Thread by @anildash

Someone who’s really thoughtful & who’s taught me a good deal about how to be more accommodating of coworkers or people I collaborate with share this innocuous little insight the other day. It’s fine, on its own. But then what happened…

… the bad-faith right wing folks who fake offense to anything that acknowledges cultures outside America (let alone other hemispheres) decided to make an example of this, pretending this is “woke culture” or some other contrived demon, instead of simple human advice.

That’s bad enough. Those attacks did what they always do, drawing days of racist or misogynist hate, along with the huge burden of having to sift through the “ordinary” hate provoked by right-wing social media, to see if there are actionable threats mixed in. Next…

Things got worse. Some of the irony-poisoned left, generating the reflexive pile-on engagement that social media craves, picked this up as bad corporate liberalism? Or something? I’m not sure how being mindful of other cultural contexts is bad, but it apparently it is, so… okay.

And let me tell you, being targeted by *one* hyper-active political group is awful, though it’s emotionally manageable if it’s a community explicitly made up of shitty fascists, like the most dominant right-wing social media figures. You can at least say “well, they’re awful.”

But when people who are supposed to be brought together by a humanist impulse, who claim to value things like respecting other cultures & contexts, pile on? It is really awful. Especially when the target has done nothing wrong.

And if you can see that the scumbags of the online right have picked a target, you can just refrain from piling on to that same person. If the person you want to dunk on is being targeted by fascists? Maybe support them instead of adding to their misery.

What seems like a couple of hours of harmless fun dunking on someone can really derail them. It draws in genuinely bad actors who will keep harassing them long after you’ve even forgotten the joke you made. And it teaches your followers that needless cruelty is how to get clout.