Vissremember kids: lack of consequences is tantamount to permission.
not holding people accountable for being fucking monsters is giving them permission to continue being monsters.
I feel like its important to add:
- not all monsters are huge political ones, some walk among us
- dogpiling people on social media, chasing them around the internet, harrassing them and abusing them for months makes you a fucking monster
- if you see people doing this to others, you should say something, or make an attempt to stop them or intervene
- standing there and watching someone get kicked in the teeth (figuratively) is the opposite of consequences
a high doom@Viss all at once, i appreciate my small circle where the chance of being involved or seeing such behavior is very rare, and also reminded there be monsters everywhere even if i dont see them
@h2onolan its probably less of an issue here on mastodon, because of the distributed nature of things - back on twitter, one of the hacks the attackers could take advantage of was that if they blocked their victim up front, the victim lost the controls on the attackers profile to report them. i think here even if youre blocked by someone, the toggles for reporting the profile still exist. also, its regular people doing the admin, not some corporate trust & safety group that needs convincing
@h2onolan so I don't think the same type of harrassment campaign could happen on mastodon, due to the architecture.
but the real horseshit part is that the folks who did these campaigns are just right here stood next to everyone, experiencing zero accountability for their malice
@Viss sometimes i will see a toot hidden with the label: “your admin has muted this account” or something like that, and i think welp if jerry (or another infosec.exchange mod) thinks they are sketch, ill just leave them be. I appreciate that, even if i dont know why it happened.
It is tough sometimes to clock an asshole unless someone tells you about them, and thats difficult to discern from regular griefing. I hope that any of my internet friends who spot me being chummy with a monster would kick me under the table or something. Not consequences exactly, i know. but maybe the best we will get
@h2onolan when i tell people about my experiences, its a mixed bag. there are folks that go 'oh thats horrible' and block them, which i appreciate. there are others who go 'oh i dunno, they seem fine to me' and i block them on the spot, and then i get others who are like 'show me proof', and i have to point to deleted twitter profiles and wayback machine and ask 'why would i lie about something like this', and usually end up blocking them because they seem... unconcerned
cognitively accessible math