I’ve talked a lot in this space about people who get mocked or harassed online, and usually it ends with the victim being doxxed (having personal information posted and then being spammed with texts/calls/tweets), fired, or at worst, threatened. With Reddit and 4chan, users can take a picture of anybody out of context (or take one off social media) post it, and then watch the mob go.
Fortunately, sometimes fighting back is effective. Falling to the troll’s level and insulting them back never works, but when someone makes a reasonable rebuttal, something magical happens: the vast majority of people side with the victim.
Recently, a black man (his skin colour will become relevant) named Adam posted a collage of photos of him starting to cry while waiting for his soon-to-be wife to walk down the aisle. However, not content to just let him have his moment and be happy about getting married, the pictures were appropriated and captions added. At first, it was still kind of questionable, but relatively benign: “When you woke up and realized having a lot of women can’t compare to just one that’s loyal.” Sexist to both men and women, but good at heart, I guess.
Then the Meninist twitter got involved. The account seeks justice for oppressed men by saying things like, “they should get into the club for free too,” and “why can’t they get doors held open for them?” The account added the caption: “He’s thinking of all the side hoes he has to give up,” which played off the stereotype of black men being disloyal. Adam then replied that he was, in fact, thinking of his wife. He then went on to write a Tumblr post denouncing the twitter account and reiterated he was emotional because he was happy to be marrying his wife, to tell men to do better, and that he was not in fact fighting back because his wife told him to.
Back in March, a 4chan user posted a picture of an overweight man named Sean O’Brien dancing, and then a picture of the same man with his head down because he noticed people laughing at him. This prompted abuse toward the man, but also an outpouring of support and condemnation of fatshaming. A group of women, spearheaded by writer Cassandra Fairbanks, launched a massive Twitter campaign to find O’Brien because 2,000 women in LA wanted to throw him a dance party. Tweets were retweeted until O’Brien tweeted accepting the invitation. A GoFundMe campaign raised about $13,000 to fly him to LA, where he attended a dance party DJ’d by Moby and got to dance with musician Andrew WK and more. He also got to dance with Megan Trainor on the Today Show and throw the symbolic first pitch at a baseball game. Though it had a bad beginning, he described the whole situation as a “wonderful journey.”
Last year, gaming journalist Alanah Pearce got fed up with being harassed and receiving death threats from teenage boys. Since the harassers weren’t exactly careful about hiding their identities, she managed to track down some of their moms and send screenshots of exactly what they were saying to her. One mom (so far) replied apologizing and saying she would have a talk with her son. Obviously it’s a little thing (and won’t really make a dent in the number of harassers online), but every little bit helps – even if that boy is the only one who stops trolling her.
Several years ago, a Reddit user posted a picture of a Sikh woman with facial hair, mocking her for her appearance. The woman, Balpreet Kaur, replied on Reddit with a post way more measured than I would have been, explaining Sikhs do not cut their hair or alter their appearances because they do not reject the body they are given. She believes that because she doesn’t focus on her outer appearance, she can focus more on her actions. Sufficiently shamed, the original poster apologized, calling himself out as stupid, and saying he had done research on the Sikh faith and found it interesting. Again, it’s a small thing, but at least that one guy is not posting pictures of people anymore and mocking them. Considering the cesspool the Internet can be, any small difference made is positive.
So the lesson here is twofold: don’t go making fun of strangers when you don’t know anything about their lives. And if you happen to be the victim of Internet mockery, maybe, just maybe, you can make a difference in a reasonable way.
