Shafiqah Hudson was job hunting in early June 2014, switching between Twitter and email, when she noticed a strange hashtag trending on the social media platform: #EndFathersDay.
The posters claimed to be black feminists but had dubious handles like @NayNayCan’tStop and @CisHate and @LatrineWatts. They stated that they wanted to abolish Father’s Day because, they said, it was a symbol of patriarchy and oppression.
They didn’t look like real people, thought Mrs. Hudson, but parodies of black women, spouting ridiculous sentences. As Ms Hudson told Forbes magazine in 2018, “Anyone with half the sense that God gave a cold bowl of oatmeal could see that these were not feminist sentiments.”
But the hashtag continued to trend, upsetting the Twitter community, and conservative media picked up on it, citing it as an example of feminism gone off the rails and “a clear illustration of the cultural trajectory of progressivism,” as Dan McLaughlin, senior writer at National Review, he tweeted at that time. Fox News devoted a segment of its “Fox & Friends” show to mocking it.
So Ms. Hudson set out to fight what she realized was a concerted effort by trolls. She created her own hashtag, #YourSlipIsShowing, a Southernism that seemed especially useful, to call out people who think they’re showing off.
He started collating the trollers’ posts under the hashtag and encouraged others to do so and block the fake accounts. Her Twitter community took on the mission. They included black feminists and academics like I’Nasah Crockett, who did some digging on her own and discovered that #EndFathersDay was a hoax, she told Slate in 2019, organized on 4chan, the dark community of web forums created by right-wing groups hatred.
Twitter, Ms. Hudson and others said, was largely unresponsive. However, their actions were effective. #EndFathersDay was pretty much silenced within weeks, though fake accounts continued to pop up over the years and Ms. Hudson continued to call them out, like a never-ending game of Whac-a-Mole.
However, #EndFathersDay, it turns out, was more than a joke. It was a well-structured disinformation operation. As Bridget Todd, a digital activist who interviewed Ms. Hudson in 2020 for her podcast, “There Are No Girls on the Internet,” put it, it was a kind of trial balloon for the election campaign that began in 2016 with tactics. by Russian agents, as the Senate hearings have shown. In retrospect, Ms. Hudson’s efforts contributed to an early and effective bulwark against the misinformation that can threaten democracy.
“It should be validation,” Ms. Hudson told Slate. “But instead it was upsetting and disturbing. No one wants to be right about the real danger we all face, even if you saw it coming.”
Ms. Hudson, a freelance writer who had worked for nonprofits but since 2014 had devoted herself to Twitter activism, died on Feb. 15 at an extended-stay hotel in Portland, Ore. He was 46 years old.
Her brother, Salih Hudson, confirmed her death but said he did not know the cause. He had Crohn’s disease and respiratory ailments, she said. Her followers said in her posts that she had long had Covid and had recently been diagnosed with cancer – and that she had no money to pay for her care. Many rushed to help.
Her followers expressed frustration and anger that Ms. Hudson had never been paid by the tech companies whose platforms she policed, that she had not been properly credited by scholars and news organizations that reported #YourSlipIsShowing, and that she had not received the health care she needed.
“The world owed Fiqah more than it gave her,” Mikki Kendall, cultural critic and author of “Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot” (2020), said by phone. Ms Kendall is one of several black feminists who have taken up Ms Hudson’s mission and befriended her on Twitter, now called X.
“The world owes it to Fiqah to never allow this to happen to anyone else,” Ms Kendall said. “Unfortunately, there’s a long tradition of black women activists who die impoverished, who die sick and alone and scared because we love an activist until they need something.”
Shafiqah Amatullah Hudson was born on January 10, 1978, in Columbia, SC. Her father, Caldwell Hudson, was a martial arts instructor and author. Her mother, Geraldine (Thompson) Hudson, was a computer engineer. The couple divorced in 1986, and Shafiqah grew up with her mother and brother, mostly in Florida, where she attended the Palm Beach County School of the Arts, a magnet school.
Shafiqah earned a bachelor’s degree in 2000 from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, majoring in Africana studies with a minor in political science. After graduation, she moved to New York and worked at various non-profit organizations.
She was new in town and alone. He found community on blogs and social networking sites, including Twitter, which he joined in 2009. (She chose as her avatar an image of Edna Mode, the haughty fashion maven from “The Incredibles.”) And like many black women on this platform, she was mocked and harassed. She received rape and death threats, she told Mrs. Todd.
In addition to her brother, Mrs. Hudson is survived by her father and sisters, Kali Newnan, Charity Jones and Mosinah Hudson; Geraldine Hudson died in 2019.
In the final months of her life, Ms Hudson published about her declining health and her fears of not being able to pay for her care or housing. She could not work because of her disabilities.
She had moved to Portland, her brother said, because the climate was better for her respiratory ailments. But he was unable to secure health insurance. Doctors had discovered that the painful fibroids she was suffering from were cancerous. He needed money for more biopsies and for transport to the hospital. Her Twitter community chipped in, as always. She didn’t ask her family for help.
“She was very private and very proud,” Margaret Haynes, a cousin, said by telephone, adding that she had spoken to Mrs. Hudson a few weeks before her death. “He told me: ‘I’m fine. If I need anything, you’ll be the first to know.”
However, on February 9, she told her followers: “I feel like I’m meowing into the void. And it’s raining. And I’m just trying not to drown.”
February 7th was a difficult day. Ms. Hudson was dizzy and in pain, she wrote. She felt her own mortality and posted about her decision to be single and not have children — “to be an aunt(ie) and not a mom,” as she put it, recalling a conversation she had with a young family member.
He died eight days later.
Alain Delaquerière contributed to the research.
