#hate campaigns

[freedom-of-fanfic]

I happen to be writing a dark!fic that I am very proud. So far I've avoided antis, but they'd have plenty to complain about with this fic. I find it absurd that someone could be harassed into taking down their fic, or bullied into a stage of depression or even suicidial thinking by some people on the internet. I've never seen it before, but obviously it happens. How is it that antis manage to have such a strong effect on people?

Mainly, anti-shipping makes fandom into a battlefield where they have not only the high ground, but also the large majority of the ammunition, claymores, and guns.

Imagine: you’re in a field full of people sharing treasure. You can bring your own treasure and share it with others. But you know that if you take the wrong step, or share the wrong kind of treasure, you’ll definitely be shot at by the people at the top of the hill with all the guns. You might be hurt only a little, or you might be severely hurt, or you might get so hurt you wish you were dead, but injury is certain. 

Furthermore, the more of your treasure you share and the more people partake of it, the more likely you are to get shot at. It can get to the point where everyone at the top of the hill are shooting at you nonstop until you stop sharing treasure, run away, agree to join them shooting at other people from the top of the hill, or die.

You, a not very sensitive person, are like somebody with body armor. If you get shot, you won’t be as hurt as other people. You may not get hurt at all. But others are not so fortunate.  Some people are just very sensitive.  Some people are made fragile by pre-existing conditions. Some people know that if they get severely injured, it will affect their experience in the battlefield forever; other people are worried that it will even affect their experience outside the battlefield.

Everyone deals with this stress in different ways. Some people deal with it by staying out of sight. Other people play the odds that they won’t get noticed. Some people go to war themselves with the people at the top of the hill. Others still take the hits and keep on going.  And still others, realizing that their presence in this field full of treasure but also full of people trying to hurt them is completely voluntary, give up - and leave.

--

Fandom is the field, antis are the people with the guns, and the treasures are fanworks. People have different degrees to which they’re vulnerable to injury. some people are just nervous and sensitive. some have pre-existing mental illness, or fandom reputations they worry about having destroyed, or real life aspirations that a targeted harassment campaign or doxxing could obliterate.

and those hate campaigns do happen. They are usually less terrifying or severe than what GamerGaters, MRAs, or other, wider-focused hate groups tend to produce (doxxing is less common, for instance, though it does happen), but they can be intense, focused, and not let up. Elent0ri, R0achpatrol, and the girl who attempted suicide in the SU fandom are victims of this kind of continuous defamation and onslaught of hate, for instance.

So some people stick around but lurk only so that they can’t get targeted; others are like you, figuring you’re not likely to get noticed or really targeted for your darkfic to the point of it ruining your life.  Some people just deal with getting loads of hate and keep going, and others just say ‘fuck it’ and leave. And a few people fire back at the antis, for better or worse. (at least it tends to draw their attention away from others.)

tl;dr: antis have created an environment where people are afraid of being harassed and targeted with continuous hate by them because they said or did something that antis don’t like, so people tend to fold easily when attacked and be stressed out by fandom for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention.

[mathsbian]

I’m glad I waste my (very lacking amount of) energy on Youtube, scrolling forever on tumblr, silly phone games, and self-care.

Like can you imagine spending hours in one day focusing entirely on your hatred for a specific person or group of people? That sounds fucking exhausting. I don’t even have the energy to work spend all day hating systemic problems like queerphobia and ableism… or people in power like Trump or Musk or McConnell (may his retirement be hell)!

If I had that kind of energy, my apartment would be SPOTLESS.

[victims-of]

While she’s not publicly on Twitter, she has created an “invisible” account so she can monitor conversation about the show — which is an aberration for her.

“Usually when something is out in the world I just let it be,” Browning said, “but for some reason with this show I need to know what people are saying and what people think. And at the end of Episode 3 so many people [on Twitter] were like ‘oh no, not Laura, she’s the worst, this ho, get her out of here.’ And I suddenly got really nervous.”

Emily Brown creating an anonymous account on Twitter so she can read people on the internet calling her character a hoe

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

Tech No Phobe

TRIGGER WARNING: The potentially dangerous effects of social media on the human brain and how many of you wingnuts may actually be budding sociopaths.

Yo, fuckslice! Can we talk about how a healthy distrust of social media is often wrongly conflated with technophobia? ‘Cause I feel like we should. 

It shouldn’t take a genius to work out that I love technology. I’m so into videogames that I develop my own in my spare time. I get all my work through the internet and the only reason you can access any of my writing is because of that same piece of technology. I’m constantly amazed by the fact that I walk around with a tiny little box in my pocket that has more songs and better sound-quality than most jukeboxes (though jukeboxes are still intrinsically way cooler than my MP4 player). I practically salivate when I hear about some new piece of space tech that brings us one step closer to colonising other worlds or achieving interstellar travel. I’m optimistic about the prospect of full brain emulation (also known as mind uploading) and the fact that it represents a chance to indefinitely extend human lifespans. As soon as they’ve advanced to a level where I can have a proper conversation with one and it wants to cuddle in the afterglow, I’m definitely getting a sex robot. Oh yes: I fucking love technology (emotionally now; physically one day), But I have some very negative opinions about social media. Including the platform I’m using to write this blog.

Don’t get me wrong: I think social media is a great way to find likeminded people you wouldn’t otherwise have met and it facilitates communication between people who- for whatever reason- can’t meet in real life. But there are a lot of creepy social media fanatics in the tech commentary world who spend a worrying amount of time going on about how it represents a new, deeply meaningful type of human interaction- something equal to or better than traditional communication. I’m concerned not just by how wrongheaded this notion is, but by how commonplace it is becoming.

Social media is a fine invention, but it is no substitute for real interactions with people in the physical world, in much the same way that a love-letter is no substitute for oral sex, no matter how powerfully erotic its wording might be. It’s easy to perform emotions you don’t feel and establish shallow connections through social media. Interacting with people you care about and- more importantly- maintaining real relationships with them in the corporeal universe requires effort and emotional investment. Social media allows you to communicate without getting invested. That’s fine, if it’s just one type of relationship in your life among many, but if that kind of superficial connection dominates the way you interact with people, you’ve got a problem. The ability to communicate with such ease that it becomes trivial is called ‘frictionless sharing’ and it’s often framed as a good thing. It isn’t. Sharing is supposed to entail friction. The extent to which you fight against that friction to make a connection happen is often the measure of how real that connection is. 

I accept that, for some people, frictionless sharing has been a serious boon. It has allowed people who consider themselves damaged or ill to talk about their feelings in a way that they can’t in real life. This is an enormously important part of many peoples’ coping strategies, and that’s a good thing. I don’t want to dismiss the positive results of social-media-enabled frictionless sharing. But it’s important to remember that it also has a dark side: it makes communication shallow, and thereby encourages people to have more shallow views of others. When other people are just letters and pictures on a screen, it’s easy to not really care about them... and human beings fall into patterns of thinking very easily. If you don’t really care about the people you see online, you might start to not care about people in general.

Think about all the hate campaigns that have been spawned on social media. Think about the scientist who landed a probe on a moving asteroid and was abused on social media until he cried because he wore a fucking shirt some people found offensive while making scientific history. Think about the care worker who posted daft photos of her being silly on a daytrip to a military ceremony and who lost her job because a bunch of joyless cunts decided that she had to be ‘taught a lesson’ for not enacting poe-faced seriousness in a particular location. Think about the IT guy who got fired after making a dumb Carry On style innuendo to his friend at a tech conference because some earwigging little pim-hole decided to quote him on Twitter. Think about James Gunn, who got fired because right-wing sociopaths and supposedly liberal people joined forces to persecute him over jokes he made eight years previously and had already apologised for. All of these people got fired because social media twats used frictionless cunting sharing to share outrage they didn’t really feel. The ‘sharers’ of the world destroyed actual human beings’ lives and didn’t give a fuck because their fucking Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and Tumblr accounts had trained them to see other humans as faceless targets, unworthy of emotional investment. Frictionless sharing is both a crash-course in sociopathy and a tool through which mass sociopathic acts are carried out. 

I’m wary of social media, but not because I’m a technophobe. I don’t think the technology is intrinsically evil. I’m wary of social media because I know how susceptible the human psyche is to being rewired in dangerous new ways. 

I like to think I have the self-awareness to use social media responsibly. I have a reputation for being abrasive, but I’ve only ever gone after targets who thoroughly deserve my ire. I have savaged many people, but always in response to wilful and extreme acts of abject cuntery. I’ve never made a concerted effort to ruin a random stranger’s life over something trivial and I’ve never joined an arbitrary dogpile against someone. I ask all of you reading this to exercise the same level of care. Frictionless sharing makes it all too easy to see other humans as disposable and unimportant. Ergo, when you use social media, you can’t rely on your initial instincts about what is and isn’t acceptable. You need to check yourself and make an effort to remember that the people you’re talking to (or at) are, well people. Behave accordingly.

Aaaaaaand in my next post, I’ll probably undermine everything I’ve just said by making cruel and arbitrary comments about whoever’s been in the news lately. In my defence, though, that’s not because of the influence of social media, that’s just because I’m an arsehole in real life, too. Don’t be me. 

[disquietingtruths]

Why Are You So Angry?

A must see documentary in short, digestible parts that explain (online) harassment and mob mentality very well!

An exploration of internet harassment and hate campaigns, looking at mob mentality, how those who respond aggressively may feel they are being attacked and how to deal with these angry people. Produced by Ian Danskin it is divided into 6 parts as follows:

Part 1: A Short History of Anita Sarkeesian

Part 2: Angry Jack

Part 3: Perception is Everything

Part 4: An Autopsy on GamerGate

Part 5: "The Good Guy"

Part 6: Talking to Angry Jack

[mpwru]

Anyone can start a non-profit, give it a hopeful sounding name and convince people they are doing good when in reality these dark horses spearhed hate and lies through their campaigns.