Are athletes, coaches and sports journalists of color enabling white nationalism by staying on Twitter? | Opinion

During the early days of Twitter, after being called the N-word about a dozen times in the span of a few hours, I decided to leave the platform. I can’t remember why I was called so many racial slurs in such a short period – day that ended in ‘Y’ perhaps? But it had happened many times before. This was the Wild West days of Twitter when there were fewer protections, and many women and people of color were targets.

So I left. A short time later, a friend of mine, who is also Black and had endured similar hatred on the platform, and had also stopped using it, told me she had returned, and it was safer (I remember thinking her description sounded so dramatic). I came back, too, and Twitter was much better, and has been for years.

Then Elon Musk bought it. What’s happened since then is the site has changed, for the worse, so fast that at times I can’t believe it. Nothing exemplifies that decline more than the increase in racism on it. Researchers found that the use of the N-word increased 500 percent 12 hours after Musk purchased the platform. There were also dramatic increases in anti-gay, antisemitic and anti-trans language.

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When Musk took over, as the Washington Post and other news organizations note, it was seen as a pivotal moment for bigots. A wide range of anonymous accounts flooded Twitter after Musk started running it.

"Elon now controls twitter. Unleash the racial slurs. K---S and N-----S," read one account, using the slurs for Jews and Blacks, according to the Post.

"I can freely express how much I hate n-----s…now, thank you elon," read another account. It has only gotten worse since then.

I don’t know if Musk is a white supremacist, but the white supremacists think Musk is a white supremacist.

All of this leads to a question that every athlete of color, coach of color, front office member of color, in every sport, in this country and around the world, as well as journalists of color, should be asking ourselves: Are we enabling white nationalism by staying on Twitter?

Twitter’s value as a hub of communication and connection makes it too valuable to easily walk away from, but its rapid descent into a cesspool of white nationalism makes it too problematic to stay.

A number of athletes of color, like LeBron James and Kevin Durant, or European soccer stars, and some NFL players, have hundreds of millions of combined Twitter followers. They make money off it and Twitter makes money off of them.

Same with news organizations and journalists of color. The site has become not just a centrifuge for democracy, acting as a warp core for movements like the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter, but journalists use it to do our jobs, connect with sources and even conduct interviews. News organizations use its influence to push stories and overall monetize our presence on the site.

What’s clear, however, is that the firewall between the lowest form of humanity, and legitimate users of Twitter, has collapsed. Athletes and journalists of color are increasingly swimming in the same Twitter pool as all sorts of rats and walking fungal plagues. We can’t ignore it any longer. This is one of the lowest points in the history of the site.

If you want to say that Twitter has always been this bad, that’s simply not true. Twitter did not have its previous owner re-platform a number of white supremacists, as Musk has done under the guise of free speech, or go on a racist rant, backing the creator of Dilbert, who said he wants to avoid all Black people. (Why? We’re soooo nice and have good barbeque.) Musk tripled down and said the media is anti-white and anti-Asian.

What do you do if you’re James or ESPN's Stephen A. Smith (5.8 million Twitter followers) or Kansas City quarterback Pat Mahomes (2.4 million)? What do you do if you’re a Black baseball player or Latino athlete? Where Twitter has become invaluable but also a magnet for hatred?

I honestly don’t know but it’s something we all need to think about.

Change platforms? Absolutely but many of them seem so primordial. Just leave and go have a life off Twitter? Yes, but Twitter is important to promote your work and make connections. There’s also no better place to find all the journalists you want to read and see.

There are of course much more important things in the world than Twitter and no one is asking for sympathy. That’s not the point. Am I a hypocrite to say all of this and, for now, use Twitter to promote my work and that of co-workers? Absolutely, yes. However, that's not the point, either.

The issue is that the man who white nationalists absolutely adore is slowly destroying a pivotal tool for athletes, coaches, journalists, and others of color, and by staying, we are helping him. That is a fact. How we deal with that is up to each of us individually.

You can say we should stay and fight since this is our space. But we’re discovering a hard truth, and that is, Twitter isn’t ours. We’re at the mercy of Musk and, increasingly, the racists who once again, as they did years ago on Twitter, have a foothold.

So, what do we do now?

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Twitter run by Elon Musk gives bigots platform for hate speech, racism