would you like to hear the story of the craziest thing that ever happened to me on twitter
in 2017 i tweeted something like “cory booker is doing amazing and should have our support” while he was testifying against Jeff Sessions & talking about racism in Sessions’ confirmation hearing. It’s really unusual for a Senator to speak out against another one like that.
at the time i was a comedian with like 1,000 followers who had mostly used twitter to tweet jokes about things like which boob i liked better until the 2016 election, an event that made me mad and sad all the time
some people thought my tweet about cory booker was in reference to his vote on a healthcare bill which i had never heard of. i honesty had no idea what they were talking about so i told them that and they said they didn’t believe me
a big account started screenshotting my tweets, which i didn’t realize at first so it took a while for me to figure out why thousands of people were suddenly really mad at me, especially since we appeared to me to be similarly politically minded
so i tried to explain it, right? talk to people. find out why they were mad. stress to them that i honestly had no idea what they were talking about. but they just didn’t believe me that wasn’t what my tweet was about and just said i hate poor people and want them to die
a girl with a big account tweeted that her father’s death was on my hands. truly not in a joking way whatsoever and it didn’t matter how many times i said that i do want people to get healthcare and medications and honestly i didn’t even know cory booker’s stance on those things
so people were mad at me for causing someone’s death. then apparently people put my tweet on 4chan. now there’s two kinds of people who hate liberals (which i admittedly was at the time and didn’t really get the difference between liberals & leftists)
so now leftists and conservatives were both mad at me and i was getting sooo many hate tweets, hundreds of notifications every minute, and i couldn’t tell the difference most of the time if it was a leftist or a conservative who wanted me to die
a lot of the tweets were clearly organized - i’d suddenly get 100 tweets saying “how dare you assume my gender” and stuff like that. someone even ended up finding my dad’s phone number and calling his house at 3am and leaving a voicemail about how i was horrible and should die
i realized that it really wasn’t helping to try and talk to people bc nobody was talking to me in good faith and just wanted me to reply to them so they could screenshot me and make fun of me so i started blocking people as they replied to me
then i got accused of silencing the voices of POC and trans people bc i was blocking people and i was just like yikes they interpret everything i do badly, there’s really no winning here, i just want it to stop
so i got a blockchain (like a bot that can block everyone who follows a certain person) and i picked a couple big leftist and conservative accounts and blocked all their followers. i literally blocked like 60,000 people 😂
i remember one guy who didn’t get caught in it DMed me and asked if i would block him so he’d be like all his friends and i talked to him for a bit and he realized i was really not the character they’d built me out to be and i asked if he still wanted me to block him and he said
it wasn’t fun anymore now that he’d actually talked to me 😂 anyways the mass blocking did quiet shit a lot but it also caused problems bc it blocked a bunch of my friends and some people confronted me and were really upset and i was like oh shit sorry that was an accident
anyways i really didn’t fuck with political twitter after that bc i realized it was full of weirdos who just like to be mean to people and i wasn’t even a hardcore liberal so it’s not like i wanted to pick that team or whatever. i just tweeted about my dog for a bit after that
probably like 6 months or a year later i realized that i really didn’t need to block anyone anymore, i’d learned a lot about how to deal with harassment and how to tune it out so i just mass unblocked everyone
i never talked about it again bc it wasn’t exactly what i wanted to be known for and honestly i’m just not a grudge holder and i tend to get over things pretty quickly so i wasn’t upset about it anymore
i’m not tweeting about it now to be like wow they were dicks, tbh i’m not mad at them anymore. i do think they were dicks but i can also see why i was good bait bc it was easy to make me feel bad, i tried to talk to people, & i wanted to make myself understood
i was just thinking about it and it’s just wild and kinda funny to me how so many people got mad at me for thinking i was talking about something when i honestly had no idea what they were talking about. but that’s twitter, and i get that now 😂
it was honestly kinda good for me to experience all that along with the harassment i got for having an LGBTQ youtube channel bc i really learned to not let what strangers on the internet say bother me. they aren’t real interactions, they’re an adrenaline game
that’s why when a friend is getting bullied or harassed i just tell them to tune it out and work on not caring. don’t explain or defend yourself, they don’t care what you actually think. they’re fighting their idea of you & engaging will just prolong it
and if people say hurtful things to you online just remember that they’re trying to hurt your feelings, so they’re gonna say whatever they think will hurt your feelings. doesn’t matter if it’s true. that’s why they call you fat and ugly & a whore, etc
you also just have to be ok with the fact that not everyone will like you. lots of people don’t like me. i get it, i can see why i’d be cringe or weird or annoying to some people. some people have accused me of being sociopathic bc i dont care that they’re mad at me/don’t like me
and i get that too! but what am i gonna do, change my personality for every person on earth? i don’t like everyone either, that happens.
some people deal with all this by joining a “team.” you agree with the people you like, you fight with the opposite team, you don’t have to be upset if the opposite team is mad at you bc they’re bad people & your team is good. that’s a natural & human thing to do
i just can’t do that though, and don’t want to. of course i have people i’m friends with and tend to agree with and things i believe in but i’m going to make those decisions on a case by case basis & i don’t want to get swept up in group emotion
so that’s one of the reasons why i don’t call people out by name, i cut people’s names out of screenshots, & i tend to talk about ideas and actions i dislike instead of people, and i don’t join in on big group roastings of people, even ones that suck.
i think that culture is weird and gross and i don’t want to be part of it. sometimes people need to be called out - people using their power to be predatory, politicians secretly doing awful things - but total group mentality is just imo weird & bad
in conclusion twitter is insane and really crazy, unhinged things happen here that are completely divorced from reality so just don’t engage with people trying to harass you. don’t explain yourself, don’t feel bad. if you always conduct yourself in a way that you think conforms
to your moral standards then you don’t have anything to feel bad about. attacks don’t need to be met with attacks. and if you’ve really done something wrong there are people who will actually talk to you so just talk to them, listen, and grow as a person
and if people are just making fun of you bc you did something goofy it’s ok to just admit you did something goofy. blocking 60,000 people was goofy 🤷♀️everyone’s a dumbass sometimes & twitter is just a fever dream anyway
