In the past four months, there have been some disturbing trends on Twitter. Some are clearly brought on by the pandemic and its effects. However, when people kill themselves due to online abuse, the pandemic stops becoming an excuse. As minor attracted people, we deserve better than the abuse we receive, and it is out of the fact that we are humans worthy of respect that we come together as a community and write the following:

Dear Twitter,

We write to you as minor attracted people who are wholly against the sexual abuse and exploitation of children. In the last few months on your platform, there has been a large uptick in hatred towards us. In January alone, 11 minor attracted people were suspended with zero explanation and another 5 were locked. On April 21st, you suspended Robert West (@robertwest5), despite zero history of rule violations and no reason given. His has not been the first. On April 30th, you also suspended David (@filledwithnoise). Both are staff in MAP Support Club, an online support chat for minor attracted people to remain law-abiding.

We fully understand that you need to keep children safe on your platform. Part of keeping children safe is creating a safe environment for your users, and we are within the terms of service to talk about minor attraction, which is important to preventing sexual abuse. You may remember the letter that many experts and professionals signed in January, 2018. However, we are consistently targeted with threats, told we’re better off dead, told to kill ourselves, baseless and wrong accusations of illegal behaviors, and more. Many in our community are minors themselves or young adults.

On May 9th, a 19-year-old ally to our community by the name of Randy killed himself. His account was suspended at the direction of law enforcement, and an FBI investigation is looking into the matter. Randy was severely harassed on Twitter and in real life. Following that suicide, there has been in uptick in expressing suicidal thoughts by many in and around our communities. Our fear is that unless you take quicker action on accounts that engage in this toxic behavior, there will be more suicides.

Even more concerning and pertinent are the groups that specifically make it their mission to abuse your platform’s reporting system to mass report innocent accounts, despite many reports on our part and a finding of “no violation” by your trust and safety team.

The purpose of our accounts is to push publicly the fact that most minor attracted people remain law-abiding and people can control their behavior so that they can have support. We want to be seen as human, not monsters, and we want better supports available to us so that there is less trauma in the world, including child sexual abuse. By unfairly suspending our accounts, you make that harder to do.

We recommend that you do more to combat this abuse on your platform by:

– Flagging specific abusive keywords and graphics used by hate communities and giving reports containing them higher priority in your queue.
– Quickly action reports made by minor attracted people regarding hate messages with the same severity you do for other targeted minorities.
– Stop allowing hate networks, whose only goal is to deplatform a minority group, on your platform.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our community via @MAPSupportClub. We would be happy to put together our knowledge of these hate communities to aid you in combating toxicity on your platform.

Signed with sincerity:

There were also three ally signatures (in addition to several allies who signed above), one who requested to remain anonymous: