[No Spoilers] An Open Letter to the Critical Role Community
To the Cast & Crew of Critical Role and our fellow Critters:
Although the r/CriticalRole Mod Team generally discourages political statements and meta discussion regarding the Critical Role community (especially on social media platforms other than Reddit), we feel we can no longer in good conscience ignore the increasingly problematic space formerly known as Twitter. While all platforms have their flaws, Elon Musk's authoritarian mismanagement of Twitter has posed numerous problems:
- Decreased Safety and Moderation - Under Musk's direction, Twitter has rolled back or ceased usage of rules and tools that were once used to combat hate speech and misinformation. Additionally, his disregard for the former verification system created a dangerous environment where malicious actors could easily impersonate official accounts.
- Censorship and Hypocrisy - Despite a supposed love for freedom of speech, Musk has willingly complied with numerous censorship requests from various authoritarian governments and stripped verification from the accounts of specific critics. He has also imposed arbitrary censorship of the terms "cis" and "cisgender," which has disproportionately targeted members of the LGBTQ+ community.
- Decreased Accessibility - Where tweets were once a simple and effective means to convey information to the public, Twitter has locked down access such that the website is virtually unusable unless you already have an account. This makes the entire site a poor vehicle for transmitting information beyond an account's own followers.
- Decreased Reliability - Musk's recklessness and technological incompetence has caused several crashes of the site. Twitter can simply no longer be trusted to be a stable platform for any sort of urgent announcements to a community (e.g. last minute scheduling changes). Even short of full crashes, it has also been repeatedly demonstrated that changes to the site will be hastily deployed with little to no notice or consideration of their impacts.
- Malicious Intent - Beyond the issues above, Elon Musk has repeatedly displayed evidence that he is a spiteful, hateful, and fascist individual who will not hesitate to use any tool at his disposal (including Twitter) for his own selfish ends.
In summary, Twitter no longer aligns with the values of the Critical Role community, and therefore, r/CriticalRole will no longer allow links to x.com or twitter.com. In the future, we may also prohibit other social media platforms that fail to uphold these values or endanger our community.
Furthermore, to the Cast, Crew, and all of our fellow Critters, we humbly ask that you join us in this small effort to improve our community by ceasing all further use and reference of Twitter. As just a subreddit, this ban will have little impact, but together, we have real power. We know this is a difficult thing to ask many of you, as it may mean abandoning memories, friends, or even more, but we would remind you that change is inevitable and encourage you to seek it out on your own terms rather than waiting until it is forced upon you. (Though please beware that if you delete your account, it may be possible for someone else to take your username and effectively steal your identity!) Rebuilding can be hard, but it will always be easier together.
Less than three <3
The r/CriticalRole Mod Team
P.S. Is It Thursday Yet?