Most people online are very blatantly obviously are constantly itching to harass mentally ill people the second they slip up and do anything out of line. I mean this as a general statement. You are all waiting for your justification. Every second of every day. It doesn't matter what the severity of the social infraction is. Just as long as there is one that can be pointed to as a reason.
It can be anything. A cringe hobby. A weird fetish. A public episode. A badly worded post. A misinterpretation of someone else. A distasteful joke. A strange queer identity. A wrongdoing from a decade ago. A messy room. An admission of poor hygiene. A bad take about a TV show. Even if it is something legitimately worthy of criticism, most people who participate in these harassment campaigns don't actually care about that. They care about making The Evildoer suffer for the sake of justice. No matter what The Evildoer does afterwards, no matter if they apologize, change their view, stop the criticized behavior, it will never matter because there is a frozen snapshot of it that is now outside of their control and it will always represent them.
I have trauma from being turned into a lolcow by kiwifarms as a teenager. I actually have more directly impactful trauma from having thousands of adults stalk and harass me— than I do from extensive sexual abuse. Having an audience of any sort puts me on edge now. Even having this blog is something akin to digital self-harm. I am distrustful of visibility. I believe that any moment I do anything even slightly wrong, I will never be given grace. I will never be asked what I meant. I will never be encouraged to improve. No matter what The Crime was. I will be baited and harassed into breaking down and then harassed further for my spiraling. Because the intention of these actions is not to remedy a problem, it is to destroy a disposable person.
