Back on June 23rd, a popular social network took a bold stance for 2019. It decided to pronounce all support of Donald Trump or his #MAGA campaign as hate speech and white supremacy and for the most part ban it from its network. Oddly enough the network that took this stance wasn’t Facebook or Twitter. It wasn’t Tumblr. It wasn’t even MySpace or Friendster. No… the first social network to ban support for Donald Trump from its pages was Ravelry, a knitting community with 8million users across the world. Ravelry took this step not only because of threatening behavior by the Trump supporters towards other members (particularly POC and LGBTQ members), but because the owners of Ravelry deemed the very rhetoric and ideology that the MAGA movement represents to be racist and sexist.
It’s a big step to take for a website devoted to… knitting. And there has been some pushback, as one might expect. Many users complained that the site had no business playing politics and that free speech dictates that they should be able to hold whatever political affiliation they wanted. Of course there’s something odd about saying you want an apolitical space where you can openly express your political view. This may all seem strange at first, but it turns out there’s always been a political connection too knitting, and since Katya is an avid knitter she’s here to break it all down for us. She’s joined by Mav, Hannah and returning guest and knitter, Amy Hummel. Give it a listen and let us know what you think.
Citations and Links:
- Thank you to Maximilian’s thoughtForm Music for our theme
- Follow Amy on Ravelry: @tartanpeacock
- Follow Hannah on Twitter: @hannahleerogers
- Follow Katya on Instagram and Ravelry: @justthatnerdkid
- Follow Mav on Twitter: @chrismaverick
- Follow Mav’s Personal Blog: http://chrismaverick.com
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