After an uncomfortable incident yesterday I feel like I need to say a thing. When you criticize how a woman who focuses on feminism and social justice, particularly a woman with a larger follower count, uses her TL especially with regard to QTing, please consider a few things:

1. They’ve been doing this a while, and are pretty good at spotting when someone is acting in bad faith. The function of a QT is because you have a point to make about the tweet you’re quoting. 2. With more visibility, there are way more assholes than smaller accounts deal with.

A LOT more. Consider that the average day is filled with harassers and bad faith actors trying to “gotcha” them in their mentions. It’s exhausting and as much as you wanna just brush it off, it gets to you, it gets to you in your soul cuz it’s like trying to hold back the tide.

Further, consider that with a bigger platform comes more responsibility. You have to be so much more mindful of the content you share. How you word every single tweet. If you want to use your account for good change, it’s a lot of emotional labor to curate what you put out there.

Typically you QT someone when you feel your commentary on it is important for others to consider. Automatically attributing it to bullying or inciting a pile on is pretty lacking in generosity of spirit. It’s projecting malicious intent onto someone who educates others FOR FREE.

Having a large follower count is not a tiptoe through the tulips. It’s stressful. Not everyone is comfortable with attention, but still might want to use their platform for good. So you put up with harassment. And abuse. And sea lions. Some of us aren’t here to collect followers.

But deciding as a much smaller account that women shouldn’t be using the QT function after an arbitrary x amount of followers sure seems a lot like trying to tell women with voices and a platform to shut up.

Also at least consider you don’t know what it’s like til you’re there.