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this is such a good summary of why so much anti-harassment advice sucks. it's this individualistic advice of "don't show your pain, don't look for help and solidarity, don't agitate for social change"
it doesn't actually work for people who get targeted by big names, and it lets people go "well, that harassment victim chose to ~give in~ and ~feed the trolls~"
it lets companies like twitter think that just having blocks available is enough to deal with the hate groups that are taking advantage of their platform's leniency
the ultimate end result of "don't feed the trolls" being seen as not only the expedient choice but also the morally correct one, which is the framing that @CCDHate uses, is asking people who are dealing with harassment to just disappear
@CCDHate everyone wants "just ignore the bullies" to work because they are unwilling to take actual useful action against the bullies (or trolls, harassers, etc)
@CCDHate i think you need to be strategic in how you engage with and publicly document hate but i think that stuff like showing when you get targeted by a popular member of right-wing media ends up with you getting however many hundred dipshits calling you the same 3 slurs can be useful
@CCDHate saying that you shouldn't do that because it "amplifies" it is basically telling people to hide the often traumatizing effects of hatred in order to make their followers' twitter timelines nonthreatening and pretty
@CCDHate i don't blame people who choose to go offline or limit how much they're in public online spaces because of the abuse that they receive.
@CCDHate decent people don't look at people dealing with abuse and reply with dictates about how they should respond to it. period.
@CCDHate any anti-harassment org that focuses on "civility" is showing their ass. they don't want to create a world free of abuse/harassment/dogpiling/etc. they want to create a world where they don't have to see it anymore
lol 
more on them
i'm reading their "report" now
mainly because i saw a couple people talking about how they cite angela nagle, a fucking troll among trolls, in it
before i get into it, let me just go ahead and say that they put their "report" into a PDF and not a website in this, the year of our lord two thousand and nineteen
for those of you who did not get basic usability training FIFTEEN FUCKING YEARS AGO that has been a bad move SINCE BEFORE FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
and the whole thing's written on a brown background so the "we made it that way for printing" thing doesn't fly
we can see from right off the bat that they're talking about abuse of "public figures"
this squares with what @nailheadparty had theorized about them creating a definition of "trolling" that has enough wiggle room to contain quite a bit of legitimate criticism from members of the public
they go on for a while in a way that implies that the trolling that they care about is about propaganda and disinformation, not destabilizing the lives of targets
more on how this was developed "to aid public figures". this is a TERRIBLE angle for anti-harassment work. dogpile harassment has regularly come in the form of a public figure painting a target on an individual with far less visibility and power.
"anarchic" and "postmodern" should both be read here as dogwhistles
as should "populist"
this bit about "trolling tactics" being adopted by "movements" without saying what those movements are is particularly shady, and is the kind of phrasing that you can use to paint Nazis and culture bombers with the same brush
with risk of this being the kind of thing they would label as ~ad hominem~ this page layout is fucking terrible. you could've reduced the size of that meme and wrapped the columns around it or SOMETHING
the whole point of pdfs is so you can be a fucking control freak about how people look at your ~design~ so maybe hire a fucking designer
anyway their entire next page is mostly right in talking about how refuting and debating trolls gives them legitimacy but it also is conflating trolling just as a style of distributing disinformation with trolling to distribute hate, threaten targets and create a chilling effect
the section called "the troll playbook" features a quote from a daily stormer guide and then spends the entire first page talking about the psychology of trolling without referencing it at all
update: they do that for the entire "troll playbook" section. it's just all troll psychology stuff. they quote daily stormer twice but don't talk about what it means "as a playbook" or connect it to the psychology or anything
the question of why they quote the daily stormer twice in their guide to not quoting trolls is not addressed
i'm also not super into the way they talk about conspiracy theories because if you look at that study one of the conspiracy theories they have is that the world is run by a secret evil cabal or whatever
the more we learn about the culture of rich people and politicians the more it seems like that one's pretty much the case it's just not actually secret. it's just what happens when a disproportionate amount of power and money is in the hands of very few
it's just that believing in the "conspiracy theory" version of that requires you to a) believe a bunch of anti-semitic bullshit and b) ignore all the real, provable child sex trafficking in favor of completely fictional child sex trafficking
there's a notable absence here in talking about who these trolls are being told to do this by. sure, there's a lot of trolling that happens sort of leaderlessly by groups of assholes on 4chan/8chan/etc, but they're also regularly started by Tucker Carlson and similar figures
this is an *incredibly* short-sided and outdated way of looking at dogpile harassment. it's the kind of thing you would only say in 2019 if you were INCREDIBLY misguided and did not listen to ANYONE or deliberately trying to obfuscate the existence of ringleaders.
this is such an underestimation and such a lowballing of threat that it is actually dangerous to be putting out there. this is the kind of thing that makes people go "it's just trolling, ignore it" until someone rides that fucking harassment army into the goddamn white house.
this is actually untrue. you can still @ people who have blocked you. for example: hey, @CCDHate, why are you distributing your "report" in pdfs in 2019, is it because you know it's garbage and you're hoping people won't click through
@CCDHate this sucks! people can post about their experiences with targeted/dogpile abuse if they want to! i've had a lot of experiences where i have been like "jesus christ look at these dipshits" and people have recognized the icons and we share a laugh
@CCDHate also occasionally doing something like "i just got this death threat from this guy" will lead to other people who also got death threats from that guy chiming in and being able to get him banned, fired etc
@CCDHate this is literally the only time they talk about the fact that harassment regularly comes from public figures
@CCDHate some things their guide does not cover in any way:
-how to get personal information taken down from dox warehouse sites that have massive amounts of personal data available for sale and will sell your phone number and addresses to stalker websites
-how to get personal information taken down from dox warehouse sites that have massive amounts of personal data available for sale and will sell your phone number and addresses to stalker websites
@CCDHate -how to talk to your mental health professionals who are not extremely online about the experience of online harassment without them assuming you're paranoid and making it all up
@CCDHate -how you shouldn't fucking report anything to websites running cloudflare because cloudflare will straight up forward your complaints to the website owners even when they're fucking nazis
@CCDHate -how to talk to your family and/or significant other(s) about the fact that you're being targeted by an army of fucking assholes that will post your address in hopes that people will come to your house and shoot you and they'll try it on them too
@CCDHate they then proceed to give a page of advice for journalists that basically says nothing that journalists do not already know but which does scold them for "amplifying" when sargon talked about raping somebody
@CCDHate presumably journalists should not write about it when UKIP candidates post on youtube about raping people
@CCDHate do journalists know how to identify troll-lead trending topics? often they do not! is this "report" going to teach them? no
@CCDHate how are we going to fix the platform-level problems? with ~algorithms~
@CCDHate for those of you who are new to this: algorithmic detection does not work very well at all. stuff like "sentiment analysis" and "toxicity detectors" are all pretty much snake oil sold to tech companies that are trying to bypass paying for human labor
@CCDHate AND THE BIBLIOGRAPHY
@CCDHate their bibliography includes a book by notorious "college campuses are threatening free speech by having leftist students" troll jonathan haidt
@CCDHate it also includes angela nagle's book, which was both full of shit and largely plagiarized from wikipedia
@CCDHate none of the other names jumped out at me but i bet plenty of them are also garbage
@CCDHate notably absent from the bibliography and the acknowledgements are any people i recognized as having actually been through internet harassment or being anti-harassment activists of any kind
@CCDHate they did thank Jonathan Sebire of Signify, which is a data science company, which explains why they are going for ~algorithms~ as a solution-- if anyone's reading this as background for a story, I'd look into the funding there
@CCDHate that's all i've got for now. i'm hoping someone can do a story on the grift these people are running, since a million blue check celebrities are signing up for it without doing any actual research
@CCDHate actually i have another thing i want to note.
@CCDHate they could have targeted their whole thing at public figures receiving abuse. they could have avoided doing this trite, dismissive graphic
@CCDHate they could have consulted with actual experts on abuse and hate, not people at data companies and unrelated nonprofits
@CCDHate they could have focused on how to counter hate speech and trolling in a way that is strategic and which doesn't try to take away people's agency to respond to harassment and hate in the way that feels right to them
@CCDHate they could have watched this very good and very old jay smooth video
@CCDHate anyway this thread offers some pretty plausible theories about this being a political ploy
@CCDHate my money would be on that they're trying to do a randi harper style consultancy or patreon grift where they occasionally talk to companies and hang out with anti-abuse authorities while casually siccing troll armies and/or trying to smear people and communities they dislike
@CCDHate they sure haven't made any effort toward getting any anti-abuse people, hypocrites or otherwise, to even remotely pay attention to them, though
@CCDHate oh also their founder/leader/whatever has the handle Imi_Ahmed and deleted all their tweets from before like a month ago, might want to look into that
@CCDHate oh also that whole report? 0 uses of the words/phrases: trans, Black, "of color" or immigrant
@CCDHate they should've called themselves the Center for Ignoring Digital Hate And Hoping It Decides To Leave You Alone And Go After Someone Else Instead
if someone wants to do something actually useful for harassment please create some kind of macro type program or chrome extension where we can put in the things to click for a twitter report and have it go through all the pages and click those same things for us
attempting to report every instance if dogpile harassment is tedious business of just clicking through the same details on a ton of tweets
this won't fix the problem because Twitter won't take down the accounts of big names that call down mobs, right-wing news outlets will keep platforming mob leaders and hosting companies/ddos protection won't take down stuff like 8chan until they inspire several mass shootings
but it would make it so that when i search twitter for a slur and report everyone using it as a slur while video games load i could get a lot more reports in
does someone want to take bets on how long this takes to somehow get terfy
