The block button. A staple of modern internet interactions. Implemented slightly differently on all platforms.
On Discord, it prevents someone from private messaging you, and hides their past messages and messages on servers. Simple, serviceable.
On Reddit, it hides their content, and also prevents them from replying to any thread below you. So sometimes a comment won’t post, until you realised some stranger 5 comments up the thread has you blocked because of an argument 6 months ago about Brexit.
On Elon Musk’s nazi platform Xitter, it prevents private messages, and it prevents the other person from viewing or replying to you. But you can still see what they say, with a warning. So it’s reversed. And they can even still reply to your threads, as long as they don’t reply directly.
On Lemmy, the block button does nothing but hide their comments and posts. It’s nothing but an ignorance button. They can still reply to you, and say whatever they want, and you just won’t see it.
But all of these diverse platforms have one thing in common: They do nothing to prevent the person you block from talking about you to other people.
Today we’re talking about harassment. It comes in many forms: sexual, violent, religious, stalking, from authority, through the law, etc. But there’s an unspoken assumption foundational to most people’s understanding of harassment. And that’s that harassment is face to face. It’s something you do directly to one other person. It doesn’t have collateral damage. It doesn’t affect people other than the intended recipient.
This is false. Or, well, if it is true, we need a new word for something much more prevalent and much more destructive. Because direct harassment is, comparatively, the least concern for victims of abuse. And focusing on direct harassment to the exclusion of all else is harmful to victims of abuse.
Direct harassment is largely a solved problem on the internet. You just use the block button. Now, direct harassment can be a problem for anyone who exists in a position of prominence. Content creators, celebrities, and the victims of smear campaigns. I don’t mean to belittle the struggles of victims like Anita Sarkeesian, who was sent death threats by members of Gamergate every day for multiple years.
Rather, I mean to expand the scope of our understanding of the problem that caused all those death threats. Because you see, the problem isn’t just that thousands of nazis personally hated her. They didn’t decide to hate her one day out of the blue. They didn’t all collectively have a bad experience with her and decide on violence. No, they were provoked to action by leaders within the movement. Other content creators who made videos and posts demonising her.
These videos were not, under the classical understanding, harassment. A Nazi makes a video she will never watch in her life, which will only be seen by fellow 4chan users and people who think Steven Crowder is a comedy genius. That’s no harm to her, right? She’s never going to see it. It’s not even addressed to her. There is zero direct interaction.
But that video convinces a hundred nazis to send her death threats. And that is harassment. Their decision wasn’t an acausal quantum wonder like a Boltzmann Brain emerging from the interstellar soup. It had a cause.
You can attack someone without ever interacting with them directly.
The worst form of harassment is not one individual sending an unwanted message to one individual. No matter how bad the message is. The worst form of harassment is creating a message that will inspire a million people to hatred. The worst form is talking about someone behind their back.
And the block button doesn’t help with that.
Abusers know this fact. The effective ones, anyway. The ones with no original ideas and no tenacity will be deterred by a block button, but that’s not who we really have to worry about. The clever ones know that to harass someone, you need to get other people on your side.
So they lie.
They invent false accusations of imagine abuse. They invent excuses for their own behaviour. They gather a posse of impressionable minions to parrot their lies and make reasonable people think “Well everyone says it, it must be true”. They get normal people boosting their propaganda, until those normal people are in too deep and can’t realise it’s all a sham without admitting they did wrong. They manipulate people into positions of vulnerable intimacy, where they can’t go against the abuser’s wishes without being isolated and hurt, and then get that pawn to hurt people on their behalf. And they tell so many lies, gish-galloping through every trick in the book, that even people with the best intentions can’t separate fact from fiction, and can’t stand up for the victims.
The block button doesn’t do shit about that.
And what I describe here isn’t the work of mastermind geniuses on huge campaigns. It’s the set of tactics used by any petty abuser who has a personal grudge and enough determination to try everything. Eventually, some of it starts working. Eventually, they stumble onto the formula to control and ruin lives through trial and error.
If someone you know is being targeted like this, don’t tell them to just use the block button. Don’t put the responsibility for solving the abuse on the victim. Stand up. Do the right thing. Abuse needs to be something everyone works together to prevent. What’s our other alternative, trusting the cops to get it right and do something? No thanks. Fight for the victims. And don’t let someone trick you into mistaking victim for abuser either. Pay attention. Trust nothing. Verify every claim until you are certain. That’s the only way we defeat abuse.
