Horrifying stuff. Decent people all over the internet are reacting with shock and sorrow and rage. As they should.
And yet…and yet…a lot of folks in social justice communities are doing what folks in social justice communities do, getting so worked up into a towering inferno of rage that they behave like the most ignorant MAGA dumbasses they deride, spouting absolute rubbish that is not only not true but cannot possibly be true, and of course shouting down anyone who tries to correct them.
Folks, don’t do this.
Yes, a large group of men did this. Yes, it’s abhorrent. No, it was not 62 million men. If you’re one of the countless people taking to the Great Online to scream your moral outrage that sixty-two million men could do such a horriffic thing, you are being a dumbass, you do not care about truth, and you are playing into the hands of conservatives who wish to mock, ridicule, and ultimately trivialize moral atrocity.
This is a trend I’ve noticed in social justice communities in North America over the last decade or so: moral outrage first, fact-checking later, truth never.
So let’s take a look at the CNN article and figure out where this “62 million men” idea comes from, shall we?
Here it is, in black and white:
Now, yes, this is poorly written (shame on the CNN editors!) and could have been much clearer. So, in the interests of fact and truth, let me spell this out clearly:
There is a site called Motherless. It gets about 62 million visits a month.
On this site was a group of people posting rape content.
That does not mean 62 million people were visiting rape content per month. C’mon. If you’re screaming outrage on the internet, you should know how the internet works.
There is a site called Reddit. It gets about 394 million visitors a month. If someone creates a subreddit called “How to Torture Kittens,” that does not mean that 394 million people a month visit that subreddit. It does not mean 394 million people a month want to learn how to torture cats.
Motherless, like Reddit, is huge. Motherless, like Reddit, has communities of people with different interests. Motherless calls them “groups,” Reddit calls them “subreddits.” Nobody visits every single Motherless group, just like nobody visits every single Reddit subreddit.
I thought this was obvious. Apparently it is not.
Yes, this Motherless group is horrific. Yes, any number of men visiting such a group is too many.
Truth. Matters.
Truth fucking matters. Going into hysterical screeds about “62 million men visiting a r@pe academy” makes those of us who care about social justice look like dumbasses. It makes us look like hypocrites when we insist on fact-checking conservatives. “Hahaha lookit these dumbass liberals, always saying ‘facts this’ and ‘fact-check that’ but when it’s their side they don’t give a shit about facts, LOL.”
It allows social conservatives to weaponize our own insistence on truth and facts against us. It allows people to ridicule and dismiss what we say. “ROFL these liberals, yapping about a ‘r@pe academy’ but they don’t even understand how the internet works, you can’t believe anything SJWs say.”
There can be no justice without truth. The truth is that 62 million men did not visit this Motherless group.
If you think I’m trying to trivialize this horror, you’re dead wrong. There can be no justice without truth. It gets right up my fucking nose when social justice liberals insist on facts and reason when we address the other side, then do the same things we accuse the other side of doing: playing fast and loose with reality in order to score cheap emotional points.
Yes, I know that the CNN article is ambiguous. I see how people acting in good faith reasonably came to the conclusion that 62 million men wanted to learn how to drug and assault their wives. But that’s not what happened, and now that you know that’s not what happened, if you continue to claim that’s what happened, you’re practicing accountability for thee but not for me. We are all accountable to the truth. There can be no justice without truth.
My fellow liberals, do better.
I started down this rabbit hole when I saw a comment on Facebook, where someone had posted about how “62 million men want to r@pe their wives” and then flew into a rage when someone else left a comment basically saying “I wish people would fact check, that number is not correct.” I switched over to my mobile browser to read the original CNN article and when I switched back,t hat post had scrolled off my Facebook feed.
If you’re pissed off about being corrected over something like this, you are the reason so many conservatives view us like this:
You may not see yourself in this meme, you may sincerely believe this meme doesn’t describe you, but other people see it.
If you expect the other side to listen to facts when you fact-check them, then you damn well have to be willing to listen and accept accountability when someone fact-checks you.
Do better. Be better. Facts matter. There can be no justice without truth. We do not win a culture war with the cheap emotional tools of the other side.
Anyone coming into the comments to try to excuse or justify deliberate factual misstatements or to argue that it’s okay to say things that aren’t true because our outrage is pure and our cause is just or that insisting on facts is the same thing as “defending rape” will be blocked permanently and without hesitation.
There I was, doom-scrolling social media at half past midnight a short while back, when this piece of AI slop floated through my feed:
I asked Google Gemini to gender-swap the image and the message, which it did without complaint:
Sorta lands a little different, doesn’t it?
There are a couple of things going on here that I find interesting. The first is that the attitude in the top meme is incredibly, bizarrely popular in certain corners of the Internetverse right now. Basically, the memes are all variants on “yeah, I’m a toxic or angry or manipulative woman, but that’s okay, you should put up with it in order to get the benefit of being with me.”
That’s not a new idea—there’s a common meme of Maralyn Monroe with a caption “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” that’s been circulating since the age of dialup Internet—but it’s weirdly popular in some corners right now. Which brings up the second point:
When you flip the script, it’s obvious how toxic this idea is.
We don’t see it when it’s a woman because we (by which I mean soceety as a whole) don’t take violence by women, especially violence by women to men, seriously. We instinctively recognize the danger of marying an angry man, but marrying an angry woman? Aww, she’s so cute when she’s mad! The greatest worry about marrying a woman is not that she’ll abuse you, it’s that you won’t know what’s on her mind every moment of the day. But hey, marry an angry woman, problem solved, she’ll tell you!
As someone who escaped an angry and controlling women, if I could express in words how deeply fucked up this is, your screen would explode. I could write an entire book unpacking how deeply problematic this is. And the fact that so many people can’t see why it’s problematic is one of those problems.
In a world where I had more time, I’d create a social media account where I just posted inversions of these memes to see what happened.
Why are most Quora Top Writers in the Epstein Files?
The Epstein Files are not files of people who were connected to serial child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Or at least, those aren’t the only people in the files. The Epstein Files list everyone ever mentioned in any email Jeffrey Epstein ever sent or received (including spam emails), along with everyone known to be at any public event he attended (including events like movie premieres).
Jeffrey Epstein was on Quora for a time. That means he received the Quora Digest, a regular email highlighting popular answers on the site. The digest emails look like this:
Because I’m a Top Writer, my answers are frequently featured in the Quora Digest. (In fact, for a while one of my answers was featured in the screenshots for the Quora appl on the Apple and Google App Stores.)
Because the Epstein Files list everyone mentioned in any email Jeffrey Epstein sent or received (Bernie Sanders is in the Epstein Files 101 times; apparently Jeffrey Epstein loved to whine about him), and Jeffrey Epstein received the Quora Digest emails, I’m listed in them.
The Internet hates nuance. People would, by and large and speaking across the left-right divide, rather be told who to love, who to hate, and what opinions they should voice rather than, you know, applying reason to their own positions. (Liberals love to laugh at conservatives for doing this, but in my experience and observation liverals are just as prone to it, or possibly more so).
Yes, I am in the Epstein Files. No, I don’t know Jeffrey Epstein, nor have I ever visited Kiddy Diddler Island. (I mean, c’mon.)
I know this is not a fashionable opinion right now, but: Folks, it’s easy to manipulate people with phony narratives and social media stories. Living in a polarized society makes this even easier, and it’s cheap to make yourself feel good with self-congratulatory “moral stands” that give you a nice hit of dopamine when other people tell you how brave and moral you are for casting out the bad people and sending rape threats to women and whatever it is the social media mob tells you to do today. In such an age, principled, fact-based attitudes are a rarity. Try to be one of those.
[Edited to add] A couple of people have asked me what point I’m trying to make here. I thought my point was evident, but apparently I wasn’t as clear as I hoped. So:
“Being in the Epstein files” does not indicate wrongdoing. There are tens of thousands of people named in the Epstein Files. Bernie Sanders is in the Epstein Files. Marilyn Monroe is named in the Epstein Files, and Jeffrey Epstein was less than ten years old when she died.
I am concerned about people doing what the DinoCon organizers did, virtue-signaling and gaining unearned publicity by excluding anyone named in the files. I strongly suspect this will keep happening; while I hope I’m wrong, I predict that over the next couple of years this will become more and more popular.
I’m concerned about it for two reasons:
It’s empty, purposeless virtue signaling. DinoCon is not keeping anyone safe; they’re playing look-at-me, I’m-so-great games. I find this kind of empty moral posturing stupid and pointless at best, actively harmful at worst. I believe this is a moral panic in the making.
More important, this empty posturing diverts attention from actual child abusers who are listed in the files. Already I’m seeing a new narrative emerging on social media: “Look, the Epstein Files are a big nothing-burger. Liberals are making a fuss over them, but Marilyn Monroe is in them! Ha ha ha, look how dumb those liberals are.”
Jeffrey Epstein was a monster. The people protecting Jeffrey Epstein’s influential, politically powerful child molesters are monsters. This is a serious crisis, arguably among the most serious threats to American governance in the last century. Let’s not play self-congratulatory virtue-signaling games with it and let’s not get sidetracked. It should be possible to hold both these ideas simultaneously: they are a serious record of deep, systemic abuse of the most vulnerable by powerful, wealthy, connected men, and also simply being named in them is not, by itself, evidence of wrongdoing.
If we want to see justice, we must be willing to evaluate the evidence critically, rationally, and thoughtfully. Yes, that requires work…but that’s the way it’s always been.
I am more active on Quora than any other social media site. I’ve been there since 2012, in which time I’ve written over 66,000 answers that have received over 1.3 billion views.
It’s no secret that the site has gone steeply downhill recently, with wave after wave of scammers and, now, ch*ld p*rn profiles growing like a cancer on the site. I recently wrote a very long answer about why that is, and how Quora’s policies and procedures basically rolled out the red carpet for people selling ch*ld p*rn (there are now a number of organized CP rings active on Quora). Quora deleted that answer, so I’m re-posting it, with expansions and addendums, here.
If you read this on Quora before it was deleted, feel free to skip to the end, where I’ve added new material.
Why is Quora allowing itself to become a spam and porn site? There are lots of real porn sites without corrupting what used to be an intelligent debate forum. Also, too much scammer spam. Why aren’t the moderators doing their job?
The moderators aren’t doing their jobs because, and I say this as someone who has interacted with many moderators and high level admins and had many lengthy conversations with them, because they cannot.
I don’t mean they can’t as in they don’t know how to…well, no, that’s not true. Some of them don’t know how to.
Sorry, this answer got really, really, really long. It’s my analysis of the many failure modes of Quora leadership and moderation based on hundreds of interactions with Quora employees, moderators, and administrators, including cofounder and CEO Adam D’Angelo, about tens of thousands of Quora scammers and spammers. It’s also based on multiple security issues and bug reports I have made to Quora, and what happened after, and on being stalked, doxxed, and harassed on quora (and having my father and my wife doxxed and harassed on Quora), and what happened after.
But you asked, so here we go.
*** CAUTION *** CAUTION *** CAUTION ***
This answer is my opinion, based on my experiences with Quora. I do not work for Quora (well, I might as well do, with all the bug reports and reports of scammers I send them, but I’m not paid for it), I have not seen Quora’s back-end code, and I don’t have any insights into Quora’s management beyond my personal interactions with Quora admins. So take this with a grain of salt.
Problem 1: Absent Leadership
Let me start at the top. I’ve met Adam D’Angelo in person twice at Quora-sponsored events. In person, he comes across as an introverted, painfully shy dude with limited or no theory of mind and no real understanding of how social media works. Stick a pin in that, we’ll come back to it in a bit.
These days, he’s an absentee landlord. He’s on the board of directors of OpenAI, and pays very little attention to Quora these days.
And yet, at the same time, I’ve talked to Quora mid-level employees who have expressed frustration that they would love to implement technical solutions to address some of the worst problems they see with scammers and spammers, but they can’t do so without sign-off from upper management, which is pretty much absent. That’s one problem. Quora is, from a leadership perspective, a rudderless ship, adrift without a captain.
Problem 2: No built-in anti abuse defenses
I run a very small Mac troubleshooting forum, and I also run half a dozen blogs. All of those sites have simple anti-abuse measures like flood control, dupe control, and username control. That means I can, for example, ban creation of certain usernames. That means, with the click of a button, I can stop this from happening:
And I can stop this from happening:
Quora can’t.
These are all user profiles that are active on Quora right now. Quora literally lacks the capability to block usernames with certain words or phrases. It was never part of the codebase from the start.
Quora also cannot do dupe control (flagging or blocking when a user posts the same word for word identical content over and over and over) or flood control (flag or block when one user posts 80 times per second, which obviously means a spambot and not a real human being).
In 1997, I ran a forum for a few years that had automated, built-in username filtering, dupe control, and flood control.
In 1997.
This is what I mean when I say that Adam D’Angelo has no understanding of how social media works. He was the CTO of Facebook, and he does not have the slightest clue how people use social media, how people interact with social media, or how people abuse social media.
Problem 3: Buggy code riddled with security holes
In December 2018, hackers penetrated Quora using significant security holes and stole the entire Quora user database. They got everything, including passwords, because Quora stored the user passwords in plain text, not encrypted, on disk.
This is Security 101. You never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever store passwords in plain text. The way every site, and operating system, stores passwords, and has since 1976, is you store passwords encrypted. When someone types a password, you encrypt it, then compare it to the encrypted password on disk to see if they are the same.
I had a TRS-80 as a kid in the 70s. It let you lock files on floppy disk with a password. It stored the password encrypted on disk so someone with a disk editor couldn’t find it.
Quora did not. Quora, a site with hundreds of millions of users, stored everyone’s password in plain text.
If that makes you deeply worried about Quora’s approach to security, you should be, because…
Problem 4: Quora’s codebase is an insecure mess
Quora has no Chief Security Officer. Quora’s codebase is riddled with security flaws, in part because they insist on writing their own code to do everything rather than using public libraries, and Quora’s developers from the earliest days onward did not know about and did not think about security. (See Problem 3. Nobody stores 100,000,000 users with plain-text passwords. Nobody.)
I have personally reported several security vulnerabilities that were actively being exploited to Quora. I’ve never heard back except for a bland “thank you for your bug report, we will pass it along to our developers.” In at least one of those cases, I saw the vulnerability being explited months after I reported it.
The vulnerabilities I reported all had to do with flaws in the way Quora handles Unicode.
Brief (I hope) technical digression about what that means: “Unicode” is a way to represent text characters. Computers were largely invented in the US and Britain, so they started out being able to understand only the uppercase and lowercase Latin alphabet, numbers, punctuation, and some special contol characters. That was it.
That means that for the first decades of the computer revolution, you could not type
Naïve
or
美丽
or
товарищ
For decades, you typed unaccented Latin characters or you typed nothing. No accented characters like the ï in naïve, no Cyrillic, sure as hell no Chinese.
Unicode was a system developed in the late 80s/early 90s to extend the old way that computers represented text, to allow for everything from accents to foreign-language alphabets to idiographic text to, later, “emoji” like 😮 and ✅.
The problem is that it had to be backward compatible with the old way to represent text or else every single computer program on earth ever written in English text would not work with the new system.
So the answer was a new way to represent text and symbols that still worked with the old system but added onto it to allow support for millions of characters, but that would still show old-fashioned characters right.
As you can imagine, Unicode is massively complex. Massively. Like unbelievably bogglingly complex.
Lots of people have written free open-source libraries for handling, storing, retrieving, and displaying Unicode. Quora refused to use them.
Instead, Quora wrote its own Unicode handling software. The thing about Unicode is that some characters are just represented by one-byte numbers (the uppercase letter A is represented by the number 97, or 61 in computer hexadecimal (base-16) numbers) and some are represented by two bytes (the lowercase a with a grave accent, à, is represented in Unicode as U+00E0), and some characters are represented as a list of instructions (basically “draw this letter and make these marks over it). Each mark is represented by a series of numbers.
That means that some Unicode combinations are illegal, not allowed, they don’t produce anything. These are called “invalid character sequences.” Invalid sequences are supposed to be detected and print as �.
Quora doesn’t do this. Because of bugs in how Quora handles Unicode, some invalid character sequences aren’t detected as being invalid. This is how trolls can create usernames that do not show up on Quora and can’t be clicked. If you see a troll answer where the name of the person who wrote the answer is just a blank, there’s nothing there, the troll is exploiting a flaw in Quora’s home-grown Unicode.
Worse, you can smuggle commands to Quora’s software by packaging the commands inside of invalid Unicode. This is similar to SQL injection but instead of wrapping the command in quote marks or SQL comment strings you wrap the commands in broken Unicode.
I’ve reported two different Unicode injection vulnerabilities to Quora. One of them was still actively being abused months later.
Problem 5: Quora does not take security or abuse seriously, and so Quora has become one of the favorite places for scammers and hackers on the Internet
Right now, Quora is struggling with a massive, staggering influx of people selling child abuse images.
I typically report anywhere from 100 to 300 or more romance scam and child abuse accounts to Quora every single day. I log and track every account I report. Yesterday I reported 164 accounts. 33 of those were offering child abuse images for sale, 23 were offering preteen child abuse images for sale, and 3 were offering toddler child abuse images for sale. I spend about an hour a day doing it and it makes me sick to my stomach but I cannot, I cannot stop doing it. I’ve tried. I just…I cannot see it and not do anything.
There is a site called Black Hat World. It is a site where scammers, spammers, computer virus distributors, ransomware distributors, child abuse sellers, and other scum and vermin get together to talk about ways to make the world a shittier place.
I sometimes read Black Hat World. They talk about Quora a lot on Black Hat World. They exchange tips and techniques for running scams and selling child abuse images on Quora. There are at least four organized child abuse rings operating on Quora right now [edit: five, I’ve found another], in addition to all the various random independent child abusers running on Quora.
Black Hat World loves Quora because of its combination of poor security, weak or nonexistent automated controls, and lax, permissive moderation. There are tutorials on Black Hat World for scammers and spammers wanting to do their thing on Quora. Actual step by step tutorials.
This all started because of this woman:
Well, not directly because of her, it wasn’t her fault.
This is Paige Spiranac.
Ms. Spiranac is a pro golfer and a model. Almost exactly two years ago, a romance scammer arrived on Quora and used stolen photos of Ms. Spiranac to run his romance scams.
I saw the account and reported it to Quora.
Nothing happened.
I reported it again.
Nothing happened.
I reported it a total of eleven times.
Nothing happened.
I emailed Ms. Spiranac’s agent and said, “hey, just so you know, your client’s identity has been stolen and her photo is being used as part of a romance scam operation on a social media site called Quora, here’s the profile that is using her photo.”
The next day I got a very polite email from Octagon Agency, the company representing her at the time, thanking me for my email. The day after that, the scam account was taken down, I assume because Ms. Spiranac sent Quora a legal DMCA takedown order.
But it was too little too late.
The scammer running the account ran to Black Hat World and was like “hey, everyone, there’s this site called Quora that permits romance scammers!” and the floodgates opened.
Now here’s the thing:
Any site that allows romance scammers will get flooded with romance scammers, obviously. But as the concentration of romance scammers rises, pretty soon there are tons of scammers competing for the same pool of lonely, gullible victims.
So the scammers start specializing. A new wave of scammers arrives who try to scam people with very specific tastes. They’ll pretend to be trans women to appeal to trans chasers. They’ll pretend to be BDSM dominants to try to scam thirsty, gullible subbies. They’ll pretend to be foot fetishists to appeal to people with foot fetishes.
If that second wave goes unchecked, then the third wave arrives, people who pretend to be underage children in order to appeal to…well, you know.
If that third wave goes unchecked, the child abuse rings are like “oh my God this site permits romance scammers that pretend to be children, we have free reign” and the fourth wave is people selling child abuse images.
This is exactly what played out on Quora.
It took about eighteen months between that one scammer going to Black Hat World and saying “hey everyone, run your scams on Quora” and the child abusers arriving in force.
There’s a lesson here: If you run a social media site, and if you do not crack down immediately and hard at the first sign of romance scammers, you will, you will attract child abusers. It’s inevitable.
At this point, Quora cannot keep up. Of the four child abuse rings I’ve seen here, each makes on average about 20 new profiles a day. You can tell who they are because they all use the same contact information for purchasing their child abuse images. You can tell they’re using bots because they all use word for word identical profiles, the same usernames, and the same images over and over again.
Remember Point 2: No built-in anti-abuse measures. Quora has no automated way to detect identical profiles, nor to block or flag based on certain usernames or certain strings in the profile descriptions. That means Quora moderators are having to do manual searches.
And they’re bad at it. Say a child abuse ring uses the name “Tina.” (This is an example; to my knowledge, they don’t.) They’ll use a bot to create identical profiles over and over. They might, for example, be
Quora moderation will ban Tina-1209 and Tina-1211 but leave the others, because you have to do a hand search to find the others and it’s tedious.
That leads to two more problems:
Problem 6: Quora’s back end tools are badly broken
I’ll give you an example:
On my own Quora space, I will often write about the child abuse profiles I report to Quora. These posts often get deleted by Quora moderation.
If Quora would delete child abuse profiles as aggressively as it deletes Spaces posts about child abuse on Quora, we wouldn’t be here, but moving on:
When Quora moderation deletes a post in a Space, when I appeal, there’s a little dance I have to do.
Quora will usually send an answer that says “We cannot undelete this content because a Spaces admin deleted it.”
Then I send back “no, you deleted it, look at this” with a screenshot that clearly says Quora deleted the post.
Then I get an answer that says “we’re so sorry, our back-end administration tool shows that you deleted the post, it’s a bug in our moderation tools, we will undelete it” and they fix it.
I’ve done this over. And over. And over. And over.
They know there’s a bug in their moderation software, one that wrongly displays to Quora moderators that a Spaces post that was deleted by Quora was actually deleted by a Space admin.
You have to keep reminding them about this bug over and over because different employees handle the appeals and each employee doesn’t know about the bug so you have to tell them “look closer, there’s a bug in your software” and they’re like “Oh! Look at that, you’re right!”
They have never fixed the bug.
They have never trained their staff that the bug exists.
Every time, you’re starting from scratch because this poor training means Quora has no institutional memory of the flaws and bugs in their own site administration software.
This same sloppy, shoddy approach to their back-end tooling exists at every level of the Quora stack from top to bottom.
For example, a few days ago I went through another little dance with Quora moderation. I had an answer deleted for spam. Then I appealed, and it was undeleted. Minutes later, it was deleted again.
10:36: I got an email saying they’d looked at the answer and decided it wasn’t spam. 10:38: They undeleted it. 11:03: They deleted it again.
I appealed again and it was undeleted again. This morning, it was deleted again.
Quora’s tools have no provision for a human moderator saying “Quora moderation bot, we’ve looked at this answer, it’s fine.”
That costs Quora money, because every time this happens, a Quora moderator has to stop what he’s doing, check the answer again, and undelete it again.
There are a ton of other, more subtle flaws, too.
After Quora deletes a child abuse profile, they sometimes delete the profile description, which usually contains an address to buy child abuse images, and sometimes they do not; the profile will stay deleted by the profile description advertising child abuse images for sale, and the address to buy them, will remain.
I asked a Quora admin about this. I got a replay telling me it was a problem in their moderation tool and they’re “aware of it and working on it.”
What’s worse is that they never delete the profile Credentials, so the child abuse rings have learned to put the ads for child abuse images inside the credentials, where they remain visible even if the profile is banned.
I wrote a rather angry email to Quora admins about this and here’s what I got back:
Here’s the thing:
This is wrong. This is not correct. You do not have to visit the deleted profile by a direct link to see this. The screenshot above is not a direct link to the profile. A deleted profile’s credentials remain visible in countless places through Quora, including in other users’ Followers and Following lists.
Quora’s own admins and moderators DO NOT KNOW HOW QUORA OPERATES.
I don’t believe this Quora employee was trying to lie to me. I believe this Quora employee honestly, seriously doesn’t understand how Quora’s software works.
Problem 7: Quora’s moderators are incurious and not proactive, probably because they’re overworked and underpaid
Say you report a profile like Keanu-Reeves-359 for impersonation.
Quora admins will delete it. What they will not do is say “oh, if there’s a fake Keanu Reeves #359, I wonder if there is a fake Keanu Reeves #358. And a fake Keanu Reeves #357. And a fake Keanu Reeves #356.”
Nope. They will delete Keanu Reeves #359 and move on.
This is especially bad with the child abuse profiles.
If you report two profiles, one a child abuse profile that is using the name Tina-1208 and another, created a few milliseconds later and identical to it called Tina-1209, they won’t go “huh, a bot is making child abuse profiles one right after the other like a machine gun. I better look at Tina-1207 and Tina-1210, too.”
Nope.
They also don’t stop and ask themselves what profile names mean if they aren’t in English.
I reported this troll profile 7 times. The first time I reported it, it was banned a few hours later. I reported it six more times after it was banned because, well, see for yourself:
Quora policy forbids hate speech in usernames. When a profile whose username contains hate speech is banned, Quora is supposed to delete the username as well.
Which they usually do. If the username is English.
Six more times I reported this profile, explaining what the username means in English. Six more times they did nothing.
Why did I keep reporting it after it was banned?
Finally, finally, after seven reports, finally, after I emailed my Quora contact directly with a screenshot of the user profile AND a screenshot of Google Translate, finally Quora removed the username:
Quora is totally fine with a username “We Must Exterminate the Jews”…as long as it is not in English.
These problems, broken tools and incurious admins, arise from the next problem:
Problem 8: Quora has no money for, or apparently interest in, paying moderators, hiring developers, or fixing the toolchain
Quora started out with no revenue model. When Quora was first founded, it was pitched to investors as a site that would collect and distill human knowledge and make it searchable.
In 2019, it had a valuation of $2 billion.
Then ChatGPT came along and overnight iQuora lost three-quarters of its valuation, from $2 billion to $500 million, because investors were like “why would someone ask Quora if they can ask ChatGPT?”
That’s why Adam D’Angelo pivoted to AI and why he now sits on the board of OpenAI. It’s why Quora is a rudderless ship.
In 2021 or thereabouts, Quora started to run out of money. With the advent of LLMs, the venture capitalists didn’t see the value in Quora anymore. Its valuation collapsed by 75%. The VCs closed the money spigots and Quora was left to sink or swim on its own.
Quora responded by…
…firing the moderation team.
Adam is pitching an AI moderation bot for sale to other social media sites.
This AI moderation bot cannot look at usernames and ban based on users calling themselves Keanu Reeves or Elon Musk.
This AI moderation bot cannot say “this Telegram username is associated with a seller of child abuse images so I will flag or delete posts where this Telegram username appears.”
This AI moderation bot cannot automatically spot and ban profiles called “Fuck All N—-rs.”
Quora keeps trying to train their AI moderation bot to spot things like fake Keanu Reeves profiles or child abuse profiles using LLMs or whatever because once you’ve scaled to hundreds of millions of people and billions of posts, it becomes difficult to add basic features like flood control or username filtering after the fact.
They could do it, but it would be expensive, so they’re left trying to fine-tune their recipe for chicken cordon bleu while the entire kitchen burns down around them.
I’ve had so many conversations about the romance scam problem and the child abuse problem with everyone from frontline Quora employees to high-level Quora admins and I 100% believe that nobody, nobody at Quora, nobody understands the scale of the problem, nor how hard it is to get rid of these people once they’ve established a presence.
I actually have more to say, there are at least three more points in my head I could make including a significant worldview issue on the part of Mr. D’Angelo, but I’ve already spent hours on this answer and it’s way, way longer than a Quora answer should be.
If you’ve read this far, congratulations! Welcome to my world. As a user who genuinely loves Quora, it’s disheartening and kind of sickening.
I do love Quora. Quora’s been good to me. I’ve met so many people who have become personal friends in the real world outside Quora. I’ve met a lover and co-author here.
But it’s getting harder and harder to stay. I reported a string of profiles selling child abuse images of toddlers—toddlers!—yesterday and it made me want to throw up. When I was done I had to leave the house and go to a coffee shop to get the stain out of my head. It’s wearing me down and I still can’t stop, because if I’m not reporting these, who is?
tl;dr: Quora was founded by someone who doesn’t understand computer security or social media. Quora has never, ever been proactive about preventing abuse. As a result, Quora never implemented the most basic front-line security or anti-abuse measures, measures that were available in free open-source software in 1997, and now lacks the resources to address the problem.
Quora’s own employees also don’t understand Quora itself, their own software, or the scale of the problem in front of them.
I’ve saved this post. In the event Quora deletes it, which I put at about a 50/50 chance, I will make it available on my blog.
So that’s the Quora answer.
After I posted this, it was deleted by Quora admins, then undeleted, then deleted, then undeleted, then deleted again. As I type this right now, it’s still deleted, but I’ve filed another appeal so it will be interesting to see if it gets undeleted again.
Whilst it was available, several folks asked if I would expand on the part where I said I have more points to make, so here they are:
Problem 9: Quora’s algorithm is broken
Like most social media sites, every Quora user sees a different feed. There’s too much content to show anyone the firehose directly, so the Quora algorithm listens to your interactions to learn what content you want to see. For example, if you downvote content, Quora tries to show you less of that kind of content. If you upvote content, Quora interprets that to mean you would like to see more like that. The more you interact, the more Quora tunes your feed.
Trouble is, Quora sometimes gets its wires crossed.
Quora interprets downvoting and muting as negative signals, and commenting and upvoting as positive signals. But bizarrely, it interprets using the Report feature to report users or content as a positive signal.
If you report lots of romance scammers, you start to see more and more romance scammers. If you report spammers, you see more spammers.
Even worse, Quora sends customized “digests” in your email. I get a digest full of stuff that Quora thinks I might like to see in email every day. Usually it’s full of answers on topics like science or linguistics or computers or math.
Lately it’s been full of romance scammers.
I want you to take a step back and let the magnitude of that sink in. Quora sends out romance scam content in emailed digests. Today’s digest included nine pieces of content. Three of them were romance scam posts.
Problem 10: Quora is remarkably tolerant of sexual abuse
Amazon AWS is one of the largest Web hosts and storage engines on the planet. A staggering amount of content, including Quora itself, runs on AWS.
Whatever you may think of Amazon (and there’s plenty to dislike about Amazon), Amazon is fanatical about dealing with ch*ld p*rn. Amazon despises child abuse.
Amazon donates a tremendous amount of money, millions a year, to support the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Amazon maintains an internal team, separate from their normal abuse team, to deal solely with reports of child sexual abuse on their networks.
Amazon, as a matter of policy, logs and tracks every single child abuse report it receives. This information, again as a matter of policy, is forwarded to Amazon contacts within the FBI, and to NCMEC.
Amazon maintains a database of child abusers, and hashes of child abuse images, which it makes available to law enforcement.
Amazon does not fuck around when it comes to child abuse. They have an ultra-strict policy, and they will strike down with great vengeance and furious anger anyone who uses their network for child sexual abuse. Hosting CP on Amazon is like calling down a targeted missile strike on your own location.
Quora, which is hosted on Amazon AWS…does not.
If you create a profile, or five profiles, or a hundred and fifty profiles, on Quora offering child sex abuse materials for sale, Quora will (well, I say will, Quora might) ban your account. It will not do anything beyond that.
The sellers of child abuse materials on Quora know that they need fear no repercussions beyond having their accounts banned…and maybe not even that. They operate brazenly and boldly on Quora, even posting profiles that literally say “CP for sale here, all ages available!”, because they know nothing will happen to them.
Why the pizza emoji? The slice of pizza emoji has become something of a universal signifier of those selling child abuse images. CP: Cheese Pizza. CP: Ch*ld P*rn. Get it?
How did Quora get here? What systemic failures led Quora to be the Internet’s hotspot for romance scammers and ch*ld p*rnographers?
Problem 11: Ayn Rand
Adam D’Angelo, Quora’s cofounder and absentee CEO, is the kind of Big-L Libertarian who mainlines Ayn Rand directly into his veins.
He’s one of those techbro Libertarians who believes, I mean really truly believes, that the solution to bad speech is more speech, as if more speech is a magic wand that somehow magically erases bad actors, scammers, spammers and ch*ld p*rnographers.
His fundamental worldview is one where acting against any speech, even “we have pictures of toddelers being raped and would you like to buy them?”, is anethema.
I believe this is why Quora has no built-in mechanisms to prevent any Tom , Dick, and Harry from creating an account called “Elon Musk” and putting up posts offering free Bitcoin if you just deposit money into an account to, you know, pay for “fees.” It’s why you can create an account called Keanu Reeves or Sandra Bullock and the system will just let you do it, because hey, we wouldn’t want to risk the real Keanu Reeves making an account and running into some kind of barrier, right? It’s why there are thousands of fake Keanu Reeves and thousands of fake Elon Musks and so on, and why Quora’s moderation, what’s left of it, is purely reactive and not proactive.
The problem is, we’ve seen over and over and over again that this approach does not work. It’s empirically not true. But it’s a religious idea among a certain kind of techbro; they want it to be true, so they treat it as Revealed Gospel, never to be questioned.
I just sent a very long email to a contact I have at Quora admin, with a cc to Quora’s legal team and the founder/CEO’s personal email address.
I suppose I should have known it was coming. In January od 2023, almost exactly two years ago, I saw my first romance scam account on Quora. It used a photo of golfer and model Paige Spiranac to try to separate lonely men from their money. I reported the profile to Quora moderation 11 times, without any result, so finally, on January 22, 2023, I emailed Ms. Spiranac’s agent. I received a polite reply on January 23, and the bogus profile was banned on January 25, so I assume Ms. Spiranac’s team sent a DMCA takedown.
Too little, too late. The message came through loud and clear: “Quora has weak moderation that is tolerant of romance scammers.”
The floodgates opened. Today, Quora is the Internet’s Ground Zero for romance scammers; there are tens of tousands of fake profiles. I report every one I encounter. A few months back, Quora admins asked me to stop reporting them one at a time, so now I note the profile URLs and report them all in one go at the end of the day, typically 200-300 a day.
Universal law of social media:
Every site that doesn’t take action against romance scammers inevitably becomes a ch*ld p*rn site.
It happens in stages.
First, a romance scammer discovers a site. He (almost all romance scammers are “he”) sets up a profile. It doesn’t get banned. He tells his buddies, who also set up scam profiles. Word spreads.
Pretty soon, there’s a huge number of romance scammers, all fighting for the same pool of lonely, gullible marks.
They start “sniping:” one scammer will start commenting on other scammers’ profiles, trying to cut in on marks who respond to scam posts. They start angling for niche marks rather than shotgunning a general approach: some will pretend to be trans women, some will pretend to be heavy women to try to attract “chubby chaser” marks; some will pretend to be BDSM dommes, looking for kinky marks.
Then come the ones using stolen photos of underage children.
If those profiles remain without getting banned immediately, that sends a signal to the ch*ld p*rn community: This site is tolerant of exploitation of minors.
That’s when they move in: people offering CP/CSAM images for sale. They use all kinds of euphemisms: “cheese pizza” (CP), “hot yummy pizza images.”
At first, these are individual low-level sellers. If these accounts remain without being banned, then the organized CP rings move in.
That’s the background.
This morning, I set a lengthy email to my contact in Quora administration. I sent a cc to Quora’s legal team and to Quora’s CEO.
In the past few weeks, the number of profiles openly advertising CP for sale has skyrocketed. Yesterday, I found three organized CP rings operating scores of profiles on Quora.
I call these CP rings the “Evelyn ring,” the “Mornay Ivan” ring, and the “Purple Knott” ring, because of the profile names and the Telegram addresses they use. Out of respect to the victims whose images are being exploited, I’ve pixelated and blacked out the images of the victims; the CP profiles don’t.
The “Evelyn” ring:
The “Mornay Ivan” ring:
The “Purple Knott” ring, which seems to specialize in child bestiality:
Every day I report these. Every day Quora bans most (not all) the accounts I report. Every day there are more. Even though these rings create identical profiles with identical content.
Being stalked on Quora didn’t put me off the site. Getting death threats on Quora didn’t put me off the site. Being doxxed on Quora didn’t put me off the site. Having my content plagiarized didn’t put me off the site. This? This might put me off the site.
I got called for jury duty a few months back, and ended up seated for voir dire for a case that quite frankly scared the shit out of me. I wasn’t selected, something I’m still not sure if I’m relieved or disappointed about, but man, there’s no way the prosecution would ever have allowed me within a thousand feet of that jury.
I have never served on a jury. I’ve been called many times, of course, but it’s always gone the same way. “Number 17, what do you do for a living?” “Well, I’m a computer programmer, and I also—” “Thank you, Number 17, you’re dismissed.” That’s happened in Florida, Georgia, and Oregon.
I didnd’t say that this time. I haven’t done development work in far too long. When I showed up, they gave us these fluorescent nametags to wear, because apparently at some point in the past a juror seated at a trial went to a restaurant for lunch, the prosecutors sat down nearby, and proceded to talk about the case unaware a juror sat next to them, and caused an expensive mistrial.
I knew something weird was up when they called us for voir dire. They’d been calling people out of the pool room all morning, but this time, they called twice as many potential jurors than normal, 48 of us. So many of us that we couldn’t all fit in the space reserved for potential jurors.
The prosecution talked to us for a while. “This is a rape case,” she said. “I’m going to ask you all a list of questions. You’re required to answer honestly. Has anyone here ever been physically abused by a romantic partner?”
I and a handful of other people raised our hands.
Then it got weird.
“Has anyone here ever heard the expression ‘junkies lie’?” she said. “Are you able to believe the testimony of a victim even if you’re aware the victim is addicted to drugs like heroin?”
“Do you believe that people suffering from mental illness are trustworthy? Would you be able to believe someone’s testimony even if you knew she had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder?”
“Would you be able to believe the testimony of a victim even if you knew she had made false accusations in the past?”
Then it got really weird.
“Suppose a victim recanted her testimony and told you that she had not been assaulted. Would you be able to look at her original testimony with an open mind?”
“Would you automatically assume that the defendant were not guilty if the victim refused to testify against him during the trial?”
“If the victim testified for the defense to say that she didn’t think he should be convicted, would you still be able to convict?”
Then she dropped a doozy:
“Do you accept that in the court system in Oregon, the job of determining guilt or innocence is separate from the job of passing sentence? If you personally felt that a defendant was guilty, but you believed the defendant was facing a sentence you considered harsh or undeserved, would you still be able to return a verdict of ‘guilty,’ knowing that deciding on a sentence was the judge’s job, not yours?”
The defense attorney had a much shorter list of questions, but one of them really jumped out at me:
“Does anyone here believe that men can abuse women, but it is impossible for a woman to abuse a man?”
It took quite a long time for the two sides to choose twelve people for the jury. I was not, as you might imagine, one of them. I suspect saying “yes” to “have you been physically abused by a romantic partner” did me before the process even got started.
I have no idea how that case panned out or what happened to the defendant, but I have to say if I’d been on the jury, I’d’ve quite likely found it very hard to convict him, given only what I know from the prosecutor during voir dire.
My Talespinner and I are just putting the finishing touches on a book we co-authored together with her other boyfriend, an anthology of supernatural erotica called Spectres.
This isn’t actually an essay about that, it’s an essay about consent, agency, and the right to say meh. Hang on, I’m getting there.
One of the stories (actually more of a novella; Spectres is a chonky book) centers on an archaeologist working at a dig site in Türkiye who unearths a Hittite artifact that, spoiler, contains the soul of a priestess of Šauška, the Hittite goddess of sex and healing. Shenanigans happen, she seduces a grad student named Sarah, they start a weird D/s relationship, and near the end of the story it’s implied that she may offer Sarah’s sexual favors to another of her lovers…something Sarah consents to.
I will have ARCs soon. Hit me up if you want a copy!
So. A few days ago I saw a post on social media to the extent of “Remember, if the consent is not enthusiastic, it’s rape.” And, of course, that post had the usual performative affirmations: upvotes, replies like “Yes! This!” and “Right!”
It kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Not just the performative virtue-signaling aspect of the responses, but the post itself.
Don’t get me wrong, I get where it’s coming from. If you wheedle, beg, pressure, coerce, whine, cajole, browbeat, bulldoze, blandish, exhort, compel, or otherwise arm-twist someone into shagging you, that’s not really consent. Consent, to be valid, must be free, informed, and uncoerced.
But here’s the thing:
Consent can be unenthusiastic without being coerced.
We like to draw hard lines. We like to put everything and everyone in neat, tidy boxes. But real life is messy and chaotic and it sometimes requires thought and judgment rather than platitudes and rules.
I’ve consented to sex unenthusiastically. I’ve agreed to do things I don’t particularly enjoy, because my lovers really really wanted to do them. That isn’t rape.
Yes, I know, I know, the person who posted on social media was (probably) trying, in a clumsy way, to say that sex without uncoerced consent is rape. And that’s true, but it’s not what she said.
Look, I get it. Enthusiastic sex between participants who are really into it is good. But you know what? There are times when one person is more into it than another, and that’s okay.
I have the right to say yes even to things I’m not overjoyed about.
I’m not a masochist. I don’t enjoy pain. I do enjoy making my lovers happy, and so I have freely, without coercion, consented to be spanked, cropped, caned, have needles stuck in me, and bottom for knife play. My body, my choice…and that means I have the right to choose things I’m not really into for the sake of a lover who is.
I am not, and I know there will probably be people who push back on this, but I am not a victim of a sexual assault when I say yes to something that I know in advance is not particularly going to crank my motor. I have the right to say yes to sex I am meh about.
In fact, thad this’ll really bake your noodle, not only do I have the right to say yes to sex I’m meh about, I think that under many circumstances it’s a good thing to do so.
We human beings are terrible at predicting in advance how we will respond to unfamiliar things. I have said yes to sex I was sure I’d enjoy and discovered after the fact that I didn’t like it at all and will never do it again. My consent was not violated.
I’ve said yes to things that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like in order to please a partner, and then discovered that, wow, it really turned me on. My consent was not violated.
Part of having agency means, I believe, having the right to agree to do things I’m not enthusiastic about doing. I may express that thus-and-such isn’t really likely to float my banana, but I can still choose to do it anway.
So. Back to Spectres.
Why would our character agree to have sex with someone she doesn’t want to have sex with and wouldn’t choose as a lover? Because it’s not about him. It’s about her relationship with the protagonist; it’s her way of showing that she is willing to give herself to her lover in that way, by consenting to allow her lover to choose another person for her to have sex with.
I’ve done that in real life, by the way; consented to have sex with someone I wouldnn’t otherwise choose to have sex with because another lover told me to. If you play with D/s, that’s a very powerful form of submission. (And isn’t that what D/s is, for a lot of us? Being willing to do things that another person tells us to do, things we wouldn’t otherwise do, because we’ve chosen to surrender power?)
Look, a lot of folks don’t play this way, and that’s fine. Part of what makes me willing to play this way is the fact that I’m not sexually attracted to people I don’t already have an emotional connection with, so it pushes my buttons in a big way, and that’s where the power, the kick, comes from.
If you don’t understand that, hey, that’s fine. You absolutely don’t need to play that way. The point I’m making here is not that you should run out and do things you don’t want to do because a lover tells you to; the point I’m making here is that it’s absolutely possible to give free, uncoerced consent that is not enthusiastic, to sex you know you’re not likely to enjoy particularly…and that isn’t automatically rape.
The problem with morals that fit conveniently in one Tweet or on a bumper sticker is that people are more complex than bumper-sticker morality. Trying to reduce human ethics to bumper-sticker slogans causes harm.
You personally don’t need to embrace the meh to acknowledge that others can, if they choose.
In which Franklin makes everyone on all sides of the political divide angry
Okay, so. Some short while ago, a question floated through my Quora feed: Should men’s rights be more talked about, yes or no?
The thing about this question is it does not, and cannot, have a simple yes or no answer, because “rights” are not one thing. But even talking about talking about men’s rights tends to get people’s backs up. I will try to be as evenhanded as possible, in full understanding that I should be able to make everyone very angry indeed.
Let’s start here: The things people talk about when they talk about “rights,” especially in the context of systemic oppression, fall into two camps: rights everybody should have, and rights nobody should have. Conflating these things eradicates nuance and causes people to talk past each other.
Before I go any further, fair warning: Whataboutism, sealioning, and oppression Olympics in the comments will be terminated with extreme prejudice.
The most common objection I hear to any discussion about men’s rights is some variant of “men already control most of the world’s wealth, men are overrepresented in government and the upper tiers of corporations, men wield disproportionate power, the last thing on earth men need is more rights.”
That’s good sound bite activism, but it’s also a fetid, steaming pile of bullshit that’s irrelevant to any thoughtful discussion of men’s rights.
Yes, it is unquestionably true that men have all these advantages. We live in societies that overwhelmingly advantage men, absolutely. Yes, this is undeniable. Conservative men in the back who are getting pissed off because I said that, sit down. You hold tremendous advantages over women. American society gives you breaks that women don’t have. That’s just a fact.
Liberals, wait your turn, I’ll piss you off in a minute.
Yes, men are advantaged. Obviously. And that has fuckall to do with men’s rights, because those advantages are not rights. No reasonable person is saying that men should have more of that, because those are advantages nobody should have merely because they were born with a certain configuration of genitals.
When I worked as a designer, there was a ha-ha-only-serious notajoke common in the industry: “This would be a wonderful job if it weren’t for the clients.”
There’s a similar problem with men’s rights: it would be a wonderful conversation if it weren’t for the men having it.
Men’s rights activists (at least in the US; I don’t see this nearly as much in Europe) include some of the most terrible people you will ever find outside a Khmer Rouge death squad. They use “men’s rights” as a platform to bang on about how much they hate women and whine about how women’s liberation ruined the world because now they can’t find a nice passive sperm receptacle who will fuck them and make them a sandwich. I mean, they’re so awful, malignant narcissists look at MRAs and say “my god, there goes a bunch of toxic self-obsessed losers and no mistake.”
But beneath the self-indulgent whining, they do, and I have to grit my teeth to type this, they do have some legitimate points.
Like, for example, and this is the bit where having alienated a bunch of conservative men, I’ll piss off a bunch of liberals: Abuse of men by women, physical and emotional, is way, way, way, way, way, way more common than most people believe.
Like, we live in a society that trivializes, dismisses, and denies abuse of men by women—so much so that many people actually support abusive women.
Like, we live in a society that mocks male abuse survivors. I’ve experienced this myself.
Like, there are in fact double standards about men who sexually abuse young girls and women who sexually abuse young boys; women who sexually abuse underage victims consistently receive lighter penalties, according to peer-reviewed studies.
Like, men are more likely to die by suicide than women. Like, men are disproportionately victims of violence, though to be honest that’s a bit of an own goal because we’re more likely to be perpetrators of violence as well.
Ideally, conversations about rights are independent of the identity of the person having them. All rights—men’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, Black rights, trans rights, religious rights—are human rights.
In practice, we cannot always frame the conversation that way, because patterns of institutional oppression mean that the abrogation of human rights always, always affects some groups of people more than others. This is why “all lives matter” and “feminism should be humanism” fail. (Well, one of the reasons, anyway; another is they’re disengenuous claptrap, but even assuming they were put forward in good faith, they’d still fail.)
It’s reasonable to pay more attention to the house that’s burning than the one that is not. It’s reasonable to pay more attention to the groups that are more disenfranchised than the ones that have more structural power.
Having said that, the lens with which we look at rights should always start with, is this something everyone should have? That’s a good first-pass filter to separate rights from privileges.
Should everyone have the right to be free of violence and abuse in their intimate relationships? Yes. Obviously.
Does intimate partner abuse disproportionately affect women? Yes. Obviously,
Does that make it okay to declare intimate partner abuse of men a non-issue? No. Obviously not. (Well, you’d think obviously not, but…)
People abuse and people are abused. Men abuse women. Women abuse men. Women abuse women. Men abuse men. We need to acknowledge that and we need to take it all seriously. “More women suffer so it’s okay if men suffer” is fucking monstrous and anyone who plays oppression Olympics that way does not deserve a fucking seat amongst decent human beings, and that’s a fucking hill I will die on.
At the same time, men, listen up.
Yes, it’s true that men can be drafted and women can’t, and it’s totally reasonable to frame this as an issue of men’s rights…
…but here’s the thing. There are 535 people in Congress and 384 of them are men, so please, for the love of God, stop yapping that this is a problem women need to fix. Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ.
Men passed those laws. Not women. Men hold the balance of power in Congress. Not women. The president is a man, not a woman. Shut your yaps about “I wOn’T sUpPoRt WoMeN’s RiGhTs UnTiL tHe WoMeN tAkE a StAnD aGaInSt ThE dRaFt.” Men, not women, created that problem. Men, not women, have the power to change it.
Same goes for men being more likely to die by violence than women. Yeah, we are…
…at the hands, overwhelmingly, of other men. How do you expect women to fix this, exactly?
A lot of the problems MRAs yap about can be traced directly to toxic masculinity, which is overwhelmingly those beliefs and attitudes held by men that are harmful to men. Don’t shove a stick in your own bicycle wheel and whine about what women did to you, my brother.
Alllllll that being said:
Society is fucked up and unequal and advantages some people over others, and yeah on balance men have a lot of things better than women do, but privilege is intersectional and there are places men are disadvantaged and yeah, if we’re talking about groups that are disadvantaged by structural social institutions we need to talk about places that happens to men too, and if that hurts your liberal fee-fees maybe it’s time to go take some remedial courses in basic human empathy and come back when you’ve grokked the notion that systemic harm is always wrong, even when it hurts people who are otherwise advantaged.
And now that I’ve pissed everyone off, I will say good day.
Trigger warning: Stalking, graphic death and rape threats, doxxing, threats of swatting, impersonation
I’ve been putting off writing this for a while now, because it involves dredging deep into some incredibly ugly stuff.
Most of you know that I’ve been stalked for years by a stalker (or stalkers) who has created fake social media profiles in my name to harass other people, and sent explicit, violent rape and death threats to me, my family, my friends, and those who follow me on social media.
This person, or these people, have made repeated rape and death threats directed at me, my wife, my father, and people who have expressed support for me or been rumored to be connected somehow with me online. They’ve sent death threats containing photographs of my partners. They’ve doxxed my family and partners.
The harassment has escalated over the past three years, as the rape and death threats have become more frequent, more violent, and more graphic. The stalker has escalated to threats of swatting (phoning fake tips to the police to have SWAT teams sent to the homes of the target). My websites have been DDoSed.
Last December, as I was leaving for Florida to help care for my mom, who was in the final stages of terminal cancer, I had an unexpected and rather uncomfortable conversation with Portland PD about an email I’d supposedly sent them saying I was stockpiling guns and the voices were telling me to murder my wife.
Fortunately, I have been documenting and reporting the stalking, rape and death threats, and harassment as it’s happened. The nature of the conversation changed once they pulled up the previous police reports and realized this was part of an ongoing pattern of harassment.
So how did we get here? And what does this have to do with polyamory?
Propaganda and the Poly Scene
So how did we get here? And what does this have to do with polyamory?
My first inkling something weird was going on came when a number of different people, some of whom I hadn’t spoken to in years, all messaged me to say “Do you know someone named Louisa Leontiades? She says she’s a journalist and she’s asking questions about you.” A few of those people sent me screenshots of messages or emails they’d received:
Louisa is a client of a former partner. After the relationship with that former partner ended, Louisa started messaging pretty much every female-presenting person who’d ever interacted with me online, going back through this very blog for decades, looking for women willing to dish dirt.
Next thing I know, somehow there are more “exes” that are accusing me of having “abused” them than the total number of people I’ve ever dated. Few forms of gaslighting are more head-twisty than someone you’ve never dated, never talked about dating, never wanted to date, never had sex with, never talked about having sex with, and never wanted to have sex with telling all and sundry about how you abused her when you were “together.” For a while, I quite literally thought I was going insane.
These “survivor stories,” as Louisa calls them, tended to the bizarre (like the woman who I’ve never been sexually or romantically connected with and never been in the same room with except in passing at a party claiming I abused her by flirting with someone else in front of her), toward the utterly untrue (a former partner claiming I “got her into” BDSM and that a 25-year-old is “too young to consent” to BDSM, when in fact she was interested in BDSM long before we ever met, and the fact her ex-husband wasn’t interested in BDSM was one of the reasons she divorced him), and the technically kind of true if you squint hard enough (my ex-wife claiming she was an “abuse victim” because I yelled at her on the phone once—which did happen—but declining to mention that it happened after we’d separated, when she broke into my house one night while I was out of town, stole a bunch of stuff like consumer electronics, then sold it to buy a new laptop).
As a side note, there’s a lesson here in how to spot the difference between journalism and a smear campaign. If a journalist hears “he yelled at me once on the phone,” he or she will ask followup questions: “Did this sort of thing happen often? What happened?” Ethical journalists also disclose personal or financial connections with the stories they cover.
My goal is not to go through all the rather strange “survivor stories” here. I may end up doing that at some future point, but that’s not the point of this blog post.
Right now, I’m here about the aftermath of these weird, wordy-but-vague accusations, what it says about the way many people see “social justice” as a tool of bullying and control, and how the poly scene’s support for “social justice” led directly to a barrage of rape and death threats against a whole bunch of other people beyond just me.
Louisa published these “survivor stories” from exes and non-exes with results you might predict: the Internet Hate Machine™ cranked up into full gear, I had to lock down comments on my blog because random strangers started posting death threats, I lost friends.
With all the various contradictory stories (“Franklin dated someone ten years younger than he was, he’s obviously an abuser,” “Franklin refused to date me because I’m younger than he is, he’s obviously ageist”), they became a sort of Rorschach test, with different people seeing different things in them. It’s kind of a Gish gallop of accusations.
One dude on social media wrote that I was clearly a bad person, because it was plain to him that I’d written the stories myself as a sort of humblebragging, since the theme to a lot of them is “I knew when I dated Franklin that he was polyamorous but he’s so awesome I wanted him all to myself and he said no.”
Seriously. Someone over on Quora actually said that.
Dr. Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist and author who serves as an expert witness in court for abuse cases, published an analysis of the “survivor stories” that concluded the stories don’t actually describe abuse.
The poly community as a whole thought about her analysis, set aside their first knee-jerk emotional response, said “huh, I wonder if there’s a reason she might have reached those conclusions,” went back, and re-evaluated the survivor tales with a more considered eye…
Hahahahaha, I’m kidding, that didn’t happen. Instead, the Internet piled on to Dr. Sheff. She was threatened personally and professionally, and received so much harassment and abuse she was forced to back away from the whole situation. You know, classic straight-up bullying.
And it wasn’t just threats. A lot of folks sent her emails that they probably wouldn’t think of as problematic—messages like “don’t you realize you’re just hurting women who have been abused?” and “I’m so disgusted that an academic would support an abuser” and “I used to be such a fan of yours, but this has really made me rethink that,” because they couldn’t even consider the possibility that she might, you know, be right.
After that, things got even weirder.
“I want a just, fair, and equitable society, and I don’t care how many rape threats it takes to get there.”
Now let’s fast forward a bit, to a nonprofit polyamory convention run by a registered nonprofit in London, called “PolyDay.”
COVID interrupted the convention for a couple of years. During the COVID lockdown, a team not previously involved with PolyDay announced they would be taking over the PolyDay name and launching a new for-profit convention under that name.
The organization that owns the PolyDay convention informed these people firmly that it owns a trademark on the name, and they would not be permitted to use it.
Lockdown ends. The organizers of PolyDay announce the convention was on once more. I don’t know if the person who tried to steal the name started the rumor or merely amplified it, but anyway, someone starts a rumor that I own PolyDay, or run it, or somehow profit from it, depending on which version you believe. (For the record, I have absolutely nothing to do with it—I live in Portland, and it is owned and operated by a nonprofit in London.)
As the rumor spread through the North American polyamory scene, people said “Hey, we can look up the history and organization of PolyDay and figure out if this rumor is true.”
Hahahahaha, I’m kidding, that didn’t happen. Instead, a large number of people determined to make a more just and equitable society and stand up for women raced to their keyboards to send a flood of rape and death threats to the scheduled speakers at PolyDay. So many threats of serious violence poured in, the conference organizers canceled the event.
Apparently, threats of rape and murder are how some people think we create a more peaceful, more enlightened Utopia.
And it just kept going. Once this kind of harassment and bullying gets going, it takes on a life of its own. A former BBC and Guardian journalist named Jonathan Kent published a book on polyamory. Someone started a rumor that I profit from the book somehow, or (depending on which version you believe) that I secretly wrote it under his name, or something.
By now, I’m sure you can predict what happened next:
People looked up Jonathan online and realized he’s actually a person, a reporter with a long documented history, and not an alter ego for me? Hahaha no. Of course not.
People harassed him, called for a boycott of his (I mean “my”) book, threatened and harassed his podcasting co-host…because in this brave new world of empathy, compassion, and social justice, that’s what you do. You harass and intimidate anyone you don’t like, or anyone associated with anyone you don’t like, or anyone rumored to be connected to anyone you don’t like, so that one glorious day, if you harass and threaten enough people, you’ll wake to a world of perfect social justice.
Meanwhile, of course, the rape and death threats aimed at me and those close to me kept rolling in. My co-author Eunice and I released a science fiction novel; a bookstore that planned to host a book event got harassed into dropping the event. Some random stranger I’ve never met made a YouTube video about what a terrible person I am, repeating the “survivor stories,” insisted she wasn’t making the video for money, then used it to beg for Patreon donations.
So it goes.
And is still going. People are still following me around on social media, doxxing and threatening my partners, friends, and folks who follow me.
Just like with the “survivor stories” themselves, the stalking and threats have become a Rorschach test of their own. A random woman on Facebook told me, with what seemed like perfect sincerity, I must be making it all up, because men never get stalked, only women have stalkers.
So here’s the thing: The North American polyamory community has a problem.
I want to be clear this is not a problem everywhere. Poly folks elsewhere largely seem to roll their eyes at all this.
But the poly scene in North America is overrun with folks who are okay with using rape and death threats as a way to express themselves, who don’t do even the barest minimum of fact-checking, who are so caught up in righteous fury that sending women anonymous messages saying “I am going to rape you to death, here’s a photo of your house” seems like a perfectly reasonable way to support social justice for women.
Now, if this is you, if you’re one of the people who sat down at your computer to type out threats to Dr. Sheff or to the people scheduled to speak at a conference because you heard a rumor that it was somehow connected to me and couldn’t be arsed to fact-check, this essay is not for you. You are irredeemable and I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t quite understand the mentality of someone who says “I’m going to stand up for women and justice by sending a bunch of people I’ve never met anonymous emails saying I’m going to murder them if they present at this conference,” and honestly I don’t want to. If this is you, fuck off.
If this isn’t you, and you’re on the sidelines saying things like “I don’t know what the hell is going on but I don’t want to get involved,” well, I get it, I really do. I’ve been there myself. I’ve unquestioningly accepted stories because they fit a narrative I believed in, and discovered later that the things I’d been told didn’t actually happen, at least not the way they were presented to me. (I may write about that at some point as well.)
And I’m not saying the fact that a bunch of bullies and Internet trolls have taken it on themselves to send rape and death threats all over the Internet because, you know, that’s how you support women and fight for social justice automatically proves that what I’m saying is true and what they’re saying is false. Only that mmmmaybe it might be worthwhile to look a little closer, you know? After all, if people are wrong about basic things that can easily be checked, like who runs a nonprofit conference or who wrote a book, perhaps it might possibly be worth considering whether or not they’re trustworthy about things you can’t easily verify.
Moving the Overton window
I’d like to believe this is a fairly new thing—that twenty years ago, communities dedicated to egalitarianism and self-determination wouldn’t so quickly embrace this kind of toxic behavior. That’s probably wrong—the same thing was common in the 1970s feminist circles—but I do believe that events like GamerGate brought a new level of toxicity into acceptability.
If you don’t believe bullying and threats are okay, but you really don’t want to (or don’t care enough to!) get involved in other people’s drama (or you really don’t care enough to get involved), so you stay out of it, or you “don’t take sides”, or you choose a default rubric like “believe all women” because investigation is too much effort, well, that’s kind of how we ended up here, in a world where harass and threaten in the name of social justice, because they feel safe in their communities who appear to support them, or at least don’t oppose them.
Just a thought.
Brandolini’s Law, or the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, tells us it takes longer to refute bullshit than it does to put it out there, and if there isn’t a corollary that tells us this is especially true when people have been told that it’s morally wrong to question the bullshit, there ought to be.
Few subcommunities have figured out how to deal with vague claims of mistreatment that kinda follow common narratives, and anyway few people really have the inclination to try to sort through it all. It’s easier to just assume that where there’s stuff that kinda looks like smoke, there must be fire, and accept a generalized “so-and-so is a bad person even if I’m not exactly clear on what he or she did.” Kinda the way people who still say the 2020 election was stolen say “there are thousands of affadavits about election fraud, it must be true.”
I mean, hell, I’ve done this myself. When you want to do right by the people around you, and you know enough about social justice to understand the uphill struggle people have faced for years getting anyone to take abuse they’ve faced seriously, you default to believing whatever you’re told by anyone who presents as an abuse survivor—a noble inclination, but one that is also easy to exploit.
Abuse is about power and control. When the poly scene went after Dr. Sheff, everyone else got the message loud and clear: Do as we say, or you’re next. Believe what we tell you to believe, or you’re next. Don’t ask questions. Keep your head down. Hate who we tell you to hate, or you’re next.
So perhaps this might be a good guideline: When you see people facing off against each other, with both sides claiming they’ve been mistreated, it might be helpful to ask yourself, “which of these two sides is sending rape and death threats, punishing anyone who steps out of line, and controlling the narrative through intimidation and threats of violence?” Because it’s hard to champion social justice and also think those things are okay.
I know the people sending the rape and death threats are a small minority, whose noise and zealotry make this seem more common than it is. That’s the thing, though: if you want your community to be a good space, sometimes you need to stand up to the bullies.
It’s okay to ask questions and look for more information. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Note: Any comments containing abuse apologism, denialism, threats, rationalization, whataboutism, sealioning, or victim-blaming will be deleted.
Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment! —Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition – Volume 10
Recently, a user on Quora asked a question about why people are so prone to judging others, even those they don’t know.
And the truth is, there isn’t one reason. There are lots of them, including Carl Jung’s…and one that I’ve been chewing on lately but I’ve never seen anyone talk about before.
This question has been on my mind quite a bit over the last five years. It’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, people will dogpile complete strangers, even when they know nothing about them except what other people say. And it happens fast. Like overnight.
When people outside your tribe do it, it’s called “cancel culture.” When people who are part of your tribe do it, they like to imagine that it’s “accountability,” though to whom and for what isn’t always perhaps quite as clear as the folks who call it that think it is.
That’s a big part of what it is—tribalism.
There’s also an element of virtue-signaling to it. Part of the way people police the border between in-group and out-group, Us and Them, is virtue signaling. Liberals accuse conservatives of virtue-signaling and conservatives accuse liberals of virtue-signaling, but in reality it’s a human trait, a way of loudly proclaiming that you’re part of the group, you beling, you’re one of the in-group, see? Look at how you champion the values of the group!
Groups, especially small subcultures, also turn viciously on their own for alleged or perceived wrongdoing because it’s a social safety valve. When you’re a member of an oppressed or persecuted minority, it’s normal to be angry, but you don’t dare express that anger against the larger, more powerful group that oppresses you, so instead you direct that anger inward, against your own, because it’s safer. That’s why small resistance groups tend to fragment, as was parodied so brilliantly in Life of Brian: because the only safe place to direct your rage is against your own community.
We’re the People’s Front of Judea, not the Judean People’s Front!
It’s kind of like an ablative heat shield that protects a spacecraft by burning up; each fragment that burns away carries heat with it, protecting the space capsule from that heat. By burning away its own members, turning on them with incredible viciousness, the community finds a way to dissipate its anger without calling down the wrath of the larger, more powerful group oppressing it.
And all those things are part of it. There’s no one reason people judge others.
But lately, as I’ve been trying to understand what motivates people to do this, I think there’s another reason that doesn’t get discussed, but that’s at least as important as tribalism and virtue-signaling and in-group/out-group gatekeeping and self-directed rage:
It’s fanfic.
It’s storytelling using real people as characters.
We are a storytelling species. We understand the world through narrative. You see this all the time in politics. Information by itself almost never changes attitudes, because we accept information that fits our narrative and reject information that doesn’t.
It’s always been that way. We always explain the world through stories. Religion is basically, at its core, made-up stories that explain the world, of course. Foundational myths are stories that tell people who they are and where they come from.
But it goes a lot deeper than that. If you say the words “abusive relationship,” the overwhelming majority of people will picture a heterosexual relationship in which a man abuses a woman, because that’s the prevailing narrative of what ‘abuse’ looks like. And so everything you’re told about a specific abusive relationship will tend to get filtered through that narrative.
Okay, so.
We understand the world through narrative in a metaphorical sense, but we also understand the world through narrative in a much more literal sense. People make up stories constantly and then fit other people into the roles in those stories, as if they were real-life characters.
See, here’s the thing: To the vast majority of the world’s eight billion people, you are not real. You’re a vague blur, a background character. An NPC. You don’t exist except perhaps as a set of impressions.
We are limited in the number of real connections we can form. This limit is called Dunbar’s number, and it’s generally assumed to be about 150 people or so—in other words, about the maximum size of a tribe of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Those are the numbers of direct personal connections you can hold in your head—friends, enemies, family, everyone. Above that number, people blur and fade into the background. They become less real.
People who aren’t real, are easy fodder for simple morality stories. These stories are abstractions, we make up in order to understand the world we live in and to signal our moral values to others. There’s no room for nuance or complexity. We cast NPCs in the roles of hero or villain or victim or tyrant or whatever, because those people aren’t fully fleshed-out human beings, they’re characters. The stories we write are basically “reality fanfic.”
The thing that’s appealing about fanfic is you can do whatever you want with it.
Think about all the people who make Elon Musk out to be a cartoon hero or a mustache-twirling supervillain. The thing about the weird veneration of Elon Musk is that a lot of the things his legions of drooling fanbois say about him are kinda true. The thing about the weird demonization of Elon Musk is that a lot of what his many haters say about him is also kinda true.
But fanfic doesn’t leave a lot of room for complexity. Most people aren’t very good storytellers, so the stories they tell about the real-life NPCs around them aren’t very nuanced.
The Fall from Grace is arguably the human story, the narrative that is so deeply embedded it reaches all the way back to tales of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The story of Faust, the story of Anakin Skywalker…it’s no coincidence that real-world fanfic tends to echo these themes. We love demonizing people we used to hold up as heroes. We get off on it. Very little feels better than tearing down today the person we venerated yesterday.
And it makes us feel good about ourselves. When you write fanfic about real-life people. You can slot people into your narratives and then pat yourself on the back about how good you are, how much you care, how moral you are, because when you share those stories, you’re showing your tribe how much you value your tribe’s values. This real-life fanfic feeds into virtue signaling and tribalism and all those other things.
Plus thee’s an element of self-empowerment. We long for connection, especially to people we look up to. Part of tearing down the people we look up to is, I think an expression of that desire for connection.
When we judge people we don’t know, often we hope to make them do something. Go through some process, resign from some position…we want a response from them. This can be part of a redemption narrative, of course—the fallen hero who is redeemed by some act is also a narrative as old as time—but more directly, more immediately, we judge others when we want them to acknowledge us, to interact with us, to do as we say.
That’s incredibly empowering. It validates us. It tells us that we can have an effect on that remote, inaccessible person we don’t know, and of course we can have an effect on the world. We’re powerful. It validates our virtues and our values. It makes us feel strong.
All of this, every bit of it, is easier to do with people we don’t know than with people we do. When we actually know someone, we see the nuance, we’re confronted with complexity. But with someone we don’t know, someone who’s a vague abstract blur? It’s easier to ignore the humanity. It’s easier to make them a character in our fanfic of life. It’s easier to see them as an archetype, a cartoon.
Of course we judge people we don’t know! Judging people we don’t know validates us, signals our virtue, lets us scrawl our own design on reality. Who can resist that temptation?
