Yeah, I’m not going to get into any pissing contests or dox myself, but my doctoral, post doctoral, and professional work had to do with identifying, tracing, and monitoring bad actors/criminal instigators on the internet.
By FAR most of the cruelty comes from 8chan trollers who enjoy throwing grenades into safe spaces. It’s also a shockingly low number of individuals doing that stuff across all sorts of topics from race to religious bigotry to everything else under the sun.
After that? Severe mental illness. (In cases like this, “you killed my favorite character who is so real to me that I think you killed a real life person and are not being punished for it.”)
And after that? Assholes who were invested in the topic to begin with. (Here, ineffable fans who want to make their pain someone else’s problem).
Of course it should GO WITHOUT SAYING that it is entirely inappropriate to harass anyone involved in production.
And of course I’m deeply, DEEPLY disappointed in the fans who did this, and I’d encourage them to leave the fandom and seek therapy for whatever it is that makes them think their actions were okay.
But at the same time, here’s what I saw:
1. Unknown people behaved terribly and/or criminally on other platforms,
2. Everyone here raced to make increasingly aggressive posts about bad actors in the fandom, and
3. A formerly cohesive community of queer, disabled, religiously and otherwise traumatized people fractured.
All that is very, VERY in line with everything I’ve spent much of my life studying.
And, to be clear; I never said the marginalized cannot be abusive. I would never say that because it flies in the face of empirical evidence. On the contrary, it’s well known that marginalization perpetuates cycles of abuse.
What I DID say was that marginalized communities are the favorite targets of the trolls who produce the vast majority of the harassment we see online.
And I said that they win when we fight each other instead of them.
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
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titsay
tangentwithtanner
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