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Sticks and stones…

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Ladies and gentlemen, my favorite tweet. I don’t know much about Mr the Creator, but he’s a rapper so I’m going to apply stereotypes and assume he’s at least a little bit ghetto. Bullying in his old haunts prolly involved blood loss.

It isn’t much fun to be the target of online abuse. I have been, long ago, not as Stoaty Weasel. But if you get shit on a blog or a forum or Twitter, you have the option to not fucking go there for a while. Not counting having your nudes or your name and address published, which I do see as actual real-world harm, nothing that happens to you in cyber space is real. It’s an essential social skill in [current year] to learn to walk away from, not get wadded up by, strangers in cyberspace trying to get under your skin.

I know, it’s a not-politics week, but I had to mention Milo Yiannapolis’ Twitter permaban, because I’m not sure what the small fry should do about it.

Backstory: Milo got into a slanging match with that black chick from the new Ghostbusters movie. The way I read it, she was ruder to him than he was to her, but because other people went after her with crude racial stuff, he got blamed for incitement. Good writeup of it here, if you care.

In response to the whole business, people were re-tweeting some hair raising things other Twitter users had said without getting banned. Like, advocating cop murder and recruiting for ISIS. All of the obvious pushback is against the right.

For those of you not on Twitter (most of my readership, I think), when a topic is discussed a lot, it appears in the sidebar as “trending”. The #FreeMilo hashtag was trending so hard, it was number three or four (it’s different in different locations) for hours. And then it was just gone. People were still tweeting about it in enormous volumes, but Twitter plucked it off the list and invisibilized it.

Now, I’m not much of a Twitter user. At all. So the obvious thing to do is walk away and hope enough others do so to make an already tanking business model tank harder. But social media have become a beloved crutch for lazy journalists everywhere. Whole tracts of the Daily Mail are just tweets from nobodies now. So what happens when all the nobodies are SJW nobodies?

July 21, 2016 — 9:19 pm
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