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A safe digital space for all of us – Women should be at the table shaping it

                                                                                         By Artemis Westenberg

International Women’s Day in 2023 had an unexpected effect for me: being recognized on the streets of New York by women attending the CSW67 and belonging to the Caucus of Europe and North America, or being political leaders of (inter)national governments. However surprising for me, I should have expected questions from many sides as I have been talking ‘spoutible’ left and right here at the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and people want to know what it really is, and where to go to check it out. 

I am certain that the readers here are wondering now too: What is Spoutible? 

This year’s CSW centers around digital life and the safe access of women to digital space. SAFE is the operative word here as Twitter and Facebook can be described as hellscapes for any woman who is offering an opinion online, sometimes even just for being online. Hate speech centering on what you look like, threats of sexual violence, are easily your harvest after a tweet or post. That being so, more and more women decide to not interact on the digital media sites at all. Which to me is on par with not daring to go out in the evening because the chance that you are attacked as woman is real. Basically, digital harassment is taking away another space from us. 

What we want, nay, what we need, is a Social Media space where we can interact with others without these hateful reactions from others. 

A space that may be like that is a new one called Spoutible. It is built by a small business owner from New York, after requests from twitter-users (me among them) to build a better Twitter. Cristopher Bouzy, owner of Bot Sentinel, has the know-how to do that and after prodding by many people he stepped up and built a Twitter 2.0. It has a Whale (hence: Spoutible) as image, where you Spout (=tweet), Echo (retweet), Quote (retweet with comment), Hearth (tell the poster you liked the Spout). Your timeline is filled with accounts you FOLLOW. There is no algorithm behind the hearts that muck up your timeline. Unless you Echo while naming the original Spouter (@Artemis_on_Mars , in case you want to Echo me) that person will NOT become more visible. Those are the small differences. 

The BIG differences are that after two warnings you will be kicked off the platform for: 
  • Hate speech (and that includes memes or images used for harassment) 
  • NON-consensual sharing of naked images (no revenge porn, or images from a third person that did not agree to be shown naked on the platform) 
  • Transgenders can chronicle their transformation in images
  • Sex workers report that they have a safe space here
  • FAKE-news 
  • LIES: not allowed by companies in their advertisements, nor by politicians 

Here in the UN, I’m making the rounds and am telling governments and women (organizations) to make this new Social Media platform the safe social media site. So far, I have piqued the interest of the governments in the Nordic Council, UNESCO director, Caucus of Europe and North America, UNOOSA, Council of Europe leadership, assortment of parliamentarians from The Netherlands, Belgium, UK, USA, Space community in Europe and the USA. 

To be clear: I’m not an employee of Spoutible. The owner, to whom I write emails informing him about the UN CSW calls for a safe digital media space, probably does not understand who this person is who is writing to him. 

Regularly we, the users, are asked how we want policies to be written, how we want them to be enforced in surveys where thousands of us answer and that survey then is the basis for the policy. As it is important that we, the users, the female users as much as the male users, need to be part of the decision-making process, this makes me hopeful that this Spoutible is what is going to be my go-to Social Media platform. 

Remember: WE CAN be at the table while digital platforms are further developed. 
As WE CAN claim this digital space, WE SHOULD. 
Life can be that simple. 


Artemis Westenberg



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