a way to use these tools in the future, both to connect with our fans and promote our little shows. But we can not in good conscience continue to use a tool whose creators choose to run so inappropriately.
If you would like to reach out to your favorite shows, you can click on the email link on each show page or email me directly at evan@fancypantsgangsters.com. Thank you for your continued support.