How Criticizing The Powerful Became “Harassment”
Last year washed-up actor and wannabe conservative pundit James Woods filed a lawsuit against a virtually unknown and pseudonymous Twitter user on the grounds that a flippant remark about Woods and cocaine (exact quote: “cocaine addict James Woods still sniffing and spouting.”) qualified as libel. The defendant was represented pro bono by a civil liberties-minded lawyer who pointed him to Woods’ history of vulgar and insulting tweets, exposing him as a self-aggrandizing hypocrite. Unsurprisingly, the court refused to accommodate the plaintiff’s request that Twitter reveal the real life identity of Woods’ heckler.
The reaction was predictable: everyone left of the hard right laughed at the bluster of a washed-up actor, while guys who have their military rank from 1973 in their Twitter bio and demand that trolls unmask themselves for a public fistfight outside of Hobby Lobby continued to imagine U.S. Marines knocking out their online detractors.
The situation was clear-cut: a Tea Party conservative with an already sullied reputation was going after a harmless nobody in a misguided attempt at a masculine public performance. Consider the reaction when the aggressor/self-styled victim is part of the in-group. When he or she meets the standards of mainstream respectability, i.e. politics at least slightly to the left of John Kasich and a proper education in corporate diversity training, the media sees them not as a blowhard having a meltdown, but as a reasonable figure facing an uncontrollable onslaught of nasty, brutish internet trolls.
This narrative peaked for the first time with Gamergate. In case you smartly muted the word “gamergate” in October 2014, it was an incident that began with a false claim by a few dozen anonymous nerds that a female game developer was sleeping with video game “journalists” for positive reviews. It soon attracted the most hysterical personalities on the internet to both sides. Death, bomb and rape threats were made both to and in defense of feminist game developers, each one promptly waved away by the accused as a false flag; herein lies the issue with measuring moral standing by the number of anonymous threats aimed at oneself — you can anonymously threaten yourself and reap the benefits. Regardless, the controversy ended with everyone from the reputable media standing in unanimous support of people who make 3-minute video games about how it sucks to have depression, who in this case were somehow the lesser of two evils.
It was a victory: gamer guys were heartbroken and “indie developers” whose entire resume of games takes less time to complete than any given title at the Chuck E. Cheese arcade had to face the reality that their careers had peaked with a brief CNN interview about gamer kids threatening to put weird shit in their mailbox. Unfortunately, the takeaway for media types was not that everyone who makes or plays video games has emotional issues — it was that social media is a battlefield where a minority of reasonable adults must be ever-vigilant against the hordes of barbarians who threaten the fragile Pax Romana of journalists retweeting each other.
The tenor of Gamergate returned to the media in late 2015, when Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump started to rise in the polls and milquetoast thinkpiece factories became paranoid that their perceived influence over the political climate was waning. When the public is mesmerized by an almost-socialist and an almost-fascist and your job is to write “Actually, the status quo is more radical than you thought”, all you can do is ramp up the intensity and present yourself as a beleaguered underdog despite carrying water for the wealthy and powerful a la “poptimists” in the music press.
Enter “Berniebros”, an amorphous group of overzealous Sanders supporters that terrorize well-paid columnists with everything from mild criticism to outright insults. Berniebros are unique among internet users: they are often assertive and even downright rude when discussing their politics with strangers. One might theorize that supporters of lesser-known, more “fringe” candidates tend to be louder and more enthusiastic to make up for the lack of name recognition and Wall Street donations, but that’s not it — Berniebros are just, you know, male privilege or whatever. Or, they just — I mean, something about them is bad, right? I don’t owe you an explanation. Stop harassing me.
“Berniebros” are not necessarily “bros” or even Bernie supporters. A Mashable article about the supposed phenomenon cited a Facebook comment from a “Carol Jean Simpson” referring to Hillary Clinton as a “lying shitbag”. (Coincidentally, women old enough to be named Carol are one of Clinton’s core demographics.) A tweet from New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum (“Man, the Feel The Bern crew (as opposed to Bern himself) is such a drag. Say anything pro-Hil & they yell “bitch” & “psycho.” V idealistic!”) was quickly debunked when a search for her handle and “psycho” only turned up a tweet from a Tea Party conservative who made no mention of Sanders on his profile. To Nussbaum’s credit, she later apologized for the mistake, but as anyone who followed the saga of the misleading Planned Parenthood “exposé” videos could tell you, later retractions mean very little to people who value kneejerk reactions above all else.
Parallels to Gamergate are drawn repeatedly despite a lack of death and rape threats, and despite the fact that Gamergate was led by a Breitbart writer and the guy from that Joss Whedon show who got really racist after it ended. The vaguer the rhetoric, the more versatile it becomes. Case in point: Anil Dash, whose name I would proceed with a vocation if I could figure out what he actually does, made a tweet lumping supporters of Sanders in with Men’s Rights activists, pickup artists and neoreactionaries, an unholy trinity of internet-bred resentment that skews far right and contains some of the vilest worldviews ever expressed within Pepe memes. The political alignment of these groups is irrelevant; all that matters is that they are part of the out-group, the massive Other threatening the supposed consensus on what constitutes reasonable discourse. An attempt by 17th-century populist John Lilburne wearing sunglasses to comprehend Dash’s disingenuous nonsense led to the most absurd accusation of harassment I’ve ever seen:
Back to trying to figure out who Anil Dash is for a second: if he isn’t a journalist then what does he do, exactly?
Oh God. I have to stop reading about him so I don’t get nauseous, but I assume if you were to go to the TED Talk YouTube channel and sort the videos from least-viewed to most-viewed he would be in the number one spot talking to an empty auditorium about “brand synergy”.
Anyway, the hysteria over Twitter harassment has expanded beyond single-issue Clinton thinkpiecers and deep into the realm of indistinguishable centrist hacks, who emitted a collective whine over the utter tragedy of chickenhawk Ivy Leaguers being subjected to cuss words on the computer. The idle political writer class has long held the belief that Twitter needs to rein in The Trolls by any means necessary. They got used to being shielded from criticism by virtue of the Web 1.0 era and now they think being correctly identified as a moron for repeatedly writing moronic columns is a deviation from the norm, rather than the default state. As Sam Kriss wrote: “To kill people with airborne explosives is fine, as long as you do so politely; trying to prevent this with undefined uncouthness is unacceptable.”
Along with any sense of perspective, absent from the discussion over online harassment and abuse is one basic fact: responding to an online mob is like trying to fistfight a bear you encounter during a woodland stroll — your best bet is to pretend you never saw it and slowly back away. Don’t even block, just mute. That the journalists in question neglect to do this means one of three things: 1. they lack the knowledge necessary to deal with facile trolling without embarrassing themselves 2. their fragile egos rest upon the assumption that 100% of their readers will react to their articles with either agreement or indifference 3. they realize that disingenuous and exaggerated complaints of online martyrdom are immensely popular on the mid-2010s internet. The suggestion that people use Twitter’s built-in functions to minimize negativity seems to be beyond the pale to the self-styled victim crowd: no matter how many ways Twitter gives users to filter their feed and eliminate trolls from their mentions, there is an ever-present chorus of malcontents demanding that the administrators tackle the “harassment problem”. Rarely if ever are concrete suggestions given; I imagine the reason is that “I should be able to have anyone I want IP-banned from one of the world’s most popular websites based on an incredibly broad definition of harassment that could easily be turned back on me” is usually too asinine to escape the backspace key of even the most filterless Twitter addict.
Whatever the drawbacks of the chaos that presents itself in the infamous “comment section”, a top-down enforcement of decorum and etiquette on social media only serves to entrench the unearned platforms bestowed upon hack political journalists. Real people are angry about the status quo and if that news is distressing to financially comfortable journalists who see the election only as an opportunity to harvest pageclicks then they deserve to be distressed.