Seems the pattern continues. A high profile account RTs something of mine. Eyes are drawn in. Obsessive stalkers freak out and start trying to contain the situation with a fresh wave of weird lies about me. People I've known forever suddenly have me blocked. What a healthy site.
Like, here's the thing. We're all familiar with the old addage, "gee, wondering why you're blocked when you haven't even interacted with me? Maybe it's because of how you treated someone else," but like, it seems that "maybe" in there is doing more heavy lifting than it should.
Broadly speaking, for the last several years now, I just straight up have not been interacting with people, at all. And I don't even just mean "via twitter" I mean AT ALL.
I don't get into arguments with people. I don't chew the fat with friends. I don't take sides in people's interpersonal drama. If someone I like makes/does something cool, I might pop off a quick "that's really neat," and if someone's having an emotional crisis, I'll try to pop in with an encouraging word. Past that, I don't really talk to anyone unless they say something to me first and outside the constant background noise of bigots shouting incoherent garbage and getting wordlessly blocked, maybe one person a month ever actually addresses me, and then usually just to ask for a quick clarification to a point I made in this sort of rambling thread here.
And to be clear, for the most part, that isn't because I am a very private person and I avoid people. That's because several different groups of people (plus, I'm sure, some random individuals) have gone to kinda shockingly great lengths to actively cut me off from any sort of basic human contact for the past several years, and been tremendously successful in convincing people that speaking to me is too dangerous to do, through some combination of outright threatening them not to do so, or spreading lies about me being personally dangerous to those who dare speak to me, or some manner of Woman of Ill Repute whose terrible crimes reflect onto anyone near me.
In all seriousness, in addition to being painted as perpetuating horrible grudges against a huge swath of people I have literally never even heard of, and another swath of people of whom I've always held a pretty positive opinion (and of course, have not speaking to or about in years because, again, efforts to socially isolate me have been Quite Successful) I routinely catch random troublemakers attempting to spread rumors that I am, off the top of my head: a nazi, a champion of pedophile rights, a transphobe, a terrorist ringleader, racist, cis, straight, effortlessly hot, popular, "a journalist," a furry, a zionist, a sex worker, a Something Awful poster, and of course the old standby- a fat bearded man from Texas who pretends to be a trans woman on the internet for... all the clear benefits that has. As well as, of course, a member of various random people's personal cliques, and oh I almost forgot the weirdoes who used to claim I was a member of the Brazilian secret police/the FBI/the CIA.
None of these are remotely true (well, I guess calling me a journalist is, as I do have a couple published articles out there, but certainly not in whatever weird sense that stalker was using it), and it's not terribly hard to disprove them should you do any research at all into who I am, what I do, what I say, and which cliques I hold membership in (again, to be clear, none of them).
But, thing is, people are generally not inclined to double check these things. You get pressured by someone to cut all ties to a person and you just do it, no questions asked. And like, OK, X says I'm a dangerous scumbag, you like and trust X, and act accordingly, sure. I get that. But like, X could be acting on bad information, and also I guarrentee you, no matter who X is and how well you regard them, X could also just be straight up acting in bad faith. Sometimes, someone messes up bad, and feels the need to save face. If X has decided to declare me an enemy of the state because X listened to a rumor and then learned it came from a nazi site, or X straight up did something completely horrible in the moment to me, it's an understandable human reaction for X to cite a different reason for people not to talk to me out of fear of that coming to light, and thanks to all my various stalkers, there is no shortage of available cover stories to "suddenly confirm are true." It happens. A lot.
And like, I realize it IS a corner case to worry about some random person you don't know particularly well/at all being pushed towards suicide by various groups of people who should really have better ways to spend their time, but don't, and are actively trying to sever any possible ties to the world she can turn to for emotional/material support or even just a brief distraction from the constant terrorizing, but... it's a corner case that's coming up, and if you really want to look at it as a general principle thing, I don't know, maybe don't block people for stuff other people claim if you didn't witness it first-hand? Pretty sure that would have no real impact on your personal life, and it'd definitely hamper a tactic which hate groups of all sorts focus on as absolutely instrumental to getting marginalized individuals killed.
And like, I realize too that seeing me get so upset over like... people I'm passingly familiar with that I haven't had a real conversation with in years blocking me out of the blue, but like, the lack of conversations is due to other pressure from stalkers, and metaphorically, when you're already dangling over the pit by a rope around your ankles, and someone's slowly sawing through it, every strand you see snapping for any reason is cause for a great deal of alarm, you know?
And, you know, further to that analogy, I'm also screaming about it because everyone seems to be ignoring the people with the knives doing the sawing of those ropes, and I would really like some effort made by someone to actually stop them before I fall.
