Several people have written articles about the problems in the Fediverse already, and every single one of them has been harassed constantly since they published their article.
Today I’m doing what none of them have done yet: I’m publishing a second article. I’ve been jobless since my previous post on this blog, and the harassment that started that day hasn’t gone away in the year since.
What’s this about “Crumbling”?
There have so far been three articles that I know of describing the problems of harassment and mismanagement in the Fediverse. I encourage you to read all three of them.
The problems described in these articles continue to exist, and by some measures have gotten even worse since they were written. I’m not here today to offer solutions to those problems. I’m simply here to remind you that they exist.
As I said before, the authors of all three of these previous articles have been the targets of some pretty horrifying harassment. By posting this, I am no doubt going to become the next target. That’s a risk I am willing to take.
The Girl Who Cried “Racism!”
One of the recent harassment campaigns has been led by an instance admin (referred to as M). Her claim is that any person who associates with the author (referred to as E) of the third article above is a terrible racist who must be excommunicated, due to an intentional misreading of one of the passages in the article about specific ways harassment on the Fediverse manifests.
M’s claim is that anyone even remotely associated with E, be they friends, family members, or even people who happen to live in the same neighborhood, deserves to be harassed until they either agree to join the harassment campaign or die.
While this specific harassment campaign hasn’t caused any known deaths (yet), similar campaigns have achieved horrific results.
But isn’t racism bad?
Yes. Racism is bad. And this campaign of harassment was never about fighting racism. M could have chosen any number of scary sounding words to use as a weapon against her targets.
Back in 2020 when I wrote my previous article, I became the target of one of M’s harassment campaigns. She claimed that I was the world’s most racist person because I had spoken to another instance admin (referred to as A) in the past.
One of M’s friends, another instance admin (referred to as R), claimed that I was actively supporting A because I was a member of her Discord guild. I looked, and sure enough, I was still in the Discord guild that I hadn’t touched for over a year. Before I left, I noticed that not only was R also in that discord guild, R was a “Nitro Booster”, meaning R was actively spending money to unlock features on that Discord guild.
What was the evidence given that A was racist? Apart from mostly hand-waving, M claimed that because A had at one point disagreed with a black person, she was a racist. The disagreement in question was handled quietly and amicably for both parties involved, and would have been completely unknown if M’s harassment posse hadn’t decided to use it as ammo.
They want you to forget
The next harassment campaign is, in all likelihood, going to be similar to all of the previous ones. The same people will be involved, they will make the same fraudulent claims of wrongdoing against someone new, and all of their followers will join in on the harassment.
They’ll spend each day posting thousands of memes to try to make it harder to find the posts where they incite violence. If they perceive you as a threat to their ability to continue harassing, they will turn on you. And by nature of being on the Fediverse, their targets will naturally be vulnerable people.
If you try to stop them, they will work tirelessly to make sure you are remembered as an evil to defeat, rather than someone trying to make a positive difference. And the cycle will repeat. By design.
Death threats received for this post: 1
It’s disturbing how the more popular someone tends to be, the less accountable they’re held for their actions which directly harm anyone less popular. And people claim that popularity never plays into it.
Well this certainly explains why a couple of them went all out on a random user on our instance yesterday (blind and dealing with depression), just for daring to interact with E a couple times. They're sure to be disappointed that we didn't ban them like the abusers wanted, just reached out with concern and a couple links to educational material.Looks like we might have to think about defederating from these instances ourselves, as much as it would suck to lose the friends there … :ms_thinking: