Thread by @QuinnyPig

So You've Been Called Out On Twitter: A ShitPoster's Guide On How To Proceed

You're likely to experience an immediate flash of defensiveness. That's not what you *MEANT* and someone's taking it way out of context. Don't they know you better than that?!

STOP. Take a beat. What you do next determines if anyone remembers this in two weeks.

I have a list of people whose judgement I trust. I ask them for their thoughts on my possibly-shitty take before I proceed. In the moment, I'm probably too close to the issue to be completely objective.

Once the defensive kneejerk reaction has subsided, really *think* about what you were called out for. Was it punching down? If you weren't who you are, and were instead someone in a different life situation, how would the tweet make you feel?

(If you've been called out for a pattern of, I don't know, sending abusive or harassing DMs to women? Then where you've gone I can't follow and you're best served by deleting your account immediately as a favor to the rest of us.)

I've taken a look into "cancel culture" and the folks who've supposedly been canceled for Bad Tweets. Every one of them when called out doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down.

When you find yourself in a hole, it's advised to stop digging.

Next, apologize sincerely. "Well what I *meant* wasn't wrong, so why should I--" My god, do you hear yourself? Stop it!

As a fellow cis man myself, I can confirm that your penis will not in fact fall off if you apologize to someone. True story!

An apology costs you nothing. You haven't "lost." You haven't somehow made yourself less relevant to the things you normally talk about.

You also haven't made doing business with you distasteful to most of your audience (particularly ones who can cut large checks).

I've gotten it wrong. I've deleted tweets and apologized for making them. It doesn't happen often because I, y'know. Work hard on empathy. But when it does, I follow the steps outlined above. It's really, REALLY not that hard.

The apology has to be sincere. None of this "I'm sorry if you were offended" horseshit. "how to properly apologize" is just a Google search away. You may as well not do it at all if you're going to half-ass it.

Don't put additional work on others as a part of it; it's nobody else's job to educate you. If you've been called out in private DM instead of in public on Twitter (a "call-in"), that is a *gift* that nobody owed you. Treat it as one. Thank them for it.

After the apology, there are always going to be a few folks for whom no apology will ever be sufficient. After the initial (REAL! Not half-assed!) apology, you probably don't want to continue to engage deeply on the topic. Take a day or two "off" from Twitter to let it cool.

After that... the only thing you have left to do is not make the same mistake again. It's really not that hard. You'll make other mistakes, in which case... see the first tweet in this thread.

Strive to be better today than you were yesterday.