Thread by @HoarseWisperer

Shaun King launched a full-on attack against a young woman who has 1% of the followers he has.

Targeted harassment. Inexcusably poor.

https://twitter.com/clarissambrooks/status/1085694469742231552

For context:

King has 1.1 million followers. The young woman he went after has 5k followers.

King has 6x as many followers as me.

I fully know that if I were to go after someone the way King did, I’d be passive-aggressively summoning people to swarm them.

When you have an audience of 1.1 million people, you have a responsibility to not abuse that power to disproportionately punish and harass people who you feel have wronged you.

I have had people smear me - and I’ve had other people send me embarrassing dirt on the offenders.

I neither used it nor put the people on blast publicly because using your audience as a cudgel to pummel people with smaller followings is just weak as sh**.

You don’t do that. Unless your goal is to abuse the power your audience gives you.

I don’t know Clarissa Brooks and hadn’t followed her before today but I guarantee you she is up to her eyes in vile, hateful, harassing msgs on Twitter, email, her home phone and elsewhere right now.

That sh** rattles you. It’s a really ugly experience. It’s hard to shake off.

I’m done prattling on here but the punchline is:

Any degree of online popularity comes with haters and critics.

If ya can’t handle it, get off Twitter. Abusing the weapon of your platform though, that’s weak AF.

p.s. it’s not just wrong, it’s also stupid.

Throwing gasoline on a tiny candle few would have seen and just might turn it into the #1 trending dumpster fire on Twitter.

Bonus fun-fact: trying to quash something and instead attracting much more attention to it is known as the Streisand Effect.

Streisand tried to suppress the publication of pics of her house on some obscure website. Became a big story. Total backfire.