You know the bit in Transformers the Movie where they're in that "court" and there's the big rotating head thing that growls "guilty" or "innocent", then drops people in the pit of death if they're innocent? That's Twitter, and it fucking sucks.
Those of you who have been following me for a while will be well aware of my longstanding frustration with social media, and particularly its tendency towards public shaming. This has been a thing for a long time now. In fact, I vividly recall having a fair few arguments with people I knew who were inexplicably in favour of it in probably about 2012-2013 or so — I'm not friends with them any more, thankfully — and it's only gotten worse as the years have rolled on.
The recent fiasco with Dan from Game Grumps should be the last straw for a lot of people. In the space of literally about half an hour, we had a Reddit post (which, it turns out, contained fabricated or at the very least misattributed evidence) talking about Dan sleeping with a groupie a few years back, and this escalated via Twitter into "Dan is grooming minors and is a paedophile". And I'm not exaggerating; it really was in the space of half an hour that all this happened.
Thankfully, in this instance it's gone away almost as quickly as it erupted, partly because the original instigator of the situation stepped up and basically said "whoops, I didn't mean this to happen" (yes you fucking did) but if Dan has any sense, he'll sue the fuck out of the little shit who started this whole thing off.
I feel strongly about this sort of thing because I've been on the receiving end of it. In the grand scheme of things, I'm pretty much an Internet nobody in comparison to someone like Dan. But I've still suffered the consequences of a band of trolls latching on to something I said (in this instance, the fact that I said I enjoyed My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic) and then using that as an excuse to kick off a coordinated harassment campaign.
And I mean harassment. I'm not talking a few mean tweets. I'm talking spreading my name around accusing me of being a paedophile. I'm talking phoning my family members and people I worked with at the time to make horrible accusations. I'm talking stalking me on every social media account I had. In my case, I hadn't even done anything even vaguely "wrong"; I was just a target for some bored losers online who wanted to try and ruin someone's life.
The difference with the Dan situation is, of course, that when you're someone of at least a reasonable amount of note online, these sort of accusations can potentially destroy your career. We saw it happen with ProJared — who thankfully bounced back after comprehensively tearing down pretty much everything that was thrown at him — and thankfully, this whole incident this time around has ended before it really got rolling.
It saddens me a bit that I've seen people I know participating in the whole thing this time around. I'm really disgusted with how quickly people went for blood, and I can't help but worry about the fact this keeps happening. Ultimately it ends up being bad for the people who are the real victims of actual wrongdoing — because eventually, no-one will believe them.
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