Tumblr crosspost (28 September 2019)

[anghraine]

I am only reanimating my fandom Twitter account with the utmost reluctance, but … fine.

(Tumblr is pretty clearly headed towards graveyard status and ... okay! Whatever!

...Twitter is reallyyyy not suited to how I do fandom but apparently it's where fandom is now? Or something. Anyway, I have the super original name of anghraine over there.)

Comments

[rhodanum]

Twitter is most definitely not suited to how a lot of older fans are used to doing fandom, but, unfortunately, it's the most active fannish platform we have right now.

A word of warning, though. Massive harassment campaigns are even more of an issue on Twitter than they were on Tumblr. Any hint of opinions against the current purity wank, if seen by the wrong person, will get your social media accounts obsessively combed over for the least thing that can be used as an attack-vector. If nothing in the usual list is found, then the harassers will simply make something up. The entire goal is to demonize and dehumanize the target, as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

Just in the last month, I had three friends driven to nervous breakdowns by harassment campaigns on Twitter that involved them being targeted by accounts with tens of thousands of followers. I was targeted myself and ended up having to temporarily deactivate my account + spent most of October locked down. Twitter's entire structure makes dogpiling far easier to achieve than almost any other social-media platform and this isn't new, we saw it in action in 2014 as well, with GamerGate.

[anghraine]

Thanks for letting me know! I knew that Twitter had become more Tumblr-like in the fandom emigration, but not that it was that bad all around. The format seems like it could enable even worse behaviour than Tumblr tbh.

Personally, I'm in this weird kind of box because I'm fiercely against antis and anti culture, and I've written the sort of thing they have meltdowns over (lol, my longest fic revolves around adulterous underage incest between a countess and a priest), but they've never come after me directly beyond screaming about Kylo Ren in reblog chains. (The worst comments I've received were actually about my ace!Luke headcanon.) I don't really know why my personality seems to hold them at bay, but ... somehow I doubt it'd work on Twitter.

[rhodanum]

Oh, it definitely won't work on Twitter. The same thing happened to me on Tumblr, they generally kept away from me, minus the odd rando shouting in reblog-chains (and also usually on the topic of Kylo Ren!) On Tumblr, the users who seemed to get targeted specifically were people without support-networks and who talked openly about things such as mental-health struggles, thus giving attackers a clear vector through which to hurt the person. Anyone with enough self-assurance usually kept the shrieking types at bay.

On Twitter? No such thing. I've lost count of how many people I've seen get accused of horrific crimes and bombarded with death-threats and the like, just in the last six weeks. Artists, writers, regular fandom-goers, people with a ton of followers, people with very few followers... The only variable is how long the attack lasts and that variable is usually influenced by the target's response (the more openly hurt and affected the target, the more the attackers will revel in the thing and keep it up).