Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

Looking at my feed today, I see this website has decided to administer a pop quiz today about mass harassment campaigns, and about half the people on my short feed here did not get a passing grade.

I'm just going to try and break this down a little real quick with a minimum of

sermonizing here.

First, our target to be stepped into the spotlight by posting a big long anecdote about starving his child for 6 hours because of some misguided ideas about ingenuity or resourcefulness or whatever.

The population at large correctly identified this as Not OK,

and began to react through the expected combination of explaining to this guy how that was wrong, giving broad public sermons to their own followers on how this is wrong, and outright aggression towards this guy, both to his face and again just generally shouted into the void.

There is definitely a discussion to be had about what an appropriate amount of pushback is to saying/doing a given bad thing, and how to identify when that amount has already been received, and having the restraint not to add one's two cents when the coin slot is plainly jammed,

but those would be the weeds I'd rather not get into today, so eh, try to keep that concept in the back of your head, but I want to focus on the next step here.

Because the next thing that happened is that the sort of person who makes sites like Twitter a genuine threat to the

lives of marginalized people showed up, and decided to make the person everyone is talking about into a Target. Which is to say, someone decided that this guy's behavior is sufficient to declare him a Bad Person who must be removed from the population, by any means necessary.

I know that this occurred because at some point, scrolling up through my feed, I saw a sudden changeover from the general discussion of how withholding food from hungry children is a form of abuse, to piles of screenshots of other things the same person has said, some dating back

as early as, just at a quick glance here... OVER A DECADE AGO.

So... here in the court of public opinion I would like everyone in the Court of Public Opinion to join me in stepping out of Courtroom A, where discussion remains ongoing as to just how bad depriving one's child of

food is, and step into Courtroom B for a discussion of how bad it is to pour over every single word of text a total stranger has left a record of anywhere on the internet, actively searching for anything which can possibly be read as detrimental to that person's character, and to

actively withhold any context that might invalidate a given piece of evidence in this effort at character assassination.

That, to me, is the more important crime (by the CoPO's definition) to focus on, not necessarily being more severe in its impact (there is no way to determine

that with the information readily available to the court), nor how much more clear the motive is here, but because this is the case where the way any given person reacts to the crime has the potential to make them an accessory to it.

I don't think the leap I'm making from seeing

wads of screenshots of twitter posts clearly dated from 2010 to "hey, some vigilante creep is being a big ol' creepy stalker looking for anything and everything to hurt someone with" is particularly hard to make. That's a pretty easy spot. Honestly, I could make that call even if

I didn't have those very old timestamps staring out at me, because I have enough of a basic understanding of how people work to recognize it as an attempt on throwing fuel on a fire if there is public resentment towards a person, and someone is suddenly putting out a big list of

other potential things to take issue with regarding that person. We can all generally agree that we know what we are seeing when we see a thing like that, yes?

So, while doing so is more excusable than being the person doing that stalking, being a quick finger twitch in the heat

of the moment, when you see that sort of stalker hit job post, and you make the choice to signal boost it and forward it along, you are also acting on that same vigilante mindset. Either because you have some unrelated issue with the target (likely, in this case, because you just

saw all that hungry child discourse and you're mad about it), or because you have personal faith in either the source of the attacks or the person who signal boosted them to your awareness is A Righteous Person who deserves the authority to identify and punish the wicked as they

see fit, you are choosing to lend your voice to those which are signal boosting what you must know is a bad faith character assassination effort compiled by someone crossing a bunch of moral lines, and you should know (but might not) that this is just as effective on anyone else.

So... don't do that please, under any circumstances.

Now, to clarify where I'm coming from with all this, this is NOT me showing up to defend Hungry Child Guy. Not at all. Frankly, if I'd gotten up a few hours earlier today when we were still on the page with people sermonizing

about the ethics of that, I'd have sat down to type out a rambling thread about the various food-adjacent ways in which I was tortured as a little girl and all the eating disorders and serious health problems that resulted. And I'll acknowledge that this particular target likely

won't suffer too badly from this particular attack, because he seems to be a well-off cis heterosexual man with a celebrity following laughing off the really freaking valid criticism leading to his targeting and all.

But the thing is, the entire POINT in playing the dig-through-

every-scrape-of-data-that-exists-about-someone-for-things-that-look-bad card is to break entirely away from why the target is being targeted, and any fundamental aspects of who the target even is, and instead focus as many random uninvolved people as possible to take up torches

with purely emotional appeals quite actively avoiding any roots in facts or logic, to pursue the targets suffering and/or obliteration with absolutely no method by which the target can appeal/attone or the attack can actually be called off if one if they could.

It's only "safe"

to subject a well-off well-connected cis het white man to that because it can generally be assumed that level of privilege prevents serious harm from befalling someone from any source at all. It's like arguing that it's "safe" to roll a giant boulder down a narrow mountain road

because you're pretty sure the only vehicles that are going to be driving up that road that day are literal tanks that can survive such an impact with just a few dents and maybe minor injuries to the driver.

That best case scenario is still pretty damn dangerous, you're making a

whole lot of guesses that your clearly potentially lethal attack isn't going to kill anyone this time, and you're setting a precedent that this is an activity that should ever be on the table for anyone to do under any circumstances which is going to encourage others to repeat it

Anyway, this is something I am particularly passionate about, because I know all too well what happens when people pull this sort of attack on people who aren't massively shielded against the impact.

People literally die.

Innocent people.

Like, massive suicide trigger warning:

Here's someone I used to know who some creep decided it'd be fun to stalk like that- oregonlive.com/portland/2018/…

She died in what is one of the worst ways I can imagine, largely in an effort to explain how important it is to not let people attack people like that.

I spent roughly

every waking moment of the last month and change trying to talk a number of people down from suicide attempts, because they have been on the receiving end of this sort of thing and the whole "holiday season" really hammers it home if you've lost jobs, family, friends, homes, etc.

thanks to the horrific effectiveness that sort of witch hunting has, in particular, when pointed towards trans people. Had a non-zero number of close calls myself as it happens.

Meanwhile, the people launching and promoting all these attacks have never suffered the slightest of

consequences for launching them, and indeed have attained rather lofty status and reputations as good trustworthy people for leading so many charges against "bad people."

And... I was going to get into this regardless, but I see it's been long enough since I started this thread

to have the first wave of people coming in with variations of "OK, I'm totally with you on how absolutely monstrous it is to subject innocent people to this sort of thing, but the guy the mob is being sicced on today genuinely is a reprehensible piece of shit." But again, the

entire underlying premise of digging through everything a person has ever said or done to assemble a collage of whatever looks the worst is that it can ALWAYS be used to paint a picture that the target is such a uniquely heinous individual as to be an acceptable exception to any

standards that would otherwise apply and in this one instance we can take every weapon out of the vault of forbidden weapons and bring it to bear.

Any time you've decided to make the exception, the "evidence" that rationalizes the decision magically appears somehow. So that just

does not work. And if you ever find yourself in a situation where you ALREADY have enough evidence that someone is the worst of the worst and does not deserve to be treated with the respect and caution as someone who you're only pretty sure sucks, then... why would you need any

more evidence to argue your case? If someone gets up on a stage in the town square every day and starts eating babies, we can just deal with that. I can't see how anyone would be like "well, baby eating is wrong, but I wouldn't punish someone for it unless I knew he also cheated

on his 8th grade math final.

That sort of logic only works if the person pointing out the very public, current, known Bad Thing does not believe the general public cares enough about that Bad Thing to bring about a fitting punishment, "forcing" the accuser to argue the case that

the person is ALSO guilty of something the general public considers to be as bad as this generally-agreed-to-be-a-relatively-minor-offense which the accuser personally feels is "as bad."

And that's being a vigilante. And that is Not OK. Because again, you're not the only one who

has a personal set of moral equivalencies in your head that's at odds with the public consensus and just to pull an example out from the pile of weirdo vigilantes trying to bring about my death, there are people who think "being trans" is as bad as "commits child sexual assault."

So no, really. Keep "digging through records of literally every single word a person has typed or said which records can be found of over the entirety of their life looking for anything bad" in the locked cabin of weapons we really genuinely do not ever open under literally any

circumstances, and freak the hell out on anyone who ever sneaks it out of there regardless of why they think they have found an exception.

And like, this isn't me calling for a blanket ban on all efforts to ever work out if something is a one-off offense or part of a pattern.

When you see a big ol' red flag from someone, it is in fact perfectly warranted to have a quick glance at other things they've recently said or if they have connections to hate groups or whatever. And like, if someone personally does a horrible thing to you, you are welcome to

bring that incident to light if that person is doing the same thing to someone else and getting the first-time offense treatment.

Just, don't ever do the whole stalker-digging-through-dumpsters thing to people, or treat someone else who has plainly done so as a reliable source.

Sincerely,
a woman sitting in the dark with all the blinds closed worrying about how she's going to pay her rent and stressing out about the one person she still trusts' safety because 6 years ago some asshole told a lie about her just to watch some very violent person's reaction