WomenBoycottTwitter Has Just Resulted in a Platform-Wide Safety Overhaul

In the days that followed the New York Times bombshell investigation into decades of alleged sexual harassment and sexual assault by Hollywood producer-mogul Harvey Weinstein, one voice kept chiming in on Twitter: Rose McGowan's. Her tweets, which called out actors including Ben Affleck for being complicit, seemingly resulted in Twitter locking her account. Twitter issued a statement saying that it was because she had posted a private phone number, but women on Twitter were incensed at what they saw was a silencing of her crucial testimony and voice, and McGowan herself shared user posts claiming the same.

One user, who Hollywood Reporter traces to a software engineer named Kerry Ellis, came up with the idea for a female-driven boycott of the social media platform in protest, and by Thursday, according to THR, it was Twitter's number-one-trending hashtag, with celebrities like Chrissy Teigen, Anna Paquin, Amber Tamblyn, and McGowan herself (who had by that time been "unlocked") tweeting support of it.

Although it wasn't met without criticism—a few critiques noted that women self-silencing themselves gave misogynistic Internet trolls exactly what they wanted—a Friday without women's voices on the platform created some serious attention. Enough, in fact, to turn the heads of Twitter's top brass. On Saturday, CEO Jack Dorsey released a statement (via Twitter, of course), announcing new policies aimed at protecting the safety of users on a platform somewhat known for its abusive trolls.

"Today we saw voices silencing themselves and voices speaking out because we’re still not doing enough," part of Dorsey's statement reads. "We’ve been working intensely over the past few months and focused today on making some critical decisions. We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them. New rules around: unwanted sexual advances, nonconsensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence."

According to his tweets, the changes will roll out in the following weeks.

Twitter had hinted at the release in their statement addressing McGowan's locked account:

It's worth noting that locking McGowan's account didn't do much to silence her: Just a few hours after it was reactivated, she named Weinstein as her alleged rapist and said that Amazon had known about it after she told the head of the behemoth company's studio.

(McGowan confirmed to THR that "HW" was indeed Weinstein.)

As Amazon's production arm goes into shake-up mode—as of Saturday it had canceled a high-budget production with ties to the Weinstein Company and suspended its studio head—we'll keep an eye out for more details about what exactly Twitter means by its new rules. One thing's for sure, though: More safety measures on the platform could only help.

Related Stories:
-Rose McGowan Was Suspended From Twitter After Tweeting About Ben Affleck
-Harvey Weinstein Says He's 'Not Doing OK' Before Leaving for Treatment Center
-[An Explosive Report Alleges Decades of Sexual Harassment by Harvey Weinstein](https://www.glamour.com/story/explosive-nyt-report-alleges-sexual-harassment-harvey-weinstein]