#oneaday Day 550: I'm so tired of online

I've had to block two different people on two different platforms today, both for the same reason: showing up uninvited and spewing some sort of borderline-abusive quasi-scolding because they happen to disagree with something rather innocuous that I had said. The details don't really matter — though if you must know, they really were innocuous opinions, firstly on the fact that localisation into English is not "censorship" (which it isn't, and if you're already typing an angry comment, I invite you to stop, take a deep breath, and just leave), and secondly, that it was surprising someone with terrible handwriting and an obvious lack of care in what they were writing could actually spell a rather complicated surname correctly. Hardly the stuff of epic meltdowns, I'm sure you'll agree — although the localisation topic does tend to bring some of the absolute worst people on the Internet out of the woodwork.

I have a zero tolerance policy for rudeness these days. If a complete stranger were to show up at my door and start hurling abuse at me, I would slam the door in their face. And as such, if a complete stranger decides to show up at my digital door online and start hurling abuse, I will gladly slam that door in their face, too. The platforms on which I blocked these two particularly odious individuals today — my other site MoeGamer, and my Bluesky account — both have pretty robust self-moderation tools that allow you to put nasty little piggies out of sight, out of mind, permanently.

My favourite moderation tool in this regard is YouTube's "Hide user from channel" function. YouTube does many, many stupid things, but this little option is a work of genius. Effectively acting as a shadowban, using this function on a user not only makes the comment you used it on disappear from everyone else's screens, including yours, it also prevents any future comments from that person from appearing on any of your videos. However — and here's the good bit — the user in question has no indication that this has happened to them, meaning they can quite happily continue spewing their hateful rhetoric "at you", and you will remain completely oblivious, while they inevitably get more and more frustrated. This is just delightful.

But you know what? I'm tired. It sucks that these mechanisms have to be in place for a quiet life online these days. And I'm increasingly fatigued with the very idea of putting myself out there — for what, exactly? — only to get chucklefucks who are incapable of responding to a post without resorting to The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies crapping up the comments sections.

I don't do anything online with the intention of pissing people off, or even being a little bit provocative. I'm honest about things — I'm honest about the person I am, I'm honest about the things I feel and believe, and I'm honest about the things I enjoy. The thing I am most honest about is that I have absolutely zero desire to argue with anyone online, which is why, as a general rule, on platforms such as my YouTube channel and MoeGamer, I make a specific effort to focus on the good and the positive.

Yes, I rant and rave and complain a fair bit here — I will freely admit that! — but this place is for me. It's my place for self-expression, for self-therapy, for processing my own thoughts, feelings and emotions, and it just happens to be publicly accessible. That does not mean I crave sweaty Internet-poisoned dudes in my mentions arguing with everything I say. I am more than enough sweaty Internet-poisoned dude for myself; I certainly don't need any more.

It might be time for another social media break over the holidays. I've already dialled things back a lot from where I was, which is good. But the holidays promise to be a nice time with family, so I'm looking forward to enjoying the peace and quiet. And that peace and quiet will have to be, at least partly, of my own creation.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 490: Normalise roasting shitty customers

Earlier today, the publisher of the new automation-centric indie game Little Rocket Lab — by all accounts a thoroughly nice-looking, charming game that seems to have mostly gone down well — shared a few Steam posts, noting that they had completely lost patience with the idiots who cry "DEI" any time a woman or non-white character is included in a video game, and had just taken to responding to them in as blunt and unforgiving a manner as possible.

Here's the prime example:

And this one's pretty good, too:

Now, of course, this had A Certain Type of Gamer up in arms about the developer being "hostile" or "butthurt" to players, and to that I say… good. He has every right to be hostile when some little shit comes in and starts shooting their mouth off about something completely, utterly stupid. He has every right to want to curate his community and filter out toxic individuals — even in the case of a single-player game like this. He has every right to say that he's happy certain types of person are not going to play the game because they can't handle the presence of women and people who otherwise look a bit different from them.

I wish this attitude was a bit more normalised. Because it of course sucks to be on the receiving end of rudeness, but if you act like a twat then you should expect to be called on it, likely in anger, and that's a bit different from someone coming up to you and, completely unprovoked, telling you that they hope you die. Unfortunately, the culture of making everything as PR-friendly as possible these days means that even if you're receiving a torrent of abuse from some blowhard on the Internet, you're supposed to just quietly endure it, accept it, thank them for their feedback and move on with your day.

Well, honestly, it's not that easy. I, regrettably, have considerable experience from multiple positions I have worked over the years with people being complete shits to what they believe is a faceless social media account, and it sucks absolute donkey dick. Sometimes it's just weird, such as the one guy who harassed me when I was on GamePro because he thought debit cards were a conspiracy by George Bush to control society. But sometimes — often, even, I'd say — it's downright scary.

Under most circumstances, you're not allowed to respond in kind, you're not allowed to express any sort of frustration and you're absolutely not allowed to make the dickhead in question feel like they are the one who has done anything wrong.

I know why this is the case, of course. It's because the second a company steps out of perceived "line", particularly when it comes to something that has A Community around it, a million and one YouTube videos will appear with "[Brand Name] said WHAT??!!" and, in turn, further harassment will be sent the way of whatever poor sap is having to man the social media mines that day — and said poor employee of the company in question will probably find themselves facing if not disciplinary action, then certainly an awkward conversation with Management the next day.

It shouldn't have to be that way, though. In an age where you can't even walk into a coffee shop or doctor's office without prominent notices about how abuse and harassment of staff members will not be tolerated, why are we still sort of okay with it online? Why do we put up with this garbage treatment from "customers" who, in many cases, are not our target audience in the first place? Why can't we say that these people are not welcome in our community and shouldn't buy our products?

I, unfortunately, don't really have an answer to that. But I have plenty of respect for "Rave" (aka Mike Rose from publisher No More Robots) above, not only for responding the way he did, but also for sharing the crap that anyone involved in the production of games — or games journalism, for that matter — probably finds depressingly familiar at this point in time. We're long overdue a good, long talk about this, and how we can make things better. I'm just concerned it might be far too late to do anything about it.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

1971: don't bully!!

Here's a curious paradox for you: how much of the supposed epidemic of "bullying" and "harassment" going on on the Internet these days is down to people bringing it upon themselves?

This isn't a question of "victim blaming", as the buzzword has it, but it's an actual phenomenon that I've observed — and, in my younger days, even engaged in myself. I can't explain why I did such a thing, but I know I did it, I know that I was aware I was doing it even at the time, and yet I simply couldn't stop myself.

I suffered dreadfully at the hands of bullies in primary school. I'm not sure what it was about me — my hair, my accent, the fact my ears appeared quite large in comparison to my head (I've since "grown into" them, I think) or some combination of all of the above and a few other things besides — but I was a regular target for some of the schools more notorious troublemakers. And it wasn't to do with my friendship group, either, as on a number of occasions my supposed "friends" actually sided against me in an attempt to win favour points with the bullies (who, inevitably, were the "cool" kids). Perhaps it was self-preservation, perhaps they'd really had enough of me; either way, it was a betrayal, and it hurt.

But I know that I was partly to blame for some of the incidents that happened. I recall deliberately goading the bullies on more than one occasion — swearing at them, insulting them, trying to attack them — and inevitably being knocked to the ground, winded and crying. The teachers on duty would do their usual "come over and look concerned" bit, but then nothing would ever happen to the people who had assaulted me. And so the cycle would repeat, over and over again.

Perhaps it was an attempt to claw my own little bit of "power" on the playground, because I was very much at the bottom of the food chain. Perhaps it was an attempt to let out my frustration about what I now recognise as social anxiety and difficulty interacting with some people. Perhaps I was just a little cunt. I honestly don't know the reason. But what I do know is that despite the fact I was the "victim", I was also genuinely to blame for a goodly proportion of those incidents — not all of them, mind, but a fair few of them.

And I'm reminded of this as I watch interactions on social media today. Mr Brandon Orselli, the chap who runs NicheGamer, an independent games site that I've become quite fond of, regularly has to fend off people who start attacking him, his work and his staff without any sort of provocation. Their reasoning? His site has, at times, been sympathetic to the consumer revolt known as "GamerGate", which has now been raging for some ten months and, despite a considerable amount of evidence to the contrary, is still regarded as a "hate group" of "misogynists".

Now, I'm not here to talk about GamerGate and whether or not it's right (largely because I know it's a topic of discussion that tends to become irrational very quickly — both "sides" are very much at fault in this regard, and frankly I want nothing to do with the perpetual arguments and finger-pointing) but one glance at the front page of NicheGamer will tell you that it's absolutely not any sort of GamerGate propaganda rag. Rather, it's an up-and-coming independent site with a clear focus, a staff that is obviously passionate about their work — including some highly knowledgeable specialist writers — and an editor-in-chief who is not afraid to stand up for himself, his work and his site.

Orselli does admittedly, at times, come across as a little arrogant on social media — but you know what? I understand the pride he takes in his work, and the pleasure he feels when things go well for his site. And I very much respect his choice to take the bull by the horns and engage these "critics" in an attempt at conversation even as they are, at times, spreading information that simply isn't true.

Why am I reminded of my own playground experiences? Well, the sort of people who are attacking Orselli and his staff remind me of the young me. They poke and they poke and they poke and they goad and they goad and they goad… and then they call foul (or, more accurately, "harassment") when the person they've been poking and goading bites back. (It has to be said, mind you, that it's not quite the same situation: Orselli is not a "bully", has shown admirable self-restraint and civility in these interactions, and has been a lot more calm and collected about them than I probably would be!) In other words, observing from the outside and recognising this behaviour as something I once did (as a child!) makes it seem very much like those attacking Orselli, his site and others like them are specifically going out and looking for trouble so they can further their "harassment" narrative.

Certainly nothing I've seen of NicheGamer's output — and since I've pretty much stopped following big games sites as they don't cover many of the games I'm interested in these days, it's one of the few sites I do check in on semi-regularly — warrants the sort of unpleasantness I've seen hurled at Orselli and his team on a seemingly daily basis, whatever your feelings on GamerGate (which, as previously noted, is not the same thing as NicheGamer). If anything, NicheGamer should be applauded for trying something different in a world of identikit big magazine-style or blog-type games sites, and catering to a specific audience rather than casting a very wide but very shallow net.

But anyway. It hopefully goes without saying that this isn't any attempt to diminish any instances of genuine harassment that actually goes on on social media — after all, I've dealt with it myself, so I know how shitty it is. But this sort of behaviour — deliberate provocation — just rubs me up the wrong way, particularly as I've suffered at the hands of bullies many times over the years, both by bringing it on myself and through no fault of my own. So in the words of Twitter's favourite anti-bully ranger:

https://twitter.com/antibullyranger/status/609751052125016064

Or, to put it another way, don't be a cunt.

1425: An Open Note to @Twitter

[Note: Since I wrote this post this morning, Twitter has reversed its policies on blocking. That was fast!]

I'm not normally one to jump on the controversy du jour and add my voice to the throngs of people yelling about a particular issue, but in the case of Twitter's recent changes to its "block" system, whereby blocked users are now effectively "muted" in only one direction rather than truly blocked, I feel it's important I share my experiences.

Earlier in the year, I suffered an organised campaign of harassment that was enough to drive me from the Twitter service and completely close my account. I only returned a while later for professional reasons — in my occupation of online journalist, Twitter is a convenient means of both getting in touch with people and promoting content. Were it not for my job, I doubt I would have returned.

The harassment stemmed from a single word in my profile: "Brony." Lest you're unfamiliar, this term describes an adult-age fan of the TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic by Lauren Faust and her team. The "Brony" community is a large and active one on the Internet, and for the most part a hugely supportive one, with its creed being "love and tolerate". It accounts for a significant proportion of creative derivative works such as fan fiction, artwork and music videos, and is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. I always considered myself somewhat on the periphery of this fandom, since although I liked the show I wasn't so deep in that I was making these creative works; I included the word in my Twitter bio as a means of showing my support for the community, however, and acknowledging something I found to be enjoyable.

What I wasn't aware of until my harassment incident was the fact that there are people on Twitter — and the Internet at large — who specifically seek out self-professed "Bronies" and torment them, usually through repeated and public accusations of paedophilia. In my case, this began as a series of Twitter @mentions that grew in frequency and intensity over the course of several days; I quickly blocked the main instigators without engaging with them, but more and more people came as the situation escalated and the group responsible for the harassment — known as the GNAA — came together against me.

I changed my Twitter username in an attempt to deter the attackers, but all this achieved was causing them to take over my original username, pose as me and post links to pornographic content.

The harassment went a step further than just Twitter @mentions, however. My Twitter bio also linked to the Twitter account of my brother, and to the video games website I was, at the time, managing editor of. The instigators of the harassment followed these links to my brother's personal website and the site I worked for, trawled the WHOIS records to find the phone numbers of the owners — my brother himself and the person who was paying for the hosting of the games site respectively — and then called them to make further accusations of paedophilia against me.

These calls continued for several days, and prompted me to contact the police to find out if there was anything I could do. Unfortunately the police were unable to do much save for keep the incident on file, and recommended that I work with Twitter to resolve the situation.

I contacted Twitter to explain the situation and point the support staff in the direction of the accounts that had been instigating most of the trouble, and which had hijacked my original account name to pose as me. After several days of waiting, during which the harassment continued, Twitter's response was that those responsible were not in breach of Twitter's terms and conditions because it was a "personal dispute". It took another round of contacting them to convince them to suspend my original username, at which point I decided to leave the service entirely, and had no intention of returning unless I absolutely had to.

Without Twitter's Block function allowing for forced unfollows and true blocking of troublemakers, this incident would have been even worse than it already was. Moreover, Twitter has shown itself to be either incapable or unwilling of dealing with persistent and organised harassment that spills out into the non-online sphere.

I am not the only person who has suffered such abuse at the hands of online bullies, but everyone who has has something in common: all they are doing is attempting to be their true selves, unashamed of who they are, what they do and what they like — and attempting to engage with like-minded or supportive people. Harassment on the grounds of something that you are — or, in my case, something that you like — is completely unacceptable, and it's not at all appropriate to just brush these levels of personal attacks off as personal disputes, then do nothing about them.

The changes to the Block policies do not encourage a change in behaviour on the part of the bullies. If anything, they punish the victim more by forcing them to take their account private when they may wish to remain public in order to meet new friends. Twitter is taking its policies with regard to harassment and bullying in the wrong direction — and these policies weren't in a particularly good place to begin with, as I can say from first-hand experience.

I would encourage Twitter to rethink how it is handling this situation, and to ensure that more robust solutions are in place for blocking and reporting persistent offenders. Twitter is an enormously useful online communication resource, and the means through which I have come to know a significant number of friends a lot better. But it needs to be a safe place; for marginalised and vulnerable groups, those who have suffered previous harassment or those who simply suffer from social anxiety, these new changes are not a step in the right direction.

Please consider the good of the community that has been built and not just the supposed needs of the business. When you build a social network, both aspects are important; without the former, the latter simply ceases to exist.

1151: Twitter Let Me Down (Or: Why I'm Not Going Back)

Let's recap.

About a month ago, I was the victim of an organised "cyberbullying" campaign on Twitter. (Aside: I hate the term "cyberbullying", but it seems to be the accepted terminology so I will use it for now.) Members of an Internet-based organisation known as the "GNAA" (NSFW Wikipedia link) started harassing me, attempting to spread slanderous rumours that I was a paedophile, and copying me in on their pronouncements, presumably attempting to get a rise out of me. I blocked and ignored them as is the sensible thing to do in this sort of situation, but still they kept coming.

They started phoning people close to me — specifically, my brother and the owner of Games Are Evil, both of whose phone numbers are stored in the "WHOIS" information for their respective websites. Not just one phone call, either — several, each increasing the intensity of the threats to get the authorities called on me for my supposed (and, I'm sure I don't have to add, fictional) perversions.

The reason for this group's attack on me, it transpires, was the fact I had the word "Brony" on my Twitter bio. ("Brony", for those who don't know, is the term for adult-age fans of the recent My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic TV show, a group which I identify myself as being a part of. Seriously, that show's great.) This group had been attacking Bronies for a while and attempting to slander them in similar ways. They were also responsible for a high-profile attack on the social networking/blogging platform Tumblr back in December — said hack was also an attack on the Brony community.

Because this unprovoked assault on both me and my reputation was frightening and unpleasant, I reported it to Twitter. Because it was spilling out of the online sphere and into the "real world" with the phone calls, I also reported it to my local police station. The latter weren't able to do much about it — I wasn't really expecting them to be able to, to be honest — but I did at least feel somewhat reassured that I'd done all the things they would have suggested I do in this situation: change my username, block the perpetrators, do not engage with them, let other people know what's going on. Eventually, the perpetrators tracked down my new username and hijacked my old one, using it to impersonate me with the most obviously fake "this is what a paedophile does" sort of posts you'd ever see.

I reported the impersonation to Twitter as a separate issue, which required me to fax them a copy of my passport at my own expense to prove my identity. (Fax? Seriously?) It took them a few days to respond to this, but they eventually suspended my old Twitter username to prevent it from posting further offensive content in my name; in the meantime, I closed my Twitter account completely.

What I'm particularly disappointed about is Twitter's handling of the rest of the issue. I reported the problems I had been having back when that original post I linked to was written — mid February — and only received a response last night. The response I received was boilerplate text that simply said there had been no violation of Twitter policy, and that they didn't mediate in disputes between users. No attempt to address my concerns. No response to the fact that I had clearly laid out a series of tweets that showed an organised — and demonstrably unprovoked — campaign of hate against me. No concern for my wellbeing.

There is a difference between a "dispute between users" or a "difference of opinion" and an organised campaign to victimise someone based on their tastes and preferences. The offenders in this particular case went above and beyond simple name-calling into full-on harassment of not only me, but also my family and friends — and not only on the Internet, but also over the phone. None of this appears to have been taken into account in the month that Twitter's safety team have had to review this situation. In the meantime, the unpleasant individuals responsible for causing me such upset remain at large and unpunished, free to do it again to someone different for just the same stupid reasons they attacked me.

For this reason, I will not be returning to Twitter as a means of personal communications or social networking. While I appreciate a network of that size is difficult and time-consuming to police, that doesn't mean that the site's user safety department should get to just sit back and say "deal with it." This incident caused me considerable personal distress, and doubtless it upset and confused my family and friends who were dragged into it, too. The complete lack of concern Twitter's user safety department has shown towards a demonstrable case of organised harassment and bullying means that I do not feel comfortable trusting them in future; consequently, I will not be returning.

I doubt they care, of course; one user is but a drop in the ocean. I felt the need to share my frustration regarding this issue, however. Cyberbullying is a real problem that destroys lives — literally in many cases — and for Twitter to just turn a blind eye like this doesn't strike me as particularly acceptable.

If you used to follow me on Twitter, please feel free to share this post with any of our mutual friends. I would like to spread the word about this if at all possible.

Thanks, as always, for listening.

1123: Assholes with Nothing Better to Do

I don't know if any of you reading this have ever been properly trolled by someone who really knows what they're doing, but I have. Twice.

The first was during my GamePro days, and I believe I've mentioned it on this blog before. Basically there was this dude who frequented the GamePro Facebook page and was a bit of a nutcase, to put it mildly. He'd often come along and comment on updates, talking about how debit cards were somehow evil and various other ravings. He seemed mostly harmless, however, so he was tolerated, left alone and largely ignored by other members of the community.

That is, until I posted a news story about Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab's interactive JRPG-style exploration of queer issues, A Closed World. Suddenly, nutjob went on the offensive, posting raving comment after raving comment and directly attacking me, accusing me of being a paedophile and all manner of other slurs. Apparently he was a big fat homophobe as well as a crazy person, it seems, so he got summarily blocked from the GamePro Facebook page, reported to Facebook and also blocked from the main GamePro site despite his best efforts to continue harassing me. This rapid response (largely from me, I might add, without engaging with him) meant that he went away pretty quickly, thankfully, but it was still a somewhat unpleasant experience to go through, even though I knew that none of the things he was saying were true.

Something very similar happened today. Yesterday, I received a bizarre tweet from a complete stranger that wasn't a reply to anything which I had said, but which simply called me a "sick, sick man." I took a brief look at this person's profile and they appeared to be… not the sort of person you'd really want to associate yourselves with, let's say, so I immediately blocked them and thought nothing more of it.

Today I received an email from Rob, the owner of Games Are Evil, informing me that he'd received a voicemail from someone — someone who neither he or I knew, I might add. Apparently they'd made some rather unpleasant allegations about me and had supposedly contacted the authorities. Much like the previous time I was attacked without provocation, my heart almost stopped, even though I knew there was absolutely no truth to these allegations whatsoever. It took me quite some time to calm myself down.

Calm myself down I did, though, and I did a little digging, as I was suspicious about a few things. So firstly I went back and looked at the Twitter account that had sent me the strange message last night. The location on it matched the location the caller was supposedly from, and the first name on the account also matched the Twitter account. Things were starting to fall into place.

I checked the WHOIS records for Games Are Evil and discovered that, as I suspected, Rob's phone number and contact details were recorded alongside the site's other information, which explained how this person was able to contact him by phone when the only information on the site itself is a selection of email addresses. The only question left was why someone would do all this.

And the best answer I can come up with is "because they had nothing better to do." My attacker is, according to his Twitter profile, a member of an anti-blogger group with a spectacularly offensive name whom I'd never heard of prior to today, and it seems they have something of a habit of attacking people in this manner for reasons best known unto themselves. It seems that today, I was just unlucky enough to be the one in the firing line. I'm now not all that worried about this ridiculous turn of events, because frankly I don't really see the "authorities" — if they were contacted at all, which I seriously doubt — trusting the word of someone who voluntarily chooses to associate themselves with a group called… well, this. (Wikipedia link, offensive name. You have been warned.)

Still, it sucks that there are people out there malicious enough to pull shit like this against complete strangers. May they all fall off a cliff and land arse-first on a sharp spike. Cunts.

So yeah. Happy Valentine's Day and all that.