“Sorry About Your Blog, Though.” Social Murder in a Global Digital Society.
Last year I watched two prominent Black disability advocates die due to unmet mutual aid needs. Both were well-known and well-loved, and neither of them were able to meet mutual aid needs they needed to stay alive.
The past three years I’ve been watching BIPOC and trans accounts slowly stop posting or disappear from Twitter, Bluesky, Tumblr, and other platforms. In most cases, I have no way of knowing if they departed for their own mental health, or if they’re even still alive.
For the past two years, I’ve been thinking over and over again “if these well-known and beloved people weren’t able to survive, to meet basic needs to stay alive, how the fuck are my friends who are Black, trans, AND disabled going to make it? How long until their mutual aid being ignored kills them?”
Because here’s the thing - for a lot of disabled people of ALL stripes, online sex work or mutual aid passed through online means is the only way we can survive and doing so to meet rent alone is often an equivalent in effort OR MORE to working other online-based jobs. When we can’t work anymore or are deemed unemployable due to our medical needs/symptoms, there’s only so much we can do if we cannot rely on a partner or family to keep us alive and housed.
But on another side, many trans people still “able to work”, especially transfeminine people, are considered inherently unemployable as well or are treated to such horrible working conditions that it becomes completely untenable. As an example, 47% of trans people without a degree are unemployed, and even trans people with a degree are five times more likely to be unemployed. 49% of trans people of color have been denied AT LEAST one job explicitly due to being trans, half experience workplace harassment such as being forced to present as the wrong gender or being denied access to appropriate restrooms, and 21% of TPOC report having been physically or sexually assaulted in the workplace.
For a lot of us, online spaces such as blogs are not just “online communities” or “nice places to waste time” but literal lifelines either regularly or when we lose our extremely tenuous grip on stability. Systemic or communal harassment campaigns that drive marginalized people off of sites repeatedly for real or invented slights or wrongs are more than simply denying them access to “community”, but can be quite literally a death sentence for them. Sometimes the ramifications are as “light” as meaning the target can no longer fundraise for gender-affirming care or surgery, or as heavy as leading to them becoming homeless or dying.
And frankly, the people who do it will often never know how many people they’ve killed, or are actively proud of “getting rid of the bad ones.” This can be over fandomite discourse, an invented harassment campaign, or actual actions. The point is the power, the punishment, the suffering.
Some targets are more tenacious than others - a couple people on tumblr have created upwards of 40 accounts out of pure spite. But when you add the strain, energy, and time of dealing with a harassment campaign to what they already needed to survive, most of their waking hours become devoted to the effort of surviving an attempted social murder.
Because that IS exactly what it is, an attempted social murder of marginalized people in one of the only spaces they may be able to use to survive. Systemic and communal attempts to kill the undesirables did not stagnate as we entered a digital era, they evolved along with our evolution of new ways to survive. They literally segregate away racialized community members via algorithms in some areas, while expending a deranged amount of comparative resources to directly sniping marginalized accounts in others. How many Palestinian bloggers have you seen constantly being account restricted or losing their accounts for the crime of trying to survive their extermination? How many trans women have you watched have their account terminated within a day of being made? How many GFMs from racialized trans people have you watched go unfilled and ignored for weeks to months?
So yes, it is attempted social murder to engage in KF-esque sustained and targeted harassment campaigns when you already know the consequences of taking out a lifeline of marginalized people, especially when it raises to “lol let’s swat them now” type bullshit. Y’all are doing exactly what the fuck I’ve been saying is the issue this whole time and trying to pretend you’re the “good ones” like they won’t just eliminate y’all too.
