the tumblr mob mentality
May. 19th, 2016 12:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1XAUtye:
asynca:
I had a bad experience yesterday.
I was discussing characters from a popular new fandom, and I happened to express a controversial opinion about one of them. When I had that discussion, it was with a set few people I’d been talking to, and it was part of a wider conversation. I didn’t tag it in the main tag, I explained my reasons, and the people I’d been talking to either agreed with me or said I had a valid point, even if they disagreed.
Then, someone who doesn’t follow me and wasn’t part of the conversation reblogged one post, without its tags, and out of context. Anyone who doesn’t know me or my blog might therefore look at it and draw conclusions about me that are quick and unfair. It was actually reblogged with the addition of ‘I hope you die’.
Interestingly, this person didn’t choose to reblog any of the in-depth and reasoned discussions I’d had about the character, or the replies where people were discussing the topic: they chose the most out-of-context, attention-grabbing post in order to incite hatred and drama.
It was like tabloid media: they didn’t care about the truth, they cared about attention.
Worse: people reblogged that post from this person, attacking me in it, and I suddenly got 60+ nasty anons on a range of social media platforms that ranged from, ‘lol shut up you fucking phobe’ and ‘I hope you kill yourself’.
That went on for 9 hours.
Not one of those people bothered to visit my blog and read the discussion. No one bothered to consider my profile or read my other posts to get a balanced view of the conversation. They all just cruelly mocked, insulted and attacked me, revelling in their perceived moral high-ground.
As much as I hate to say it: this site is renowned for that. The ‘Tumblr Mob Mentality’, people call it. Up until now I’d never been a victim of it, but let me tell you how fucking awful it is. It’s horribly unfair that people still keep reblogging the posts mocking me without reading the full conversation, or considering the motives of the person who attacked me in the first place.
So, before you reblog a call out post, make sure you have the full story. Don’t be reduced to a Tumblr Rent-a-Mob member - don’t let someone whip you into a hateful frenzy without making sure you know what’s really going on.
There is never a reason to cruelly mock, attack or insult someone - it’s not ‘smart’, it’s not ‘witty’, you’re not ‘fighting the good fight’ - you’re just being awful, and you’re better than that.
Yeah but I had this happen to me multiple times on other platforms? I once had an excerpt of a friends-locked Livejournal post copy-pasted up onto a screen in a physical room full of people for them to all read. I had another one where someone snipped an excerpt from a 2000-word story I wrote and e-mailed that excerpt to other people to whip up controversy. This led to a situation where in actual real life I was physically pulled into a room and made to defend myself, unprepared, for having written an essay about a thing I had experienced, to people who hadn’t read the essay but knew it had mentioned a person.
Like, the situation described in the post above? Terrible, but absolutely not Tumblr-specific. This shit happened to me in 2006. I’m just saying.
The best part is that this continued intermittently for literally years, and to this day I don’t know who it was who was lurking my journal. It wasn’t necessarily directly someone who had f-lock access, but there may well have been someone with f-lock access working with them. There were also weird phantom retweets, a little later when Twitter became a thing? It was abundantly clear that I am Interesting Enough online that there are large numbers of people who lurk my stuff, and there was at least one person who made it their business to make sure other people were aware of stuff I talked about.
There is nothing new under the sun. Also, this person could well have followed me to Tumblr, I just withdrew from almost all in-person activities so there’s nothing to start shit about anymore. Have I talked about how I quit roller derby? Nope not even privately.
asynca:
I had a bad experience yesterday.
I was discussing characters from a popular new fandom, and I happened to express a controversial opinion about one of them. When I had that discussion, it was with a set few people I’d been talking to, and it was part of a wider conversation. I didn’t tag it in the main tag, I explained my reasons, and the people I’d been talking to either agreed with me or said I had a valid point, even if they disagreed.
Then, someone who doesn’t follow me and wasn’t part of the conversation reblogged one post, without its tags, and out of context. Anyone who doesn’t know me or my blog might therefore look at it and draw conclusions about me that are quick and unfair. It was actually reblogged with the addition of ‘I hope you die’.
Interestingly, this person didn’t choose to reblog any of the in-depth and reasoned discussions I’d had about the character, or the replies where people were discussing the topic: they chose the most out-of-context, attention-grabbing post in order to incite hatred and drama.
It was like tabloid media: they didn’t care about the truth, they cared about attention.
Worse: people reblogged that post from this person, attacking me in it, and I suddenly got 60+ nasty anons on a range of social media platforms that ranged from, ‘lol shut up you fucking phobe’ and ‘I hope you kill yourself’.
That went on for 9 hours.
Not one of those people bothered to visit my blog and read the discussion. No one bothered to consider my profile or read my other posts to get a balanced view of the conversation. They all just cruelly mocked, insulted and attacked me, revelling in their perceived moral high-ground.
As much as I hate to say it: this site is renowned for that. The ‘Tumblr Mob Mentality’, people call it. Up until now I’d never been a victim of it, but let me tell you how fucking awful it is. It’s horribly unfair that people still keep reblogging the posts mocking me without reading the full conversation, or considering the motives of the person who attacked me in the first place.
So, before you reblog a call out post, make sure you have the full story. Don’t be reduced to a Tumblr Rent-a-Mob member - don’t let someone whip you into a hateful frenzy without making sure you know what’s really going on.
There is never a reason to cruelly mock, attack or insult someone - it’s not ‘smart’, it’s not ‘witty’, you’re not ‘fighting the good fight’ - you’re just being awful, and you’re better than that.
Yeah but I had this happen to me multiple times on other platforms? I once had an excerpt of a friends-locked Livejournal post copy-pasted up onto a screen in a physical room full of people for them to all read. I had another one where someone snipped an excerpt from a 2000-word story I wrote and e-mailed that excerpt to other people to whip up controversy. This led to a situation where in actual real life I was physically pulled into a room and made to defend myself, unprepared, for having written an essay about a thing I had experienced, to people who hadn’t read the essay but knew it had mentioned a person.
Like, the situation described in the post above? Terrible, but absolutely not Tumblr-specific. This shit happened to me in 2006. I’m just saying.
The best part is that this continued intermittently for literally years, and to this day I don’t know who it was who was lurking my journal. It wasn’t necessarily directly someone who had f-lock access, but there may well have been someone with f-lock access working with them. There were also weird phantom retweets, a little later when Twitter became a thing? It was abundantly clear that I am Interesting Enough online that there are large numbers of people who lurk my stuff, and there was at least one person who made it their business to make sure other people were aware of stuff I talked about.
There is nothing new under the sun. Also, this person could well have followed me to Tumblr, I just withdrew from almost all in-person activities so there’s nothing to start shit about anymore. Have I talked about how I quit roller derby? Nope not even privately.
