Online abuse

[anghraine]

I got linked to this article about the steps of online abuse, and I thought it very accurately encapsulated the things that have made Tumblr so (much more) unendurable lately, particularly the anti-shipping and anti-ace brigades.

Comments

[kaoriva]

A very interesting read, I can't help but recall the anti-shipping blogs that I have came across with on tumblr (those who will hunt you because you ship a problematic ship) as well the Zamii incident in the SU fandom...is scary how tumblr has become like this.

[anghraine]

It's pretty much impossible not to think of that, I think.

And yeah, SU fandom is pretty much a sterling example of that sort of thing. And TFA antis essentially turned Star Wars (a wanky but not particularly didactic fandom) into that sort of thing.

To some degree, I think Tumblr/wider media fandom has been this way for a long time—at least for several years; it's the environment that allowed people like Winterfox to flourish. But it does seem to be getting worse.

[kaoriva]

TFA antis RUINED the Star Wars fandom for me that I'm so disappointed. Back then, of all the fandoms I was, the Star Wars fandom was my favorite because how peaceful it was. I mean, yeah, people often argue about if the prequels were good or not but it never came to the extremes of hunting or shaming people for that! (I agree with you that I rather prefer the midichlorians wank or even the Skywalker family resemblance debate than this whole "You're racist and abuse apologist if you ship Reylo over Finnrey!!!111!")

Yeah, toxicity always has been present on fandoms, is just that plataforms like tumblr manage to make it more notorious, specially since there's no control or moderation from the staff's part.

[alias_sqbr]

This bit really struck me:
In the process of community conflict, there’s typically a very flawed identification of community targets. Correctly identifying who’s responsible for a particular grievance requires a deep knowledge of systems thinking, often requiring literacy about institutions or systems whose very inscrutability helped inspire the conflict in the first place. Given their imperfect model of the problem, the community gloms on to whomever is most visible or vulnerable as a target of their ire. Many times this is someone only tangentially related to the target organization, or someone who has no real position of power in an institution, but who has made themselves visible by trying to defend against the community’s action. In other cases, the target is someone picked specifically for their symbolic meaning to the community, as a representative of the greater issue that galvanizes them; this often happens without regard to whether the person actually has control or agency over the issue.

[anghraine]

Yes! That's one of the bits that hit on Tumblr Syndrome most exactly, I thought. That need to make an example of the selected target, even if the target doesn't make any sense—I remember, for instance, Riley & Co harassing and ultimately doxxing a (black) teenage girl in the name of anti-racism, because she disagreed with their toxic tactics. And that's not getting into truly trivial things like ships (now I always think of the #i saw goody proctor reblog a reylo gifset post!)

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, the key moment that decided me on distancing myself fom Kynn, back before she became persona non grata, was seeing how she came across some random moderately racist but incredibly clueless white woman and decided to actively bait her into increasingly ridiculous levels of clueless racism, purely for the joy of making fun of this woman as a group with Kynn's other friends. That's not being a helpful anti-racist ally that's being a bully.

But asides from that sort of deliberate cruelty, even beyond the choices of any individual person, there's just this really unfortunate arbitrariness to which (percieved) injustice gains a foothold in public consciousness. Sometimes the arbitrarily chosen focus of everyone's ire really is worthy of that much attention, and may even work as a rallying point to changing broader problems. But sometimes a relatively innocent person randomly gets the full force of everyone's anger about much larger problems.

[dreamsofghostsandstars]

The really scary thing about this is that I think I may have having fallen into some of this pile-on behavior when I was first on Tumblr, not really getting the dynamics of what was going on and getting carried away. After being there a while, I just started to go, "...Eh, let's take a step back from this. I don't like what we're getting into. What's really going on here?" I wonder how much of this is done by people who have been on Tumblr <6 months or so, vs. people who have been on it longer and have a more jaundiced (or, you know, clearer) view of "righteous" causes.

[anghraine]

Same.

I mean, I think part of it is inherent to the reblogging system: you're responding to the original post, not the 80,000 or however many other replies. And as someone who's occasionally written posts that spark Tumblr infighting, it's very ... hm, depersonalizing. I definitely remember a case where I indignantly reblogged an obliviously misogynistic ask someone got about Leia, not realizing that literally thousands of people had gone after the asker despite his apologies—because they didn't follow him and didn't see it, and often didn't follow the person who'd gotten the ask and didn't see her asking people to stop reblogging it. She'd deleted, but it didn't matter once the post was out there.

I know some people really want DW to develop some sort of reblogging function, but while I do think it'd be good if it moved a little with the times (media hosting! drafts!), I emphatically don't. It's way too easy to see posts as fundamentally detached from actual people.

[skywalker_saga]

The fandom on tumblr genuinely scares me sometimes. I don’t know if things have gotten worse or if I just remember things being better than they actually were, but it honestly does feel like fandom is a scarier place than it used to be. My first fandom was Harry Potter on LJ years ago, and while that fandom had its fair share of wank I don’t remember people being accused of being IRL racists or abuse apologists if they imagined the wrong fictional people kissing. There were ship wars of course, but I think they were mostly about what pairing was going to become canon, not about which ship is the most morally upstanding. Something feels different now, and I don’t know if it’s the platform - does the structure of tumblr somehow encourage this sort of mentality? - or if it’s the fandom I’m in now (Star Wars), or whether it’s just the trendy thing these days to act like your personal taste in fictional characters and ships is a moral question. Whatever it is, I don’t like it.

(I hope it’s okay to comment on these older entries, btw! I got this journal a few days ago but I only just got around to actually reading my reading page! :) )

[meridian_rose]

Interesting and some more good things in the comments here. I think that's a good point about reblogging; I think it should be an individually opt-in per post. So if you have a post you want re-posted, a request for help for someone, or a fest announcement, whatever, you could tick a box. But most of the time you want all comments to your post *at* your post, in threaded discussions. Because that's why journals work better for discussion than Tumblr. And I hadn't thought of it in terms of separating post from person, but you're right.

I'm seeing a little more calling out of Tumblr's herd behaviour now which is good. Because there are parts of Tumblr that are well out of hand.
The X-kit maker was driven off by a sustained attack over unsubstantiated allegations of abuse. There are posts about how you must not follow people if you ship what they define as a "problematic" ship. The you must adore every female character *because* they're female attitude seems to have originated at Tumblr - and same for any other character type that's not cis-het male.
I had the "icky girls shouldn't write slash" trope rear its ugly again last week; like the existence of fanfiction itself we seem to have to keep having discussions about why fandom, and how we participate in it, is important - and why censoring is harmful to the minorities who are often the ones creating transformative works. Except Tumblr is not so good at hosting discussions and things can get heated and blown out of proportion.

Final thought, I wonder if some of this is dogpiling is worse because of the ephemeral nature of Tumblr. I've been in fandom forever, I use my fannish identity at almost ALL the places, it is who I am. But at Tumblr you have people deleting their accounts on a whim, starting new blogs, changing their names every five minutes. They don't seem to be very engaged/invested long term, and so if they get irritated they can make a truly horrendous bullying post, get called out, disappear, and maybe start over. Those of us more invested are maybe more careful about the causes we get behind and how we express ourselves, the way you might be more careful about what you say on a public forum under your legal name compared to using an anon account.
I don't think anonymity makes abusive behaviour happen (nor forcing non-anon prevents it, I've seen shitty FB posts under people's legal names), and I believe anonymity is an important part of privacy online for many, many reasons. But I do wonder if people are willing to burn their bridges on Tumblr and Twitter more than, say, at LJ/DW where you're unlikely to start over every few months.