(Boosts encouraged)
Have you ever personally been on the receiving end of an internet harassment campaign?
(personally here meaning “you, specifically; or a small group containing you”)
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I presume there’s some sizable sampling bias here, but these numbers are quite a bit higher than I expected.
And yet, simultaneously, not high enough to end the outrage cycle that perpeptuates this.
RT: https://akko.erincandescent.net/objects/8c3c9a25-ae63-44c0-9c8e-322a986da9d9
If you answered yes to the first question:
Did you have nightmares about it?
If you answered yes to the first question:
Did it change the way you interact with people on the internet or in real life?
Honestly, from my own experience, I sorta-kinda recommend being on the receiving end of a cancellation mob.
It both gives you a visceral understanding of why you should resist any urges to ever join one again, and also just how… impotent they are. It’s harrowing, yes; but you come out of it a week later and by and large nothing has changed.
You might lose a few friends, but friends who abandon you at the first sign of trouble didn’t really respect you as a person anyway.
I've been on the receiving end of many internet harassment campaigns (some on Mastodon!), but I view that very different from being cancelled.
Harassment campaigns are people calling me the N-word and saying that they will kill me for hiring Black people or women in tech.🤷🏿♂️
Getting cancelled would be me doing something that causes my community that loves me to hold me accountable for my actions. I've never been cancelled, but I've been held accountable many times.
1/N
You can't get cancelled by a community that you are not in. Because cancellation is a removal of support. I can't cancel Maroon 5, because I'm not a Maroon 5 fan.
You can get dogpiled by complete strangers. Most of the people that post racist comments to me after seeing something I said screenshotted on the "Black People Twitter" subreddit, are people I would never hang out with.
You can be held accountable by anyone. Strangers, or your community.
2/2
@mekkaokereke What would you class “a dog pile ostensibly in the name of social justice, by people who are perhaps not part of ‘your community’ but are adjacent to it”? Especially when its based upon either something that you said but entirely decontextualised, or based upon something you didn’t say at all?
There are groups of people, both here and elsewhere, which enjoy employing this exact strategy - ostracising people on the basis of slights imagined or exaggerated. I have seen them referred to as “context collapse cults”, a term I think is quite apt.
They are often full of well meaning people who do not realise what their group has become, but they are very insidious.