#internet harassment
god the idea of “doubling down” has ruined the fucking internet.
“when anybody commits a minor offense they must immediately and with no hesitancy apologize and start self-flagellating. any attempt to clarify your point or umbrage taken with any insults not only makes the original offense worse, they now have a new problem” does anybody see why this might be bad?
if the human threat response was to lie down on the ground, throw an apple in your mouth, and start marinating yourself for your attacker’s convince we wouldn’t have gotten very far as a species
“Sure, they were harassed by hundreds of people over accusations that were ridiculously minor or patently false, but they refused to apologize for the stuff they didn’t do, and this proves that they deserve all the harassment after all, the problem is not the original thing, it’s their response”
This story is worth telling because it just keeps getting better.
And by better, the meaning is “worse”.
You might want to catch up on the 10 Everyday Information Warfare Tactics You’ve Already Fallen For - and the case of the AltSciFi zine project (the number has grown to 15 tactics, with examples illustrating how they’re used).
Here’s a timeline of the past year or so:
- Our Tumblr blog reaches ~1,500 subscribers (unlike AltSciFi Twitter, the Tumblr follower count is not curated, so many followers are probably bots). The AltSciFi Tumblr blog has several hundred posts accumulated over at least four years.
- A prototype of the AltSciFi gallery/store site is posted to GitHub. Four out of 15 pages have working PayPal links, but the site is obviously not complete. Hint: it’s on GitHub – a site for programming and web development, not e-commerce; 11 pages have no links at all.
- The attack begins on Twitter. An artist finds the GitHub site. The artist (we’ll call her “MiraKillian”) does not contact AltSciFi, but instead creates a Twitter slander/libel attack about how AltSciFi is “stealing art”. This attack spreads across social media. Many artists on Twitter use copyright-trolling this way to earn “clout”. In this case, MiraKillian is a member of a gang called “The (Twitter) Artist Community” who obsessively Like and Retweet each other’s posts to get more magical “clout”. Ironically, the Like/Retweet game rewards the best narcisssists and biggest bullies who rise to become “Influencers”, some of whom act like megalomanaical miniature Harvey Weinsteins lording their imaginary status over less-popular followers who beg for “signal boosts”, prostrating themselves to win the Influencers’ favour.
- AltSciFi is accused of “promoting” the unfinished site via Tumblr. The Tumblr blog’s homepage is the only one that links back to the Github site, since that page was used for testing Tumblr’s layout. The Github pages that have PayPal links aren’t connected anywhere on the homepage at all – meaning that no one could find them in any case. (And in case you’ve ever tried to sell anything via social media, it’s a complete waste of time unless you have an extremely specific niche, or ten of thousands of followers. AltSciFi had neither of those, since we haven’t publicly marketed, promoted, or launched the zine yet.)
- The slander/libel attack reaches GitHub. One sci-fi makeup artist whose work was posted to the AltSciFi Github test site submitted a mostly-false DMCA takedown notice. GitHub never investigates, but rather automatically posts all DMCA takedown notices. This creates the illusion of “guilt” – but also puts the makeup artist in legal jeopardy for libel based on her own gullibility.
- A few months later, MiraKillian’s name appears above the title of a cyberpunk webcomic created by a popular artist (we’ll call her “Miirai”) who has been publicly scammed quite recently. Miirai has built a public persona around being shy and trusting, which makes her the perfect target for yet another scam. This time, MiraKillian has taken over drawing Miira’s webcomic along with one other artist, while Miirai herself begs her followers on social media for money to “support” the comic due to repetitive-stress injuries (art is hard work). That is a well-known tactic called a “sympathy scam”.
- The slander/libel attack reaches Reddit. Nona goes on Reddit and creates a topic to ask, “would you raise funds to help Miirai get proper medical attention for her injuries?” One of Miirai’s new “team” appears and lies that Miirai is still creating art for the cyberpunk webcomic herself, which contradicts what she wrote on recent entries of her own blog about being disabled due to her injuries.
- The slander/libel attack poisons a Reddit community. A day later, Miirai herself shows up and defends MiraKillian, making up a conspiracy theory about how a fake Patreon account claimed to be her – therefore it must have secretly been AltSciFi! And the idea about her being scammed is “fake news”! (Note: a key tactic in any scam, obviously, is to gain the confidence and complicity of a vulnerable person.)
- The slander/libel attack poisons a subreddit’s moderators. The subreddit in which this conversation takes place starts arbitrarily deleting Nona’s posts about the topic. Nona quickly narrows down exactly which moderator was likely the culprit based on who was active on Reddit when the most recent post was taken down, and asks a different moderator to deal with it.
- Instead of disciplining the culprit, the moderator starts bullshitting, trying to make the problem about Nona instead. Nona contacted the moderator using a relatively new account to create distance from the attackers who are on Reddit. The moderator used that as an excuse, saying “creating alt accounts and posting about the same thing repeatedly is ‘suspicious’.” The mod also lied that adding links to further information about the incident was “spamming”, and intentionally misinterpreted Reddit’s rules (do not post the same comment repeatedly) to mean, “do not post about similar topics more than once”.
- The Reddit admins do nothing. Nona messages the Reddit admins. A week passes. No response.
Note: on that same subreddit, Nona previously posted a topic about the zine, and a well-known copyright troll appeared, spamming the comments section. After Nona reported the troll’s comments, Nona was banned for “spamming the moderators”. So Nona wrote a blog entry about it, and two years later, another artist commented on the blog that they were dealing with the same idiot. It’s been _two years_ and the moderators of that subreddit are still allowing the troll to use their sub as his personal toilet for trolling. So much for “just ignore the trolls.”
So you can see that as this story unfolds, it shows how much of a sham the idea of “free speech” really is on social media. Tribalism by a small, aggressive group of motivated (and mostly illiterate) bullies (the “Artist Community” on Twitter, who are actually just a few hundred idiots who are heavy Twitter users) spreads into an internet-wide disinformation campaign.
TL;DR The fallacy of “free speech” on the modern internet is a question of what is deleted or people who are bullied into silence. You can’t know what’s missing if you never see it in the first place.
Sounds like the perfect starting point for a dystopian sci-fi story, doesn’t it?
The AltSciFi project is now fully dedicated to the fight against misinformation, disinformation, internet bullying and copyright trolling. The AltSciFi concept is only the beginning. We are here especially to support members of maginalised communities online (nonwhite, women, LGBT as well as non-neurotypical and older users). A safe and empowering internet for marginalised users creates a better internet for everyone.
If you want more information about ongoing and upcoming efforts to help independent artists and fans like you to create a better internet, send a DM – or email altscifi at tutanota dot com.
P.S.Keep fighting for net neutrality. If we stop fighting, copyright trolling will become multinational corporate law, and the open web will effectively cease to exist. In other words, welcome to a real cyberpunk dystopia. The only way to stop that from happening is to create a better future for ourselves, since no one else will do it for us.
Every conversation naturally reaches its end, when you realise that you’re repeating what you’ve already said.
Now is that moment for the Twitter-based slander campaign against AltSciFi.
Since the facts have been revealed to show that their claims are nonsense, the campaign’s perpetrators are using desperate last-ditch attempts to distort the meanings of facts themselves.
Thankfully, those distortions are easy to spot, and that’s what this blog entry is all about.
Beyond this blog entry, there’s nothing else to say about the slander campaign. That snake can only continue to eat its own tail from here on.
One good outcome of this situation is that AltSciFi is now also dedicated to helping artists protect themselves against being taken advantage of online – that includes dealing with copyright issues intelligently without harming other artists or fans, and protecting themselves against being slandered by malevolent groups of trolls. Both of those are major problems on the web and in social media especially. AltSciFi can now speak about both from the perspective of first-hand experience.
Distortion #0.
Distortion #0: “Your faux intellectualism is a continual self-perpetuating narrative stroking your overinflated ego.”
Aside from being a tortuous sentence of near-gibberish, its creator barged into a conversation that was about helping another artist in order to post this little gem of muddled prose. Talk about an overinflated ego.
Here’s the more insidious point, though. This frames any attempt at self-defense by AltSciFi as “a continual self-perpetuating narrative.” Notice how it not only ignores the fact that this “narrative” exists to fight back against people like him who slandered AltSciFi – it also pretends that any attempt by AltSciFi at defending itself is due to “overinflated ego”. This is a classic tactic used by emotional abusers, called “gaslighting”.The term gaslighting has also been distorted and misused in service of slander, as you’ll see below.
Distortion #1.
“Look,we all know you stole and tried to steal art….”
This is a rhetorical gang attack called an appeal to popularity. Whenever someone says “we all know that…” or “everybody knows…” without presenting any evidence, you know they’re probably lying (or being manipulated, as someeone has lied to them and they chose to believe it).
Distortion #2.
“The facts were presented prima facie...”
This is an amusing attempt at legalistic jargon that backfired completely. “Prima facie“ means “at first glance, without further investigation“. Facts presented ”prima facie“ are not evidence until you discover the story surrounding the little bits of data visible at first glance.
Distortion #3.
“…you don’t get to backpedal and cite them as rumor because it’s convenient in painting your side as just.”
The “facts” are detailed at length, here (click here). Read them yourself; that was the whole point of writing the blog entry.
Notice the tactic here: they can’t disprove the facts, so they try to distort what the facts mean. AltSciFi has never needed to “backpedal” nor cite facts as rumours. Read the blog entry for yourself. These are the facts.
Distortion #3.
“There was so much evidence presented by multiple parties involved…”
Wrong. There was only one incomplete AltSciFi website, on a site for web development, with four pages that a few people mistakenly believed were “selling art”. The rest of the slander story was based on a complete lack of “evidence” (because there was no “evidence” to be found, and never was any). This distortion unintentionally reveals the problem itself: no one knew what they were taking about before trying to slander a project that hadn’t even started yet. Even worse, no one bothered to ask before jumping on the slander bandwagon. That was the scary part. Everyone swallowed the rumours and no one asked for the context surrounding the “evidence”. The excuse given was “it’s not my job to find facts”. Wrong again. That’s always your job – also known as basic adult critical thinking. Facts are meaningless without context.
Distortion #4.
“…and your interactions with them that the public lambasting your project received was justified.”
Notice the grandiosity here. “The public lambasting” refers to a campaign that began with a few bored artists on Twitter, starting with one who manufactured a disingenuous “white knighting” campaign – a borderline conspiracy theory to save the “The (Twitter) Artist Community!” – that turned out to be factually false and full of nothing but mean-spirited trash-talk.
Distortion #5.
“Be careful what you post AltSciFi, the art community doesn’t soon forget.”
Yes, darling, thank you for the reminder that these blog posts were written and posted publicly for a reason. Nice little stalkerish implied threat, there, too.
Notice how the person impersonates “the art community” when in fact, his “community” is a few artists on Twitter who took the opportunity to loudly bully a group they knew nothing about. That phrase should read “the art community (of bored idiots on Twitter with deficient reading comprehension skills and too much time on their hands that would be better spent creating art)”.
Distortion #6.
“The easy shortcut you could’ve done is to just say "hey, I was wrong, I’m sorry, I’ll fix it.” and then fix it. But that’s not who you are and not what you did. Quite the opposite in fact. “
As usual, completely wrong. From the very first conversation on Twitter, even before the slander attack began, AltSciFi apologised for mistakes made – but also held the artist accountable for her decision to send a mob of Twitter users instead of finding out the facts first.
The original tweet is timestamped 7:36am - 17 Jan 2018:
[Λ•]ltSciFi - @altscifi_ - Jan 16
Here’s the grown-up perspective: We both made mistakes here. You made a dramatic mess for no reason. And the bit about a strawman is nonsense because you’re just misusing the word, along with "gaslight” and “victim-blame” in a victimless situation.
Followed by:
[Λ•]ltSciFi - @altscifi_ -7:41am - Jan 17 2018
Your reaction was valid, yes. As a professional, it makes you look like a bitter spoiled child to act like a Twitter bully, misleading hundreds of people, instead of simply finding out what was actually happening. Are you adult/professional enough to accept your responsibility?
And:
[Λ•]ltSciFi - @altscifi_ -8:27am - Jan 17 2018
Don’t pick a fight, and you’ll get a very different response. When you talk about being a professional, does a professional send a Twitter mob against people? Or is that a juvenile thing to do? Ask yourself what response you intended to get.
Unsurprisingly, she gave no answer to these questions.
Since the perpetrator is a narcissist (and quite likely a sociopath, given recent events involving another artist), the mere possibility of her not being seen as “saviour of The (Twitter) Art Community” only enraged her further. She couldn’t admit her own mistake, and instead dug herself in deeper.
—
So now you see the tactics behind this game of rumours, distortions and lies.
For the artist being taken advantage of by the perpetrators of this slanderous mess, AltSciFi only has one note of caution. It applies equally to all indie sci-fi artists and writers, perhaps including you:
Be careful who you call “friends” – especially if you paid them before they befriended you.
Beyond that, the slander campaign is now eating itself; AltSciFi will play no further role in it. There are more important things to do, and hopefully you’ll join us. In the meantime, enjoy creating art. We’ll have more exciting news to share soon. :)
It all began in sometime around 2014…
(This was originally going to be an infographic, but there’s wasn’t enough time. Here is the story. All names have been changed to protect everyone’s privacy, as always.)
Nona: “How can I promote my stories and art? I’ll post to Reddit.”
Nona posts to Reddit and gets a few upvotes.
Nona: “Okay… now what?”
As all Reddit posts do, Nona’s link slides off the homepage and quietly slips into oblivion.
Nona: “I know. I’ll create a newsletter! And post it on Wordpress!
And offer subscriptions on Patreon!”
Nona gets busy making things.
Nona: “Okay.. now what…?”
Mysteriously, no one finds the newsletter. The net is vast and infinite.
Nona: “Okaaay. There are so many artists on sites like Twitter and
Tumblr – I’ll create accounts there and build a zine! Maybe we can
help each other get paid for our art without needing corporations
like Amazon, Google and Reddit! We’ll do it ourselves! That’s what the web was built for, after all.Yay!”
Nona spends the next four years trying different ways to build
a zine. Gradually, it grows from “just another Wordpress blog”
into a complete infrastructure for independent artists to sell their work. Nona also keeps writing and creating art.
The Twitter following slowly grows. A few paying subscribes sign up.
Our name is AltSciFi. We stand for independent art, and the potential of the web to connect artists with fans who want to pay for high-quality work.
This is an informal project by artists and techies.
We use sci-fi to teach about user privacy on the open web, anti-militarisation of police, anti-nuclear war, and celebrating the human rights of women, people of all religions (and no religion), LGBT people, neurodiversity, and global culture.
This is the human future. This is AltSciFi.
Summer 2017
Nona: “Now we have a zine and social media presence, but no one can actually sellorbuy anything. Wait! An idea! The ultimate dream is to create indie films, like an authentic live-action Ghost in the Shell and sequel to Tank Girl, right? Awesome!”
Nona creates a store site. It has become clear that Patreon sucks, so Nona tests a few PayPal links to see if it’s easy for visitors to use. Nona posts more prototypes to Reddit. No one buys anything because the site is unfinished and there’s obviously nothing to buy (or maybe they just didn’t like the art enough to try to buy it?), but people seem to like the store site concept overall.
“Great! We’re getting closer… but there’s still more work to do.”
(Links were added on the Tumblr blog, too. Scroll past the first page and you’ll see no other links anywhere – for over two years of blog posts. Isn’t that interesting? Half the links don’t even work, as someone recently pointed out. The design testing obviously wasn’t complete, which is why nothing has been officially announced anywhere.)
Late 2017
Nona: “There’s this great piece of art on Twitter by some artist named Stan, but it has a caption that might be seen as unintentionally racist. Hmm… I’ll re-post it and attach the creator’s @username to give Stan credit for her work.”
Stan sees the post in her Twitter mentions.
Stan: “Whaaat! Someone re-posted art of mine! How dare they!
Should I ask them to retweet instead? No! I’ll quote-tweet them and
make up a story about ‘stealing’ art so my followers get angry
and harass them! That’s how artists like me do things on Twitter, after all!”
Nona’s Twitter mentions start buzzing with angry noise.
Nona: “What is this bullsh*t about 'stealing art’ in my mentions?!”
Nona clicks Block on the noise. It works. Nona goes back to building
the store and zine, and making new art of her own, including a 53-page dystopian novella completed in 2017 December.
2018 January
An artist named Dick finds the unfinished store site. A few of her images are there as part of the store prototype. Her page is one of four with PayPal test links, out of about twelve pages that don’t have links at all.
Dick: “What’s this? My work is on a website somewhere? And there are
PayPal links? That’s weird – what should I do? Should I ask them to take my work down? The site looks pretty cool. Should I find out what it’s all about?”
Dick sees an opportunity. “No… I’ll go on Twitter and whine to my
fellow artists! Maybe I can start a Twitter rage-mob and make myself look like a saviour of The Twitter Artist Community!”
Dick goes on Twitter – and who’s there? Stan of course! And Stan
is still angry that her own attempt at sending a Twitter rage-mob failed.
Dick: Hey Twitter followers! Have you heard of AltSciFi?
Stan: Yes! And I’ll gladly slander them for you! <bullsh*t about 'stealing art’> Hey followers, jump in!
Stan’s Twitter followers: <more bullsh*t about 'stealing art’>
Stan makes a mistake, though. She includes AltSciFi’s username in a tweet,
and AltSciFi sees it.
AltSciFi: “Are we going to do this every few months, Artist Twitter?
*sigh* Okay…”
AltSciFi decides to deal with the bullsh*t head-on, while moving forward to complete the zine and store sites. Several blog entries chronicle the harassment campaign while AltSciFi blocks a few hundred trash-talking idiots on Twitter.
2018 March
Nona finds that Dick has attached himself to Mirai, one of Nona’s favourite cyberpunk artists. Nona tries to warn Mirai, but to no avail. It’s a sad moment, as Mirai has been taken advantage of before very recently – but hopefully things turn out better this time. At least some of Mirai’s fans are now paying close attention to Mirai’s new “team” (including Dick), so at least that’s better than nothing.
Moving on…
AltSciFi has finally (almost) completed the zine, store sites, and…
…has begun something completely different and new.
Now,AltSciFi is ready to do something that just might change the world,
even if only in some small way.
Stay tuned. :)
When you enter a chat room and it’s apparent you’re female so all these guys start messaging you liek “hey baby you so fine baby”
And then there’s those that message you like they’re just tryin to chat and be cool, but they get all mad when you bring up your s/o like, can I not just chat online without it being some kind of sexual endeavor?“And ur boyfriend doesn’t get mad at you for this chat app?"
Like no. I just said I just wanna chat with people. Clearly you can’d understand that “chat with” is not the same as “hook up with” so bye bye.
I mean I just can’t get over this. Some of my best friends are people I met through social media/chatting. Back then there was always the threat of these people but they weren’t as prominent (in my own personal experience).
I literally downloaded this app and had the above experiences. I made my profile say clearly I both have a boyfriend AND don’t wish to be contacted for sex/flirting/relationships. But it’s STILL HAPPENING.
These men don’t care that I’m a human being. They notice I’m a woman and think that means it’s okay to bombard me with propositions and harass me when I shoot them down.
Ugh. - H
