Your assumptions about The Good Fairy expose your own bigotry. She’s not in the right here. All I’m trying to do, when I scoop up field mice and bop them on the head, is to preserve my own identity as a Little Rabbit. Not many people know that Little Rabbits are under threat. I’m hoping to change that through social media.

Some history: For nearly a century, field mice have been pulling the wool over your eyes and making you believe that they’re victims, just because I scoop them up and bop them on the head. Using this falsehood, they get special treatment and benefits, and all the while the correct power structure in which Little Rabbits rule over the forest civilization is eroding. But believe me, the natural order of things is to have Little Rabbits in charge. That’s the way it’s been ever since we were Little Rabbits in Europe. Scooping up field mice and bopping on them on the head is part of our birthright.

There’s this frog who totally gets me. He’s the only one.

Everything bad that has ever happened is a result of taking away power from Little Rabbits. Little Rabbits are much smarter than field mice. Let that sink in… If I didn’t scoop up field mice and bop them on the head, they’d mix with Little Rabbits and then what would happen? There would be no Little Rabbits. It would be Little Rabbit genocide.

In 1987, 103 field mice participated in a Florida University study. The study revealed tapping the head of field mice stimulates the neurons which produce serotonin, also known as “the happy hormone.” Given this incontrovertible fact I ask you, where’s your compassion for field mice? What about their happiness? YOU’RE the one who hates field mice.

In a forest where I can freely bop them on the head, field mice would be much better off. If you say you care about field mice — you, the Good Fairy, and the Forest Council which has recently issued a statement condemning my bopping field mice on the head — you’re a hypocrite. You don’t give a damn about field mice, their children, or babies. You’re just virtue signalling to convince yourselves that you’re better than me, Little Rabbit Foo Foo. I won’t let you get away with that, baby-hater.

The frog watches everything. I know he has my back. I call him Pepe.

The Good Fairy is the real racist, because she’s destroying Little Rabbit civilization. The Good Fairy needs to take her “I don’t like your attitude” sanctimony and shove it up her ass. Oh wait… I’m not supposed to say stuff like that anymore because it’s not politically correct. Remind me: Who’s being oppressed again?

Most field mice are undocumented, you realize, so you’re defending something illegal. ILLEGAL. Think hard about that. Meanwhile, the Good Fairy threatens to turn me into a Goonie, and no one cries out. Everyone has become desensitized to hatred directed against Little Rabbits.

On a side note, don’t believe the false doublespeak Gruffalo narrative which implies that field mice are clever. The Gruffalo is a cuck. Everyone knows that, and calling someone a cuck is the best, most damning, most devastating insult and not for a moment will I ever examine why I’m convinced of that. Read this excellent article I found on Reddit called “Are field mice mammals?” Take your red pill!

Sometimes, the other forest animals watch me, perplexed, as I scoop up field mice and bop them on the head. “What on earth are you doing?” they say. “And why do you keep calling people cucks?” “I’m a proud Little Rabbit,” I tell them, “and I’m committed to safeguarding the heritage of the European forest civilization.” To their follow-up question, I reply, “Yes, I am aware that most real-life Europeans think I’m just a strange Little Rabbit. I get asked that a lot.”

And after all my efforts, what happens? The Good Fairy still doesn’t like my attitude. She’s trying to silence me and suppress the truth by threatening to turn me into a Goonie. The Forest Council has approved the measure. But just you wait. The frog is going to rise up. The frog is strong and bold. My feelings for the frog are purely platonic, by the way.

Go ahead. Try to turn me into a Goonie. We will rise up. The frog will…. Wait. Where is the frog going? Hey, come back! Don’t spawn now! I don’t have any chances left! Wait! You’ll see! We will rule the world! We’ll be the master race again! We’ll all get book deals and aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhbhbhghh!

By Becky Hayes

The most persistent criticism of the #MeToo movement is that advocates have abandoned due process in favor of trial by the faceless internet mob. Critics accuse the women leading the movement of pursuing “vigilante justice” or worse, a witch-hunt.

These critiques have dogged #MeToo from the beginning, and now that the backlash to the movement has reached a crescendo, we’re about to hear a whole lot more.

But don’t listen.

Social media is exactly the right place for #MeToo to play out. In fact, it’s the only place it ever could. The frequent invocation of due process ignores just how inadequate the American legal system is for protecting women against sexual violence and harassment. It is precisely because the courts of law and other traditional avenues of recourse have failed women that they’ve turned to the internet and the court of public opinion.

Due process sounds great in theory. Zephyr Teachout, former Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York, defined it as “a fair, full investigation, with a chance for the accused to respond” in her recent New York Times op-ed on this topic. It’s hard to argue with that. The concept of due process is a fundamental pillar of the American justice system and one that we pride ourselves on.

The problem with #MeToo—according to its detractors—is that women have bypassed the courts, where due process rights apply, and gone directly to the public to seek out justice. The public, in turn, has rushed to judgment. Critics argue that justice can only be served by submitting these claims through the formal legal systems that guarantee basic fairness to the accused.

Social media is exactly the right place for #MeToo to play out.

We know from experience, however, that the systems currently in place to deal with complaints of sexual harassment and assault have systematically failed victims and have allowed far too many perpetrators to continue their abuse unchecked.

This is true of the nation’s criminal and civil courts, forced private arbitrations, HR department investigations, and campus tribunals. There’s no great mystery as to why. We have shorthand for these kinds of impossible-to-prove claims: “he said-she said.”

The phrase refers to the fact that all too often the only evidence in sexual harassment or assault cases is the victim’s word against the abuser’s denial. The incident of alleged abuse almost always takes place behind closed doors, so there are no other witnesses. With so little to go on these claims almost never result in a successful verdict.

And while no database tracks the outcomes of employment discrimination cases nationwide, a review of a random sampling of cases by Laura Beth Nielsen, a professor at the American Bar Foundation and Northwestern University, revealed that only 2% of plaintiffs win their cases.

Even when there are eyewitnesses, much of the mistreatment women are complaining about falls short of the legal definition of sexual harassment. There is a big gap between what the public believes is appropriate workplace behavior and what is considered egregious enough to warrant discipline, dismissal, or legal sanction under our existing guidelines and laws.

For example, did you know that your supervisor grabbing your butt at work is not enough, on its own, to sustain a claim under Title VII, the federal law that prohibits workplace sexual harassment? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) defines sexual harassment as “unwelcome sexual advances” that “unreasonably interfere with an individual’s work performance,” or that create a hostile atmosphere at work. Under Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson the Supreme Court held that such conduct must be “sufficiently severe or pervasive” to “create an abusive working environment.’” As recently as 2014 a federal court dismissed the claim of an employee whose boss grabbed her butt twice in one day in front of co-workers because it was neither severe nor pervasive enough to offend the average woman according to the judge, a woman no less.

Laws protecting women from sexual misconduct are much narrower than the commentators who want to redirect all these claims into the courts seem to realize. Annika Hernroth-Rothstein argues in National Review that “[i]f sexual harassment is a crime, it should be fought not with hashtags but with the full force of the law” in a piece titled, “#Metoo and Trial by Mob.”

Sexual harassment is not, in fact, a crime. Title VII imposes only civil liability — i.e. money damages — on employers in cases of workplace misconduct. Further, only employers with more than 15 employees are covered. Employees of small businesses have no federal protection.

Due Process Is Needed For Sexual Harassment Accusations — But For Whom?

The same goes for freelancers employed as independent contractors and unpaid interns. Some state and local laws are more generous, but these are few and far between. Sexual harassment claims against anyone but employers and, under Title IX, federally funded schools are not covered at all.

Even if your claim is covered and meets the legal definition of harassment, there are still multiple barriers to seeking recourse through the courts. First, going through the formal legal system costs money. There are court fees and lawyers to pay, in addition to the time off work required.

Second, sexual harassment claims are subject to statutes of limitations — meaning that victims cannot bring these claims after a certain amount of time has passed. In many cases, these time limits are very short. The federal statute of limitations under Title VII, for example, is only 180 days, or roughly six months.

The New York State limit is three years.

Many of the claims of sexual harassment—and worse—that are coming out now as part of #Metoo are many years, and in some cases, decades old. Victims of sexual harassment often have more pressing needs in the immediate aftermath of the experience than filing a lawsuit, including dealing with the resultant trauma and, all too frequently, job loss. For these men and women there is nowhere else to go but the internet to air the grievances that have long been buried.

What Happens When Your Rape Expires? – The Establishment

The calls for due process are often tied with calls for reform to the existing laws. Reforms can take years to pass, and even when they do, they almost always apply prospectively to new claims, not retroactively. Thus, for many of the victims who posted their experiences as part of #MeToo, their options were internet justice or no justice at all.

Which would you have had them choose?

Social media has no barriers to entry. It is free and open to all. The only thing women need is an internet connection and the guts to come forward. Unlike the federal courts which are bound by the strictures of a nearly 50-year old law, the public has shown great willingness to consider the whole wide range of women’s stories that run the gamut from rape to a squeeze on the waist during a photo op.

Even better, social media has allowed for a dialogue among diverse voices about what kind of behavior is acceptable and desirable in the society we want to live in, rather than just what is legal or illegal. The recent engagement around Babe’s account of a young woman’s date with Aziz Ansari is the perfect example. That article engendered some of the most thought provoking discussions on today’s sexual politics despite the general consensus that the behavior described didn’t break any laws.

To Raise A Feminist Son, Talk To Him About Aziz Ansari

One of the unique advantages of social media that makes it particularly well suited to this movement is the incredible power of hashtags to connect women with similar stories. The men who have been brought down by the #MeToo movement have not been felled by individual women tweeting out isolated claims. In each case consequences have been visited upon abusers based on the strength of a large number of women coming forward with often nearly identical allegations that show a pattern of misbehavior.

Such is the power of #Metoo that it can aggregate the stories of women who have never met and who are separated by decades. Hashtags allow for the revolutionary possibility that sexual harassment will no longer be characterized by “he said-she said” allegations, but, as illustrated poignantly in a recent New York Times ad, “he said- she said, she said, she said,” cases, ad infinitum. (Though, of course, even one “she said” should not be dismissed.)

For all its utility, the role social media played in the #MeToo movement has also been overstated. The stories that brought down industry giants like Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Mark Halperin, and others did not originate on social media platforms, but rather in the pages of the nation’s finest newspapers. The allegations were thoroughly vetted by investigative journalists bound by a code of ethics that provides its own kind of due process. Journalistic ethics require corroborating sources before going to print with a story with serious allegations such as sexual harassment. Furthermore, journalists always seek comment from the accused, giving them an opportunity to speak out on their own behalf.

Critics’ insistence on due process presupposes an answer to a still open question: What is “the point” of #MeToo? The courts are best at meting out punishment for violations already committed. What if #MeToo isn’t about punishment, or, more to the point, what if it’s about more than punishment?

What if it’s about changing the system prospectively, not seeking redress for the past? What if it’s about prevention? The author of the Shitty Media Men list wrote that her goal was to warn others about men in her industry so they could protect themselves. What if #MeToo is about catharsis and about having a long overdue conversation where we all get to have a say? What if there are a multitude of points, and very few of them are well served by the courts?

The reflexive outcry about the need for due process from #MeToo critics is not well considered. It’s time we stop telling women where, when, and to whom they can tell their own stories. If #MeToo is about anything, it’s about the end of the era of women and other victims suffering in silence.

Social Media Has Its Pitfalls But You Can Use It For Positive Change — Here’s How

Together, we can build the future we need.

Unsplash/Jonathan Denney

By Alaina Leary

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

I t’s easy to think that social media is a force for negativity — that it’s bad for our mental health to be constantly exposed to a stream of news and avenues for comparing ourselves to others. But social media can also be a platform for creating and sustaining positive social change, and it’s something that we can all be a part of.

Hashtag movements like #MeToo, which was started by activist Tarana Burke and later amplified online, have lasting consequences. RAINN (The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) reported a 21 percent increase in calls to anti-sexual assault helplines after Harvey Weinstein allegations and #MeToo exploded, showing that online conversations can persuade people to seek help offline.

The 2014 hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks launched a nonprofit of the same name that now offers internship grants, mentorships, awards for authors and booksellers, and an app called OurStory that helps connect people with vetted diverse books. And Marley Dias’s #1000BlackGirlBooks has helped continue that conversation while proving that young people can become activists and create change.

These are only a few examples of how movements like #BlackLivesMatter use social media alongside grassroots organizing as a catalyst for activism. It’s worth noting that many current policy changes — like the recent repealing of net neutrality — are particularly tough on marginalized people who rely heavily on the Internet for agency, education, and activism.

One of my earliest experiences with activism was when I started using an LGBTQIA+ youth forum in middle school to spread information about safe and consensual sex with our international online community, and later became a moderator for the group.

If you’re interested in using social media as an agent for positive change but you’re not sure where to start, here are some tips that may help:

1. Take advantage of interactive activism opportunities in online communities.

Research shows that people are more likely to participate in causes with social or interactive aspects that have a personal feel. This was what helped the ALS Association Ice Bucket Challenge go viral.

If your friends and family see you posting about a cause — whether it’s a call for donations or a simple action they can take — they’ll be more likely to participate because you’re a part of their personal social network. It also helps if it’s interactive in some way like the Ice Bucket Challenge was.

Last year, a friend of mine organized a call-to-action for people to write to representatives about the Affordable Care Act. She used social media to get the word out and designated a specific date for people to do it. She then invited local folks to her home to write out postcards for mailing and encouraged people to join in virtually via social media if they weren’t able to attend.

If your friends and family see you posting about a cause, they’ll be more likely to participate because you’re a part of their personal social network.

Many people might be informed about causes like affordable health care or net neutrality, but they don’t know what they can do. Since social media is social and somewhat intimate by nature (depending on how many people you connect with), it’s a great platform to spread awareness and get other people excited about a cause.

2. Make sure your activism is accessible and inclusive

The best thing about social media activism is how accessible it can be. Actions like organizing, going door-to-door for a campaign, or showing up for an in-person protest can be expensive and dangerous — especially for people of color and other marginalized people. They can also be downright inaccessible for people with disabilities.

A successful campaign for change is accessible to everyone, like the creation of the Disability March website as an online counterpart for the Women’s March. It’s also tied to offline change; not everyone can physically attend a march, but everyone can voice their concerns about the political administration with the chance to be heard. There is more than one way to get involved, so it’s inclusive of a wide range of people. The Disability March website offers examples of how people can organize online as part of their activism.

How Do You Keep Social Media From Destroying Your Mental Health?

The Women’s March was a great example of how social media helped organize an event, and disability activist Mia Ives-Rublee spearheaded the effort to make the event more accessible and inclusive to the disability community. Online efforts like Women’s March on Washington — Disability Caucus and #CripTheVote aim to sustain this momentum through finding accessible ways to get disabled people politically engaged.

No matter what your cause, there are ways to tie simple actions to real change — like encouraging people to take next steps to protect and restore net neutrality, or sharing information about how people can get registered to vote in an upcoming local election.

3. Remember that small steps are critical to getting the work done

Particularly with our constant access to information, it can be easy to lose sight of how small pieces of the puzzle are crucial to effecting larger, long-lasting change.

But small steps — like voting in local and state elections, calling your representatives, or creating a community group for political education — have a major impact. According to Harvard Business Review, easy-to-replicate, low-risk tactics are the most likely to succeed.

Small steps have a major impact.

It’s powerful if you share with your community that you’re going to get registered and make voting in the next local election a group effort, and you all get together to achieve that goal. It might seem like a small action, but state and local elections matter — they often help decide things that will have an impact on your life and the lives of those in your community. And because local elections typically have lower voter turnouts, every vote counts.

Don’t discount local protests or smaller national protests because you’re not seeing the turnout that the Women’s March had. Get invested in grassroots organizing online: What issues are communities talking about? Is there a call-to-action that you can participate in? Especially if these are communities that are typically ignored in politics and the media, it’s time to listen and get involved.

4. Share the work that other activists are doing

If you’re feeling a little lost or defeated — or you just need some time for self-care — that’s okay, too. Remember that you can’t do everything, be a part of every cause, and commit to every possible social or political action.

Amplify the work that you see other activists doing, even if you can’t take part personally. Maybe there’s someone you know who’d love to donate to a fundraiser, or maybe you can connect with someone who needs help calling their Republican Congress member.

Whether it’s showing up for a local community workshop, volunteering for a nonprofit, or retweeting activism-related information to your online network, there are so many ways to use your social platform for good.

I’m An Activist — Am I Allowed To Unplug From The Internet?

Sometimes I’ll see fantastic work that I know I can’t physically be a part of, like the Climate March in Washington, D.C., and I share the work of activists who were involved in organizing or attending. I know that I’m an individual person and as much as I contribute to causes that I care about, I can’t feasibly do everything, but what I can’t do, I can amplify.

There’s something positive and empowering about sharing our collective wins with the community, too. When you see an effort that’s affecting positive change — especially if it’s a cause that’s not often reported in mainstream media — share it with your social networks and friends. Tell them about some of the best activism victories you’ve witnessed or been a part of in 2017 — you never know, it may just encourage someone to get involved.

Social media activism is great for so many reasons: It is more widely accessible, it gets conversations started, it sustains momentum, and it helps empower people who may have never thought of themselves as activists.

As a multiply marginalized person, I always wondered what I could actually do to create real change — to work on issues like disability rights, marginalized voices in the media and publishing, accessible health care, sexual assault and consent education, or LGBTQIA+ rights.

Through online communities, I’ve gained access to invaluable resources, like learning how to distribute safe sex and consent education on campus with Great American Condom Campaign, help get college students registered to vote with Rock the Vote or report on accessibility in public transit.

Some of my activism work is fully online while other aspects have an offline component. But, regardless, there’s one thread of connection: Every time I speak up and share about these issues on social media, people reach out to me. They let me know that they feel empowered to share their own story, or that they’ve connected with a nonprofit I recommended to donate or do volunteer work.

Together, we can sustain all this momentum and build the future we need.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/we-warned-you-about-milo-and-youre-still-not-listening-947dad4a8400/ Mon, 09 Oct 2017 21:34:52 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3508 Read more]]>

While accepting, in the sober light of hindsight, that Yiannopoulos is irredeemable, his apologists refuse to admit there were obvious warning signs.

I n September 2014, writing perhaps the first editorial for a feminist publication about the nascent GamerGate hate campaign, I ended the piece with the following warning:

“What GamerGate showed us was how a small group of angry 4chan users apparently convinced a horde of well-meaning people to believe that they should silence certain women for the good of all. … Attention must be paid. This will happen again.”

And so it did; the right wing forces who exploited GamerGate’s vitriolic attacks on feminists, queer people, and anyone deemed “PC” in videogames were ruthless in applying those tactics elsewhere, all the way up the ladders of Western politics.

In the wake of Joseph Bernstein’s 9,000-word Buzzfeed report on the newly-revealed private emails of one-time Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos, it’s instructive to remember that. But amid all the caterwauling from folks in the media about how “we should’ve paid attention to GamerGate,” it not only stings deeply (I and many other people, mostly women and queer people, were warning everyone about this for years, from every rostrum we could find), it also ignores a deeper history that men like Yiannopoulos exploited.

Everyone Who Enabled Milo Yiannopoulos Should’ve Seen This Coming

4chan didn’t discover reactionary politics in August of 2014, after all. For years prior, black women on Twitter had been targets of 4chan campaigns designed to sow dissension in feminist movements and prey on white feminists’ willingness to equate “activist toxicity” with being black, female, and opinionated about racism on social media. The revelation in Bernstein’s report, meanwhile, that several “liberal” men in media had collaborated with Yiannopoulos by feeding him ideas for stories or calling targets, wasn’t proof of any new phenomenon either. Liberal/feminist men being bigots and abusers in private is a tale as old as time; Harvey Weinstein naturally springs to mind. But there are always clear warning signs. You need only to look at how many women of color had the number of Hugo Schwyzer (a man who attempted to murder his girlfriend, slept with his female students, and routinely used dodgy and possessive language to describe women he worked with) long before he was drummed out of feminist circles.

GamerGate wasn’t new, it was an escalation and formal marshaling of longstanding forces (one can’t even say they were dormant, just disorganized). Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon saw the terroristic power of GamerGaters’ rage against something as simple as a gay videogame character, and it’s no wonder they set about trying to harness it for ever more consequential ends. What’s gobsmacking about Bernstein’s report is that it took incontrovertible proof that Yiannopoulos did things like use Nazi-themed passwords for his emails, and literally sent one of his most famous articles to actual neo-Nazis for line edits, for some people to go “oh, maybe we should’ve listened” (never mind that evidence of Yiannopoulos’ history of Nazi sympathy has been out there for a long time).

GamerGate wasn’t new, it was an escalation and formal marshaling of longstanding forces.

More grating still are people who actually worked with Yiannopoulos because they saw him as useful to their “anti-PC” crusade, now trying to cover their asses. There was a furious alacrity to Cathy Young publishing an article at Forward that pretends to be a mea culpa, at once saying she “take[s] full responsibility” for “enabling” Yiannopoulos, and then trying to find a way to blame her “PC Police” bugbear for him as well. “If people who gave Yiannopoulos a pass on bad behavior (myself included) were his enablers,” she wrote, “so was the politically correct culture that fueled his ascent.”

If everyone is to blame, then no one is. Which, one suspects, is rather the point of her writing this.

Young’s self-justification is required reading for understanding how fascism preys upon the minds of the morally weak. Her tortured attempts to separate contempt for Yiannopoulos-the-man from unwavering faith in the “anti-PC revolt” she so cherishes are instructive because they point the way to understanding why A) so many “liberal” writers cozied up to Yiannopoulos long after the breadth of his bigotry and vileness was known, and B) why this is, in all probability, going to happen again. Young is, after all, a person who — like so many liberals, centrists, conservatives, and even some leftists — sees a 19-year-old yelling about trigger warnings to be at least as great a threat to human liberty as actual Nazis.

She makes that clear at the end of her Forward op-ed when she likens a left-winger accused of harassment to those same Nazis, arguing “I don’t know that there is much of a moral difference between [her] and the hate groups Yiannopoulos has defended.” (Author’s addendum: While the person in question has been accused of harassment, it’s also worth noting that she is a woman of color and critic of racism who has herself been the victim of backlash that took the form of harassment and doxing, which Young entirely fails to address.)

And who says conservatives aren’t fond of moral relativism?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the popularity of ideas like this are why Charlottesville happened. You get the sense that Young learned to treat Yiannopoulos not as a moral problem, but simply as a PR liability for a reactionary cause she remains committed to. She’s treating him, in fact, the way that a white nationalist advised Yiannopoulos to treat his newfound openly Nazi fans: with “patronizing contempt.” Yiannopoulos responded gratefully, “I have been struggling with this. I need to stay, if not clean, then clean enough.”

Young is trying to stay “clean enough” in this regard, washing off the taint of Yiannopoulos’ approval and his championing of her pet cause. You cannot separate what made Yiannopoulos so singularly loathsome from those causes, however. Pointing out that he availed himself of the useful idiocy of people who fear neopronouns or kneeling black athletes more than Nazism is not self-defense, but self-indictment.

When ‘Free Speech’ Kills

Young, and many like her, will try to suggest that Yiannopoulos espoused worthwhile ideas while hiding a secret evil. They can’t accept that his evil was blatant. They will not face up to the fact that, despite his sophistry, his dog whistles to the extreme right were clarion clear in their meaning. They won’t admit they got hoodwinked by an embarrassingly transparent PR snowjob that did a poor job of hiding Yiannopoulos’ allegiances.

“Who’d have guessed,” Young writes with breathless incredulity, “that there was video of Yiannopoulos singing ‘America the beautiful’ in a karaoke bar to an audience in which some people gave Nazi salutes? Or that he used Holocaust-themed Internet passwords such as ‘kristallnacht’?”

Anyone. Anyone could’ve guessed that.

The Buzzfeed article did not reveal anything about Yiannopoulos’ beliefs that armies of women, queer folks, and people of color didn’t already know. It merely put faces, names, and words to events and ideas we knew existed in the abstract. People like Young appeared on stage with Yiannopoulos and boosted his profile, while defending him from criticism by the women of color who knew what he was about long before the “Dangerous F****t Tour” (which, I might add, still prompted fawning apologism and profiles). She sheepishly owns up to that much.

What Liberals Don’t Get About Free Speech In The Age Of Trump

But Young’s mea culpas ring hollow when she adamantly refuses to reflect on why white nationalists find views like hers ripe for exploitation. Belief in the “PC Police” bogeyman is not merely a useful tool to the extreme right, after all, but an article of faith: the utter conviction that transgender people, Muslims, people of color, Jews, all control some kind of world-historical force that keeps white people oppressed. Curtis Yarvin, one of Yiannopoulos’ neoreactionary sources exposed by the Buzzfeed report, gives it a touch of grandeur and calls this conspiratorial force “The Cathedral.”

The widely-shared willingness to find something redemptive in these reactionary, anti-PC spasms is what allowed Yiannopoulos to find so many willing apologists on the political center and the left, as well as among libertarians.

Belief in the ‘PC Police’ bogeyman is not merely a useful tool to the extreme right, after all, but an article of faith.

GamerGate, a movement he lent much strength and fire to, spiraled out of control in part because of his malign influence. He was attracted to it not only because he saw a group of young people he could exploit, but because he agreed with their fundamental vision of “PC gone too far.” It was a vision that was always charged with bigotry. Openly. Gaters borrowed neo-Nazi propaganda to attack their favorite targets, for instance — this tranche of examples comes from 2014. Their figureheads, like Davis “I’m a huge white nationalist on paper” Aurini, weren’t shy about Nazi-adjacent beliefs, either. Yet another GG stalwart, one of Yiannopoulos’ white nationalist sources and ghost-editors, Vox Day, tried to start a GamerGate-style campaign in the world of science fiction in 2015 using exactly the same arguments.

This was all out there, plain as day, years before Yiannopoulos’ fall from grace.

None of us who were attacked at the time, or who covered the harassment campaign, were surprised by Yiannopoulos’ association with white nationalism. And yet people like Young want, need, to find something redemptive in it all that proves that their “anti-PC” crusade is still worth fighting.

Easily-Triggered Privileged People Have Turned Society Into Their Own Giant Safe Space

In the words of critic Noah Berlatsky, “open Nazism is not very popular. But the idea that feminists, trans women, black women, need to be put in their place is very popular.” The thrust of Young’s argument is that all of us minorities bring it on ourselves, that if only we weren’t so loud or mean or pushy, we wouldn’t be making people sympathize with Nazis. Goodness, where have we heard that before? This isn’t an argument so much as it is proof that one is a moral invertebrate, squirming in pain from perceived insults and slights. A black woman said mean things, so maybe that guy who wants to kill the Jews has a point.

The hypersensitivity that reels from “trigger warnings” but thrills to Yiannopoulos’ joyful transphobia, that likens workplace diversity trainings to “gulags,” is what fuels the outrage culture about “outrage culture,” a screaming fury that can never be sated by giving it what it says it wants. It will merely demand we make ourselves smaller and smaller until nothing of us remains. Reactionary outrage about “PC” is not a philosophy as much as it is a burning sun that demands our compliance as its nuclear fuel, consuming it endlessly until it can feed no more and goes nova.

There is, of course, a middle ground in dealing with actual left wing abuse and toxicity. It’s a line I’ve tried to walk. For instance, I co-facilitated a daylong workshop-conference at Smith College with the scholar and reproductive justice elder Loretta Ross entitled “Calling In the Calling Out Culture.” Her and I, two women of color from very different generations and activist backgrounds, came together to give Smith lessons about ethical activism — and drawing a line between passionate advocacy and abuse. For years, I’ve written about dealing with the excesses sometimes produced by the zeal in our movements, and the failings caused by activist language or turning insights into inflexible rules.

Yet I’ve been able to do this without sharing a stage with or otherwise abetting a Nazi. It all puts the lie to the idea that empowering men like Yiannopoulos or the petty hate movements spawned by 4chan is the price we have to pay to have an open and fair discussion on progressive excess. Yet again, people of color have led the way and had this discussion for years. We converse without all the hyperbole that attends the usual “PC gone mad” shtick, unironically parroted by people with unassailably lofty media platforms. A world where Bill O’Reilly escapes with a golden parachute is not a world where “PC” can “ruin lives,” I’m afraid.

The revelation in Bernstein’s report that so many liberals cozied up to Yiannopoulos is not shocking in this light, however. Fear of the “PC” phantom is in vogue even on the left, where rants against the malevolence of “identity politics” (meaning, any political discourse that doesn’t center white men) are a dime a dozen. Leftist scholar Angela Nagle blames it for the rise of the “alt right” in her book Kill All Normies, for instance.

Why Your Criticisms Of Identity Politics Sound Ridiculous

It’s an existential terror that can seem like a bigger threat, in one’s mind, than actually-existing fascism. It’s why Jonathan Chait can write for days about those awful student activists “censoring” conservative views, but is utterly silent on right wingers stopping black academics from speaking in public, or using legislatures to strangle schools that teach or research things they are ideologically opposed to.

Such people, regardless of what values they claim to cherish, become enablers of the ugliest forms of reactionary politics — and it’s those enablers who are the key to its success, who look the other way, “play devil’s advocate,” who claim that there are “two sides” to issues that demand moral clarity. They are not, in any sense, Nazis. But Nazis find them useful.

Thus we were left with this grotesquerie: liberal men like David Auerbach passing gossip along to Yiannopoulos and whining to him about Wikipedia “censorship” (he has since issued several furious, if unconvincing denials), or a liberal journalist and TV producer like Dan Lyons yukking it up over transphobic jokes with Yiannopoulos, or Mitchell Sunderland, a writer/editor at Broadly, siccing the man on “this fat feminist.” While not mentioned directly, New York Magazine’s Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi also partook in email threads and tweets that egged Yiannopoulos on and fed him ideas; Sunderland publicly alluded to an email chain he and Nuzzi used to collaborate with Yiannopoulos.

They are not, in any sense, Nazis. But Nazis find them useful.

For her part, Nuzzi is also one of the only people caught up in this mess to try to justify herself. Bernstein publicly tweeted that Nuzzi had no part in the secret email list he reported on, but Nuzzi’s critics continue to point to numerous tweets where she expressed warm feelings for Yiannopoulos or pitched article ideas to him.

“I was friendly with Milo online before there was an alt right,” she tweeted, “when he was a silly troll. We never met or ‘collaborated.’”

Aside from the fact that I’d expect the Washington correspondent of New York Magazine to know “the alt right” has existed since long before 2016, the heyday of her friendship with him is when she — for instance — helped Yiannopoulos marshal rape threats towards feminist journalist Jessica Valenti. This was also a period where Yiannopoulos was posting Breitbart articles with half-naked photos of underaged trans women and trying to destroy the lives of GamerGate targets. Nuzzi hardly helps herself by implying this was all okay with her.

Lessons On Our Dark Future From The Rise Of The Religious Right

In this she merely paraphrases Cathy Young. In trying to defend David Auerbach from criticism, Young writes, “His last email to Yiannopoulos…was sent in early March 2016, several weeks before Yiannopoulos’s flirtation with far-right and neo-Nazi groups became public.” Evidently his behavior before March 2016 was all acceptable; omelettes, broken eggs, et cetera.

To both Nuzzi and Young, there were no real red flags, despite Yiannopoulos’ obvious malevolence and bigotry. In October 2015, when Nuzzi tweeted that she wished she was hanging out with the man, he’d just published, “Sorry, Girls! But The Smartest People In The World Are All Men,” libeled a critic of GamerGate as a paedophile (while posting underaged pictures of her), brought down harassment on a Houston Press reporter’s family, and spread the conspiratorial lie that Shaun King isn’t black. These attempts at ruining lives were, apparently, fine by Nuzzi. He was just “a silly troll” after all. Her ideas might’ve just inspired a racist article about Neil deGrasse Tyson, or led to a campaign to hound a trans woman into nearly killing herself; not, you know, Nazi stuff.

To both Nuzzi and Young, there were no real red flags, despite Yiannopoulos’ obvious malevolence and bigotry.

While accepting, in the sober light of hindsight, that Yiannopoulos is irredeemable, they refuse to admit there were obvious warning signs. Perhaps because the warning signs were uncomfortably close to cherished beliefs of their own.

To all these people, the terror of creeping “PC,” with all its starkly exaggerated shadows on the walls of their minds, was so great that they could see their way clearly to working with Milo Yiannopoulos. Cathy Young’s and Olivia Nuzzi’s responses are but the first of what I’m sure will be many attempts to redeem the utterly broken moral instincts that led to this happening. Thirsting for freedom from guilt, plenty of people will listen. They will learn nothing.

And therefore, as I said three years ago, this will happen again.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-damning-moral-consequences-of-twitters-refusal-to-ban-trump-1d0b64df0c1/ Mon, 02 Oct 2017 22:08:53 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2921 Read more]]> Trump’s North Korea tweets are a frightening violation of Twitter’s rules. Why won’t the social-media giant take any action against him?

Another day, another escalation in the threat of nuclear war thanks to the tweets of the President of the United States. Yesterday, after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said lines of communication were open with North Korea, Donald Trump tweeted “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man” and “…Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”

The tirade came on the heels of North Korea saying Trump’s digital nosebleeds — otherwise known as tweets — constituted a declaration of war. During what was supposed to be international diplomacy discussions at United Nations meetings last week, The Art of the Deal’s author tweeted:

“Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of [Kim Jong Un], they won’t be around much longer!”

In response, North Korea’s foreign minister Ri Ying Ho retorted:

“For the past couple of days, we had earnestly hoped that the war of words between North Korea and the U.S. would not lead to action… However, [the President of America and infamous game show host] had ultimately declared war again last weekend, by saying regarding our leadership, that he will make it unable to last longer.”

It’s not a stretch to see the words of the renowned WWE Hall of Famer turned 45th POTUS as inconsistent and antagonistic to diplomacy. Trump’s clearly proposing bringing harm to millions of innocent people should certain conditions arise.

If something terrible happens, blood will obviously be on Trump’s tweeting hands. But it will also be on Twitter itself.

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Trump’s clearly proposing bringing harm to millions of innocent people.
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The platform the Commander in Chief uses to “communicate” with the world is not owned by Trump or his administration. It’s run by a private company, which has its own Terms and Conditions, concerning what content may and may not be allowed on. Trump’s violation of these terms is flagrant. In fact, one of Twitter’s rules plainly states:

“Violent threats (direct or indirect): You may not make threats of violence or promote violence, including threatening or promoting terrorism.”

If threatening to wipe a country off the map, with the power to do so from behind the Resolute Desk, is not sufficient to constitute a threat of violence, I don’t know what is.

There’s also a clear precedent for the company to take action against those who violate its rules. To cite but a few examples, Twitter has, in the past, axed blogger and terrible person Chuck Johnson; an attention-seeking blowhard who consistently used his army of racist followers to threaten actor Leslie Jones; and the recently convicted Martin Shkreli after he harassed a columnist.

So why not punish Trump?

I’m An Academic Who Was Targeted By Trump’s Weaponized Base

According to Twitter, it’s staying mum because Trump’s tweets are “newsworthy.” When Twitter was slammed for not taking down Trump’s “they won’t be around much longer” tweet, it issued a barrage of threaded tweets which stated:

“We hold all accounts to the same Rules, and consider a number of factors when assessing whether Tweets violate our Rules. Among the considerations is ‘newsworthiness’ and whether a Tweet is of public interest. This has long been internal policy and we’ll soon update our public-facing rules to reflect it. We need to do better on this, and will. Twitter is committed to transparency and keeping people informed about what’s happening in the world. We’ll continue to be guided by these fundamental principles.”

It’s obviously true that Trump is highly newsworthy. But this fact is descriptive and objective, not moral. Stating that something is seen and of interest to many no more tells you that it should be published than if you said it is written in English. So what if it’s “newsworthy,” when it’s also blatantly dangerous?

Tellingly, Twitter contradicts itself in the first two sentences of its statement. How can you hold “all accounts to the same Rules,” then adjust because an account is popular and the tweets get more coverage? That’s not equal application in any sense of the term equal. (As Wired put it in a recent excellent piece on this matter, litigating Trump’s specific violations “requires pretending that Twitter actually intends to apply its rules to all of its users equally.”)

Furthermore, a threat from a man with the U.S. army, a nuclear arsenal, and a notoriously obsessive and hateful fanbase poses far greater harm than some anonymous anime avatar. Indeed, if there is adjustment of the rules, surely they should be adjusted to give less, not more, leeway to the president of a powerful, armed country — a man whose relationship with words is akin to arson?

As to Twitter’s claim about public interest: If it really cares about public interest, then may I suggest the interest of not being destroyed because of hypersensitive men armed with nukes?

Many might shrug at this whole exchange since it’s “only Twitter.” But first, note that the Foreign Minister of North Korea responded to the media. And second, at the very least consider how powerful people have and are forced to respond to Trump’s tweets on a regular basis: to clarify, argue, respond, and so on, on the international stage.

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A threat from a man with a nuclear arsenal poses far greater harm than some anonymous anime avatar.
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The President of a very powerful country flips markets, conveys orders and policies, and issues statements that have to be responded to by other leaders, generals, and ministers — foreign and domestic. To brush off tweets as merely contained to the internet is no different than dismissing writing on paper because it is contained to the literate. Those who can see it can and do respond.

On these grounds, Twitter should grow a spine and remove this lovechild of white resentment and unfettered opulence. But since it probably won’t, clinging as it is to the defense of “newsworthiness,” might it at least consider another course of action? What if it simply removed Trump’s verified status?

Twitter has done this before, as an apparent way to punish offenders. Verified status is merely meant to indicate you are who you say you are — but it also confers other benefits, such as conveying authority to other users, access to analytics, and so on. Removing the tick means removing those benefits, while showing strongly that Twitter disapproves of this menace using its platform to further his harmful agenda. Such a move would be similar to Congressional censure, which Congress implemented to allow for something “stronger than a simple rebuke, but not as strong as expulsion.”

Violent Misogyny Was Normal Long Before Trump

Pending this move, Twitter at least owes us more transparency about which rules apply to us mortals, and which apply to those with actual power and the magical “newsworthiness” it appears to crave. ­

While we’re at it, perhaps Facebook can clarify how its ethical obligations align with a need to be “newsworthy.” Mark Zuckerberg has made similar noises about Facebook being a platform to give “all people a voice,” ignoring the dangers of publishing certain content on the grounds that it may be of interest to some.

And herein lies the ultimate rub. When social-media sites crow about “newsworthiness,” they’re really just saying “because it’s good for business.” Beyond Trump’s tweets generating ample attention and interest, Twitter may be afraid to ban the country’s most powerful Republican, as it could lead to a mass exodus of conservative users who contribute to the company’s bottom line. In light of Twitter’s attempts to stay relevant as a business in the face of stagnant growth, this imperative is particularly pronounced. Ditto Facebook, which has profited handsomely off of providing a platform to vile beliefs.

And so we’re back where we started — with Trump able to tweet out whatever he wants, potentially nuclear consequences be damned. If the threats become something more, Twitter and Facebook should be prepared to ask themselves: Was it worth it?

For years, LGBTQ+ content has been categorized as NSFW by social-media platforms.

Unsplash/Wesson Wang

Last month, Tumblr joined several other social-media outlets in actively celebrating Pride, sharing a post encouraging LGBTQ+ content. That same month, it also introduced a new measure called Safe Mode, intended to give users “more control over what you see and what you don’t.”

Ironically, it looked to many users like one of the things that set the new feature off was LGBTQ+ content .

In theory, Safe Mode hid “sensitive content” (later clarified to mean “specifically, nudity”) from those who had the filter turned on. It was optional for most users, but mandatory for those under 18. In reality, and to be blunt, the algorithm simply did not work. It failed to block some nudity, sporadically hid everything from educational PowerPoints to gifsets of video games to pictures of cute animals — and, crucially, routinely censored LGBTQ+ content, regardless of how non-sexual it might be.

When the queer community pushed back, Tumblr apologized, and hastily clarified that the problem was the unintentional result of what’s known as “false flags.” In a post, the company wrote:

“The major issue was some Tumblrs had marked themselves as Adult/NSFW (now Explicit) as a courtesy to their fellow users, and their perfectly safe posts were getting marked sensitive unintentionally.”

Essentially, the algorithm had initially assumed that every post shared by someone who self-identified as “Explicit” was sensitive, and this was affecting some LGBTQ+ content. In response to the outcry, Tumblr removed this assumption so that posts are now judged only by their content rather than whoever has created or shared them. The company also gave some details on the algorithm itself, which attempts to use photo recognition to recognize nudity, and described it as “not perfect.”

Ongoing changes do appear to have made the algorithm more successful — or at least less twitchy. Still, people were right to worry.

For years, and across many of the most prominent social-media platforms, LGBTQ+ content has been categorized as NSFW. Back in March, YouTube creators found that LGBTQ+ adjacent videos they had created were being hidden from viewers via the company’s own safety option, called “Restricted Mode.” This included coming-out stories, educational content, and even this video titled “GAY flag and me petting my cat to see if youtube blocks this.”

For years, and across many of the most prominent social-media platforms, LGBTQ+ content has been categorized as NSFW.

YouTube has shared vaguely that it uses “community flagging, age-restrictions, and other signals to identify and filter out potentially inappropriate content.” In response to criticism over the blocking of LGBTQ+ related videos, YouTube sent out a statement that illuminated little about the problem itself, or how exactly it hoped to address it:

A message to our community …

???@YTCreators

The company did seemingly make some changes, as fewer videos are now being blocked. But months later, issues remain. The aforementioned cat video, for one, continues to come up as blocked. As of mid-July, searching “gay” with the filter off returned a wide variety of videos, with top results including documentaries, coming-out videos, and same-gender kisses with hundreds of thousands of views. Turning the filter on, these videos disappeared, with the top results averaging a far smaller viewership.

Long before its latest hiccup, Tumblr had similar issues with filtration. In 2013, searching for tags like “gay” and “lesbian” would return no results on certain mobile versions of the site because they were flagged as inherently NSFW. In response to backlash at the time, the company wrote that “the solution is more intelligent filtering which our team is working diligently on. We’ll get there soon.” According to a reddit thread, this was still a problem in August 2016.

Twitter faced its own criticism this June, for flagging tweets with the word “queer” as potentially “offensive content.” Like YouTube, it replied vaguely, saying simply that it was “working on a fix.” As with Tumblr, the issue was particularly glaring for taking place during Pride Month, when the company was otherwise touting its LGBTQ+ inclusivity.

The Capitalist Appropriation Of Gay Pride

The question of why this keeps happening is a complicated one. Because social-media companies tend to be tight-lipped about how things work on the back-end, we have limited information on the source of these glitches. In some cases, as with Safe Mode, the problems do seem to stem from technical flaws. But it’s hard to imagine human bias not playing a role in at least some of this censorship.

In any case, social-media companies should be taking these filtration issues seriously—their impact on queer people, and especially queer youth, cannot be overstated.

Online, LGBTQ+ communities are far more likely to be welcoming to people of all ages and identities; they are places where minors can explore their sexuality and gender, learn about themselves, and get invaluable support. Tumblr in particular has long been the home of a robust LGBTQ+ community — it’s very difficult to use Tumblr without being exposed to the idea that not only are LGBTQ+ people everywhere, but they’re loud. This can show a questioning person that being LGBTQ+ is nothing to be ashamed of.

YouTube is another crucial resource for young LGBTQ+ people, as are a thousand smaller websites that anyone can access through a simple search — provided their engine doesn’t categorize their query as “unsafe,” like the “kids-oriented” search engine Kiddle once did for “bisexual,” “transgender,” and so forth.

The internet’s imperfect algorithms are not born of a vacuum. They are created by people, who are influenced by their assumptions. And when these programmers make these kinds of choices or mistakes, they don’t only make finding resources more difficult. They undermine the hard work of content creators who often ask for nothing in return except to know that an LGBTQ+ kid feels a little better. Instead of getting a comforting word from an understanding person, the child gets a warning that their identity is considered unsafe by an unfeeling corporation.

The internet’s imperfect algorithms are not born of a vacuum.

There’s also a troubling irony at play in all this — not only are these social media platforms failing their LGBTQ+ users with their “security” settings, they’re doing it to disguise the fact that they aren’t truly making their sites safer. Tumblr is absolutely not a safe website. Bots that spam porn and literal Nazis abound, and Safe Mode does nothing to prevent direct person-to-person harassment, including any aimed at minors. Ditto Twitter, where white supremacist activity has increased 600% since 2012, and Daesh continues to have a presence. Thousands of people, mostly women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color, experience torrents of harassment everyday. Twitter’s solution — hiding “sensitive content,” with filters blocking the word “queer”— has paradoxically hurt the very group it should be working to protect.

Our community is rightfully angry at this continued erasure. We build our support, education, and love on platforms owned by corporations who don’t seem to care about us. Social-media platforms may pay lip service to inclusivity, but in the end, we’re left only with systems that flag our identity as wrong.

We will continue to fight back against this censorship, because we understand a fundamental truth: Our existence is not sensitive content.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

When I checked Facebook this morning, I was greeted with a bunch of balloons and confetti surrounding a giant banner bearing the thumbs-up symbol. “Sarah, your friends have liked your posts 36,000 times!” the text underneath it read. “We’re glad that you’re sharing your life with the people you care about on Facebook. Here’s a look at some photos that your friends have liked.” Then there was a photo of me standing beneath a large, fairly anatomically correct dinosaur statue at a mini-golf course, proudly thrusting my putter skyward in order to draw attention to the plaster dino genitals hovering above my head.

This completely meaningless and arbitrary milestone in my social media career comes at a weird time for me. Not because I think there’s anything particularly hollow or condemning about my eight-figure “like” tally. Most of those likes came out of pretty genuine and earnest interactions on my part and I don’t think they’re indicative of any great ill in my personality or in society. But I’ve found myself increasingly tired by any human interaction online or in person lately, and when I saw that banner my first reaction was “Well, it’s no wonder I’m so tired.”

As someone who spent her formative years as an undiagnosed autistic misfit in a city of 48,000 people who had little to no interest in me or any of the things I enjoyed, I’ve always considered the internet a godsend. Thanks to chat rooms, message boards, and fan sites, I went from being a loner isolated by her atypical interests to being able to form intense, mutually beneficial relationships. While the online universe is often portrayed as a place of artifice where people can manufacture or at least idealize their personas, I found that it was the first place that I could actually be myself — and get something other than disinterest or disdain in return.

While the online universe is often portrayed as a place of artifice, I found that it was the first place that I could actually be myself.
Click To Tweet

I don’t think my experience is unusual, either. For every article and condescending cartoon I’ve seen about the supposed fakeness of online life, I can think of multiple examples of people who have made genuine connections — and genuine change — through the internet. Sure, there are people who only present their best moments, and people who use the relative anonymity as an excuse to be abusive. But it’s not like the offline world doesn’t have its share of posers and jerks. As someone who’s spent a lot of time observing human interaction from the outskirts (like many autistics, I study people and then try to reproduce their behavior in an effort to gain acceptance in social situations), I can’t say that I’ve come across any significant differences in the way that we socialize in the real world versus the virtual one. And I suspect that for anyone who does notice a marked difference, that says more about how sheltered and homogeneous their pre-internet lives were than about the nature of the net.

I like Facebook — and occasionally tolerate Twitter — because I use them as an extension of my “real” life. Social media is enjoyable when I’m feeling well, and useful when I’m not. It’s helped me find people who share my somewhat obscure interests (after two decades of obsessing in solitude over the ’60s spy show The Man From U.N.C.L.E., for example, it only took a couple of tweets to find some fellow weirdos to share it with). The internet has been a way to keep in touch with friends and family and stay up to date on their lives during periods when I’ve had neither the resources nor the energy to properly maintain my relationships with them in the flesh. Some people might think that a “like” is a hollow gesture, or an empty rush that can’t compare with in-person communion, but those simple gestures have been a way for me to let other people know I care or am paying attention when I’m not up to the task of an e-mail or a dreaded phone call. As someone who works from home, it’s sometimes the only source of socialization I get in a day.

Friendship In The Age Of Unfriending

Where social media does differ from the meatspace, though, is in terms of volume and speed, and that’s what’s been throwing me off lately. With everything that’s happening in the world, my almost instant access to it — and to the reactions of so many other people — means that I’m constantly taking in more than my head and my heart can process at any given time, and I’m struggling to express myself in any meaningful way in return. My social media presence is relatively sheltered; I ruthlessly maintain a small number of friends on Facebook and have a small number of Twitter followers, and I’m also a white woman which means that I’m generally subject to less harassment than women of color. But it’s still beyond my current capacity as a person and a writer.

I don’t think social media is the cause of my current troubles. It’s just cranked them to 11. If the virtual world is, as I believe, just the real world coming at you faster and more thoroughly, then my issues with it are simply my day-to-day issues amplified. I like to observe people to get a better idea of how to belong with them, so I obsessively read every tweet and post and comment and link that comes across my feeds in a misguided attempt to understand everyone. I want to be a good person, but I’m so hard on myself that I often end up overwhelming myself with information and external and internal criticism and freezing. I struggle with hyper-empathy, and end up taking in everyone’s emotions in a way that makes me feel like a permeable membrane — or like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s regularly embattled Deanna Troi during a particularly harrowing episode. I’m often too overwhelmed to post anything thoughtful or meaningful in the wake of a tragedy, but I also don’t want to give people the impression that I don’t care about these things. And the “why isn’t everyone posting about ____” posts always seem to hit before I’ve had the chance to process. Social media was, in theory, supposed to be a respite from all of that. But being myself on there also means there’s no escaping myself on there.

I’m pretty sure the solution isn’t just to delete my profiles. The world doesn’t need another writer exploring that old chestnut for material. Besides, I don’t want to cut myself off from all of the brilliant people and valuable opinions that social media has helped expose me to. And it’s not like my problems would vanish if I did that. I’d still be a vicious perfectionist whose all-encompassing desire to do better too often leaves me doing nothing instead; I’d just be a vicious perfectionist who is also bored, lonely, and has no one to share my collection of suggestive Man From U.N.C.L.E. gifs with.

So if my problem is that my online life is just my real life on performance-enhancing drugs, perhaps the steps I need to take to make it more manageable are the same ones I’m already doing (or at least attempting) in the rest of my existence. I don’t stop and talk to every single person I encounter on the street, so why do I force myself to catch up on every single tweet, thread, and comment that I encounter? I’ve reached the point where I feel no shame in telling my friends that I’m not up to going out, so why am I so reluctant to give myself time and space away from the internet? I would never encourage my friends to call me in the middle of the night unless it was an emergency, so why the hell do I think to check my phone when I’m awake at 4 a.m., suddenly concerned that I’ll let someone down if I don’t respond right away?

Social media was supposed to be a respite. But being myself on there also means there’s no escaping myself on there.
Click To Tweet

So I’ll be trying to put my social media use on some semblance of a schedule and limiting the ways in which I can access it. I have an iPad filled with books and videos that I keep free of any apps that involve active participation on my part, because I think it’s helpful for my particular brain to have a device that encourages the consumption of ideas without demanding any output on my part. I’ll try to find other outlets for my procrastination. (I won’t say that I’ll try to curtail my procrastination, because I’m thinking of realistic solutions and that’s not going to happen in this lifetime.) I’ll put even more effort into resisting the incredibly perverse urge to read Facebook comments, because that’s just common sense.

None of these are particularly exciting or groundbreaking suggestions. Setting boundaries and giving yourself time to relax and recover are pretty obvious ideas, even if most of us tend to ignore them far more than we should. I’m starting to realize, though, that I’m going to have to be more serious about them if I want a more rewarding — or, at the very least — more survivable life in all of its forms. Having a platform where I can share a photo of myself posing with a fake dinosaur cloaca and having friends all over the world who will appreciate this ridiculous moment in my life is something worth fighting for. It’s just not something worth breaking myself for.

This week we tracked down Danielle Muscato. She’s the activist who fired off a series of tweets in response to Trump’s latest Twitter tantrum because Alec Baldwin impersonated him on SNL. Muscato’s tweets were picked up by first by Groop Speak and Occupy Democrats, followed by Mashable, HuffPo, and NBC News. (Tweets and handle published here with Danielle’s permission.)

Jesus fucking Christ, @realDonaldTrump. You are the president-elect. Pick your fucking battles, man. You’re embarrassing yourself. — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump Baldwin’s impression isn’t “Sad.” You know what’s sad? In 7 wks you’ll be responsible for 330m lives & you can’t think of — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump (cont) anything better to do than tweet abt a comedy show. You know that actual lives are at stake, right? You’re pathetic. — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump This is not a joke, Donald. Don’t you have anything better to do? Are you so narcissistic that a PARODY is your priority? — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump Do you know how many trans people were murdered since Election Day? Do you know how many veterans killed themselves?

— Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump Do you know how many children went to bed tonight without enough food to eat? Do you even care? What is *wrong* with you?! — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump No, of course you don’t know those things. You don’t even know what a “blind trust,” and you call yourself a businessman.

— Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump You’re pathetic. You ran for prez for attention. You are a fake,a fraud. You never wanted to win anyway; we can all see it.

— Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump You are not fooling anyone. You’re scared, and overwhelmed, and you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing. And it shows — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump You think we’re all too polite, too aghast, to call you out. I see through you, Donny. I’m calling you out. You’re a joke. — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump With every fiber of my being, I am disgusted by you. And you know what the real secret is? You’re disgusted by you, too. — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump That’s why you surround yourself with gold, and beautiful women that you objectify. You know you’re a loser, so you try to — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump make yourself feel better, feel successful, authoritative, with things, and money. You are an impostor. You are a fraud. — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump I’m ashamed of you. The world is ashamed. You spout NONSENSE, millions of illegal voters?! Even you don’t believe it — absurd — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump Do you think we’re stupid? You think we don’t know what you’re doing? Trying to control the narrative, get your followers.. — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump ..to distrust the media, the polls, news reporters, so that they must turn to YOU for what’s true, what’s real? There’s a — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump ..name for that. It’s “propaganda.” We know what you’re doing. We will not allow you to suppress votes with this nonsense. — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

@realDonaldTrump We will not allow you to trample our civil rights! We will not allow you to destroy the progress we’ve made! WE WILL RESIST — Danielle Muscato (@DanielleMuscato) December 4, 2016

Give us a quick bit of background about yourself.

My name is Danielle Muscato and I’m a 32-year-old transgender woman from Missouri. I’m a civil rights activist, writer, public speaker, and musician. I’ve been an activist since 2011, mostly focusing on the separation of religion and government and fighting discrimination against atheists, but also many other areas of progressive social and political interest, such as abortion access, science education, Black Lives Matter, and more.

What was going on when you decided to reply to Trump’s SNL tweets?

I was, and remain, angry and aghast at Trump for failing to take his job seriously. In seven weeks, this man will be the only thing standing between peace and launching nuclear weapons. I consider it a national emergency that the president-elect can’t even be trusted to handle his own Twitter account.

I was, and remain, angry at Trump for failing to take his job seriously.
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Is there any additional info you want to add around your tweets? (140 characters can be limiting!)

We must resist. Bottom line, resist. That’s why yesterday, I was using the hashtag #RESIST. The day we accept ANY of this as normal, we have already lost. Fascism accumulates power by pushing people, by testing us, by testing boundaries. We must call him out literally every time he says or proposes something that is unacceptable; we must actually label it as “unacceptable”; and we must demand change. From access to health care, to LGBTQ rights, to international relations, to so much more, complacency is literally death in this case, for potentially millions of people around the world, and also for people here in the USA. If you do not already, I encourage everyone reading this to start identifying, personally, as an activist, and to work toward that end accordingly. Resistance, en masse, is our only hope.

What has the response to your tweets been so far? Positive? Negative? Any Trump supporters flooding your feed?

Well, I’m actually suspended from my Facebook account for three days, because a bunch of people — I assume Trump supporters — filed community standards reports against me, and Facebook’s algorithm automatically locks you out if enough people do that. But aside from that, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. As a civil rights activist, I was already verified on Twitter before this went viral, but I went from 3,500 followers to 90,000 overnight. I’m absolutely thrilled that my message has resonated with so many people. I think these things simply needed to be said, and I absolutely intend to use this platform to continue fighting for good. I’m sitting on literally thousands of emails, and going through them as quickly as I can. I’d guess that perhaps 1 out of 200 or fewer messages has been negative. The negative ones are easy to spot, because of all the spelling errors and anti-trans slurs.

I absolutely intend to use this platform to continue fighting for good.
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How do you feel about your portrayal in the media concerning your tweets? (I noticed, for instance, that many platforms simply stated “this woman’s Twitter rant” without naming you or providing any background information.) Did sites ask permission before republishing your Tweets?

Some did, some did not. I don’t mind. Twitter is public; as long as they link to my feed, it’s just more visibility. My goal is to spread the message that we must resist Trump, and media coverage amplifies the signal.

What are you working on right now? Any projects our readers can support?

I’m a full-time civil rights activist, and I’m always working on new talks for conferences, universities, and local groups, in addition to writing, and doing media appearances, event organizing, and formal debates. If you are interested in supporting my work, I do have a Patreon, and I’m also available for bookings and freelance writing through my website.

Where can folks find you online (besides Twitter)?

I’m on all the major social media sites under Danielle Muscato, including a Facebook page, an Instagram feed, and a YouTube channel. You can also reach me through my website at www.daniellemuscato.com. I get a lot of email and I can’t always reply to everyone, but I do my very best to read them and respond as much as I can! I love hearing from people.