Thread by @AnaMardoll, There's a lot of good advice going around Twitter right now on [...]

There& #39;s a lot of good advice going around Twitter right now on how to avoid abusers. I think I would like to write a ramble on how to not become one.

It& #39;s my belief that just about anyone can become an abuser over time, and that a lot of times abuse can start as a series of not-great behaviors that amplify and intensify over time.

Almost all the behavior I& #39;ve been thinking about for this thread is stuff many(most?) people have done at least once. This isn& #39;t a "template to identify abuse/abusers". There& #39;s other threads for that.

This is just a list of things I watch out for in myself, as a self-check.

1. "Am I forgetting that I could be wrong?"

Self-assurance isn& #39;t a bad thing! But toxic people tend to *forever* stop entertaining the idea that they might be wrong. That they might have misunderstood or misinterpreted; that there might be another perspective.

This leads to:

2. "Am I framing everything as Me Against The World?"

There are people who hate me, sure. TERFs and abusers exist. But there& #39;s a vast sea of individuals who aren& #39;t allied with my abusers against me.

We saw these in action with a recent person called out in the book community; if you unfollowed and blocked them, you were "with" their abusers, and either duped or a betrayer. There was no room to just be a person who looked into the matter and found their behavior unacceptable.

Had they chosen to remember that (a) they could be wrong and realize that (b) a lot of trustworthy sources believed they were in the wrong, they could& #39;ve backed down, listened, apologized, and mitigated the damage they caused to their reputation. They chose not to.

This leads me to:

3. "Am I assuming Bad Faith too quickly and too broadly?"

Again, there are people who act in bad faith online! But when someone has begun to believe that *everyone* criticizing them has a personal vendetta against them, that& #39;s a worrying red flag.

I& #39;ve been on the receiving end of harassment pile-ons. I was hounded for a couple of particularly bad days because I criticized " gender reveal" parties.

But I didn& #39;t assume everyone running on me was personally acting in bad faith. People make mistakes or are misinformed, etc.

#3 isn& #39;t just for call-outs, though. I try really hard to educate on here in ways that *don& #39;t* assume everyone else is maliciously wrong.

Red flaggy language like "I& #39;m disappointed in so many of you" or "a lot of you don& #39;t seem to care" or "I would& #39;ve thought fellow [marginalized] people would understand" all evoke shame and guilt responses, especially in abuse survivors like myself.

(Here& #39;s where I point out, again, that I& #39;m guilty of this behavior in the past. It& #39;s one reason I try so hard not to write like this *now*. I realized it was unhealthy and unfair.)

Really, all three of these boil down to a reminder that I can be wrong and other people can be right. But I think it& #39;s important to remember that all the time and not just mid-callout.

And because I learn best with specific examples, I& #39;m going to pull out two exhibits from very recent experience.

Exhibit A: An author I followed wrote several threads in which they characterized "soft-blocking" as gaslighting abuse.

Soft-blocking, in case you didn& #39;t know, is a way of shaking off a follower by blocking and unblocking them in quick succession.

If you have neurodivergence which causes you to doubt your own recollection, soft-blocks can be disorienting. "Didn& #39;t I follow them last week? Did they soft-block me? Or did I forget? Or did Twitter bork up?"

But a person& #39;s right to safety means more than my own comfort.

If someone soft-blocks me, I may be hurt but I affirm their right to set boundaries. I recognize that the issue might not even be me (hell, maybe they like having a very specific number of followers) or that if it is me, I may have done something wrong ( #1).

I remember that they are almost certainly right about what their boundaries need to be ( #2) and that they& #39;re acting in their own best interests and not necessarily in bad faith against me ( #3).

Keeping these things in mind leads me to NOT call out someone who felt unsafe around me as an "abuser" for asserting a Twitter boundary (and in the process proving they were totally right to feel unsafe around me!).

This is what I mean when I say that remembering these things at all times (and not just during callouts) makes me, I hope, a better and safer person to be around.

But most of all I really want to highlight the shaming language: the I& #39;m Really Disappointed In You stuff that sends me instantly back to childhood and my own abusive parents.

Someone I trust did this recently on an issue; basically did the "both sides have wrong people on them, I& #39;m disappointed in so many of you, how could you?" rhetoric without ever staking out their own position or discussing the issue in detail. Scolding without clarification.

For a lot of abuse survivors, that just triggers an instead shame and guilt spiral. We want to rush to reassure our friend that we& #39;re on their side, and to reassure ourselves that we& #39;re on the right side. We& #39;re scared of being wrong, of being outcast.

If you& #39;re going to stake out a position and educate on here, my belief is that you need to *do* that. It helps no one to just vaguely come out and say "I see wrong folks on BOTH sides of the Kitten Juggling issue, and I& #39;m ashamed of so many of you."

Okay? How is that actionable?

Accounts that do that a lot, that use vague finger-waving to shame their followers without staking out a specific position that people can agree or disagree with make me nervous. They& #39;re cultivating *followers* in the non-Twitter sense of the word. Folks who follow their leader.

That& #39;s why I& #39;ll try to hammer out my threads with details and examples, and I& #39;ll try to bookend with reminders that I could be wrong, that there could be things I haven& #39;t considered. I don& #39;t want people to "follow" my lead. I& #39;m not a leader. I& #39;m just a fool with a keyboard.

I also have a really malicious autocorrect, so now I have to seed corrections throughout this thread. My apologies.

I will add: Persistent harassment makes it *harder* to not fall into these errors.

When you& #39;re being hate-mobbed, it& #39;s very easy to fall into a Me Against The World mentality. Humans dig in and get defensive.

I& #39;m NOT talking about callouts. I& #39;m talking about how it& #39;s hard to accept real criticism when it comes sandwiched between death threats from other people.

Knowing that, I& #39;ve deputized a few key friends to *take my keyboard away* if I ever get hate-mobbed and start lashing out.

That might be a useful idea for others, too, I don& #39;t know. It depends on whether you have someone you can trust to do that.

AND I& #39;ll add that there are a lot of people on here who like to see Social Justice people fight, and who will back you in a fight no matter how wrong you might be. So be careful who you listen to.

Again, knowing this, I have some trusted friends who I can go to and say "am I wrong?" and they& #39;re good enough friends to say "yeah, you could be handing this better" when I am.

https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="💕" title="Zwei Herzen" aria-label="Emoji: Zwei Herzen">

Latest Threads Unrolled: