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.
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 spend a certain amount of my time each week tracking down spammers, scammers, and phishers. I use a lot of tools for this: Spamcop, wget, other things. One of the tools I occasionally use is the suite of site reputation sites all over the internet, sites that can tell you how long a particular domain has been in use, whether it’s blacklisted anywhere, the site’s overall reputation score.
Occasionally, because I’m curious, when I find myself looking up a site’s reputation score, I’ll look at my own sites’ scores, just because.
So it was that I looked up xeromag.com on one of these sites, when lo and behold:
Just for the record:
No part of xeromag.com uses AI generated text. It’s all written by me, most of it years (or decades!) before LLMs and genAI were even a thing. I first set up Xeromag on January 4, 1997, a time long before ChatGPT was a gleam in Sam Altman’s eye.
In fact, Xeromag has been scraped by genAI bots, which probably explains why AI checkers think it’s AI generated; AI LLMs were trained on what I wrote on Xeromag.
And on my books as well; I’ve been informed by lawyers for the class-action suit against Anthropic that several of my books were fed into the devouring maw of Anthropic’s LLM, as a result of which I’m apparently due thousands of dollars in settlement money if and when the courts approve the settlement.
There’s something deeply offensive about pouring decades of effort into writing, only to have your writing lifted to train AI models, then be accused of using genAI because, well, the AI models produce output that looks like yours, on account of, you know, being trained on your words.
(In fact, most LLMs know me by name; as an experiment, I went to Gemini and asked it to explain fluorine chemistry in the style of Franklin Veaux, which it did, though rather more, I think, in the style of a high school student who read some of my stuff once and tried to mimic it.)
By way of comparison, here’s the real deal:
So, to be clear:
I wrote this blog, every word of it, without the use, direct or indirect, of genAI.
I wrote all my sites, every word of them, without the use, direct or indirect, of genAI (as a trip to the Wayback Machine will show; much of the content on all my sites predates ChatGPT and its ilk).
I am, as one might gather, getting a little sick of people and, now, machines telling the world I am something I’m not.
I have added “Not by AI” tags to my blog and I’m in the process of adding them to my other sites as well.
I’ve now been in Florida for over a month and a half, helping joreth get her new (to her) RV set up and situated…a project that involved gutting the entire inside, adding 600 watts of solar to the roof, and replacing the house batteries with a very large lithium battery bank.
As we’ve run bto and fro between Winter Haven and Orlando, mainly along I-4, a wretched hive of scum and poor civil engineering, I noticed a very peculiar thing:
Florida has given up on the idea of advancing your station through hard work.
Drive across Florida on Interstate 4. Drive around in downtown Winter Haven, Orlando, or Lakeland. Notice anything peculiar?
I’m talking, of course, about billboards. But not just any billboards. Florida is, to an extent I’ve not seen in any other state, littered with billboards…for accident lawyers. Billboards as far as the eye can see, all advertising how much money you can make if you are in an accident.
Billboard after billboard after billboard, all for accident attorneys. On the stretch of I-4 we’ve been driving regularly, most of the billboards—54%, by my count—are advertising accident attorneys.
They’re everywhere. It’s absolutely uncanny.
I took these photos from inside a moving car, so I know the quality isn’t the greatest, but they just go on and on. We would drive down stretches of road where every single billboard for miles advertised accident attorneys, one after another after another.
Florida has long been legendary for the staggering numbers of terrible drivers on the roads, the result of snowbirds coming down from all over the country without being accustomed to the rain, a olice force focused on making money over protecting public safety, and lax licensing laws.
But I think there’s another part of it as well:
In Florida, there’s a cultural attitude that says getting in a car accident that you can blame on someone else is like winning the lottery.
They even have lawyers who specialize in going after semi owner/operators and trucking companies.
And, of course, language is no barrier to your payday.
But the absolute freakiest thing?
Remember when I said that getting in a car wreck is like winning the lottery? I meant that literally, not figuratively.
Accident lawyers put up shiny happy billboards with shiny happy accident victims wearing shiny happy smiles under headlines trumpeting how much money they made.
(There’s something so very very Florida about this little scene: an “I won $500,000 in an injury lawsuit, isn’t that awesome?” billboard over a strip mall with a pawn and gun shop, an acupuncturist, a martial arts center, an MMA arena, and a weird Evangelical church, all sharing a roof.)
The way these billboards are designed, they’re exactly like state lottery billboards.
“Dude! You got hit by a car and smashed into rubble? Awesome! Cha-CHING!!!”
Every time you pull into traffic in Florida, you’re sharing the road with people who sincerely hope you hit them because that’s the way you get ahead in this world.
It’s really deeply creepy…and perversely, it incentivizes the exact opposite of driving defensively. Coming up to a light and it looks like someone might be about to run the red? Gun it! Get in that intersection and hope he slams into you. Then maybe you’ll be one of the shiny happy people with a big payday, baby!
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.
This is an essay about cultural appropriation, except that it’s not really an essay about cultural appropriation.
This is actually about the way genuine, complex problems in complex societies get reduced to nattering virtue-signaling nonsense that become used as blunt instruments to ensure conformity and serve as tribalistic us-vs-them markers, in a process of ensuckitude that substitutes sloganeering for genuine thought, bleating of approved bumper-sticker platitudes for engagement, and tribalism for solutions.
Buckle up, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going bye-bye.
Let’s look at cultural appropriation
Odds are probably pretty good you’ve heard of cultural appropriation. Odds are also pretty good you have strong feelings about it, and that your strong feelings map closely to whether you self-identify as liberal or conservative, but can you actually offer a cogent description of what it is?
Cultural appropriation is a great proxy for the general dumbification of social justice and the generalized ensuckitude of real social discourse, because, oh my God, the prevailing culture-wars conversation around it is So. Fucking. Dumb.
This is how social justice dumbification in general works:
Step 1: Distort and water down the meaning of “cultural appropriation” until you use it for nothing more than “wearing vaguely ‘ethnic’ clothing” or “styling your hair in an unconventional way.” (To be fair, those who understand cultural appropriation is a real thing sometimes do this step for you.)
Step 2: Ignore and/or disregard actual instances of genuine cultural appropriation.
Step 3: Pretend your diluted, absurdist definition of “cultural appropriation” is the only definition there is; refuse to discuss, or even acknowledge, any other meaning.
Look, I get it. There are folks who make me roll my eyes so hard I can see my own brain stem when they talk about “cultural appropriation.”
Probably the greatest example of an absurd self-own was the Internet goon squad that accused a woman of “cultural appropriation” for wearing Japanese clothing when she was Japanese.
All the cringe. ALLLLLL the cringe.
So yeah, I get it. Stupid gonna stupid, man.
And it ain’t just cultural appropriation. Remember when James Cameron’s movie Avatar 2 came out? Some Native people complained that the movie peddled Native tropes for entertainment without actually recognizing Native history of defending biodiversity.
A lot, and I mean a lot, of white urban liberals jumped onto Twitter (yes, I’m totally deadnaming the name of Elongated Muskrat’s social media platform) to crow about how they were boycotting the movie and dish on people who saw it.
Some folks I know personally, folks I once used to respect and even admire, did this. And you know what was especially pathetic about it? They had no intention of seeing the movie in the first place, oh no. They took to social media to crow about how righteous they were for not watching a movie they never intended to watch, because it made them better people than the ones who did watch it…
…and yet, did they actually materially improve the lives of even one single Native person anywhere? Even one? Even a little bit?
Nope.
See, I might respect someone who went onto social media to say “hey, this movie might be problematic, and here’s why, so I took the $30 I was gonna spend on tickets and popcorn and a gigantic tub of Coke, and I donated it instead to this charity that helps Native populations, and here’s the URL where you can donate too,” but did they?
Nah, bruh, because it was never about the Native people.
It was virtue signaling and bullying. It was “Look at me! Look at me! I’m better than you! Hey, everyone, look at me!” It helped nobody, because it wasn’t intended to. It was about preening and primping, about vanity disguised as social justice.
I didn’t watch Avatar 2, but I didn’t crow about it on social media either, because I never intended to see it in the first place.
Not watching a movie you never intended to watch is not a virtue, and that’s really what this is all about.
But I digress. Let’s get back to cultural appropriation.
“Cultural appropriation” in the academic sense does not mean “woman who kinda looks maybe white on Twitter wearing a yukata that self-righteous white craft-beer liberal dumbfucks think is a kimono.”
Cultural appropriation is when a white businessman sees a Navajo pattern, thinks it’s pretty, and commissions a sweatshop in China to make millions of knockoffs that he gets rich from without, you know, contributing to the people who created it, or even bothering to learn anything about it at all.
And that’s not nonsense. It’s a real thing that happens, just like turning other people’s brutal oppression under colonialism into entertainment whilst you eat overpriced popcorn is a thing that really happens.
But bullying a Japanese woman on social media because she looks “too white” to be wearing the clothes you don’t think she should wear doesn’t actually strike a blow against cultural appropriation, does it?
The difference between social justice and bombastic bullying
Liberals tend to whine about conservatives who mock and deride “social justice warriors,” but if I’m to be perfectly honest, a lot of that is our own fault. We liberals are easy targets, because we have a habit of taking our own values and reducing them to bumper sticker platitudes that we use to bully others without, you know, actually doing anything to solve the problems we claim to care about so much.
I would like to propose a test to help separate genuine concern with social justice from the general enshittification of morality into empty tribalism and bullying. Don’t worry, it’s a simple test, one that can be applied in less time than it takes to drink a single soy-milk latte. Just ask yourself these questions:
At the end of your social justice venture, can you point to any person whose life or situation is now a bit better for your actions, in any way, however small?
Was your social justice venture invited by the people you, a rich white person, claim to be speaking on behalf of?
Is your social media venture targeted at the people who are responsible for the injustice you see, rather than bullying people for not doing what you want them to do?
If you can’t answer “yes” to all three of those questions, maybe you aren’t as virtuous as you like to pretend you are.
I spend a lot of time on Quora dishing on conservatives, but here’s something that is absolutely endemic among my fellow liberals that absolutely gets on my last nerve.
Way, way too many liberals are more obsessed with moral purity than any Southern Baptist could ever be. Way too many of my fellow liberals are obsessed with absolute moral purity to the point where any disagreement whatsoever becomes an opportunity to summon the torches and pitchforks.
Liberals, especially in matters of social justice (however variously that may be defined), have an unfortunate habit of seeing anyone who agrees with them 98% not as an ally, but as a 2% enemy. And that 2%? Purge it with fire!!
Actual photo of a typical North American liberal whose fellow liberal has just expressed a minor difference of opinion.
It’s as if we liberals fundamentally do not accept the idea that any disagreement can ever arise from a legitimate difference of opinion, priority, or even fact. No, no way. Any disagreement, any difference however slight, can only be active, willful, malicious evil.
Liberals love the fire of righteous anger. We’re addicted to how it feels. Grabbing the torches and pitchforks and setting off on some zealous crusade makes us feel like we’re doing something. And that makes liberals incredibly easy to manipulate. We all have to virtue-signal and signpost our righteous purity, all the time. The insistence on ideological purity creates an atmosphere of fear and oppression, because at the end of the day nobody is pure enough. This fear and oppression leads to dogpiles and mob rule, because nobody wants that zealous rage directed at themselves.
Conservative authoritarianism is blind, mindless allegiance to a person, however corrupt and obviously self-serving. Liberals sneer at conservative authoritarians, but liberals tend to fall victim to an equally blind, uncritical allegiance, not to a specific person, but to group norms and presumed virtues. One Polynesian person on Tumblr complained once that the hashtag #poly made it hard for her to find other Polynesian Tumblr users because polyamorous people used it instead, and from that moment on it was torches and pitchforks for any polyamorous person who self-described as “poly” rather than “polyam” in any context anywhere, on or off Tumblr, because if you call yourself “poly” you are disrespecting disempowered communities of color.
Marshall University professor Greg Patterson ran into this for talking about filler words in different languages. “Filler words” are words that you insert as pauses in a sentence when you’re thinking. “Uh” and “um” are the most common filler words in English.
A common filler word in Chinese is 那个, pronounced “nà ge”. One group of students complained that this sounded too similar to the English N-word, and that, direct quote,
There are over 10,000 characters in the Chinese written language and to use this phrase, a clear synonym with this derogatory N-Word term, is hurtful and unacceptable to our USC Marshall community. The negligence and disregard displayed by our professor was very clear in today’s class. […] We were made to feel “less than.” […] We are burdened to fight with our existence in society, in the workplace, and in America. We should not be made to fight for our sense of peace and mental well-being at Marshall.
Professor Patterson was removed from the class.
Part of the issue is that Patterson is liberal himself, and as much as liberals love going after conservatives, we save a special and particularly fiery rage for fellow liberals who we believe have transgressed our ideology, regardless of how specious that belief might be.
Part of the issue is that Patterson did not immediately grovel. In liberal circles, it is axiomatic that any fellow liberal accused of any transgression is automatically and self-evidently guilty, always, and the only appropriate response is immediate and unconditional apology.
Any other response is always and self-evidently proof of guilt. Denial? Proof of guilt. Confusion? Proof of guilt. Anger? Proof of guilt.
And part of the issue is that nobody wants to be in the line of fire. Once the torches-and-pitchforks mob has been unleashed, everyone is a potential target. Anyone standing too close to the offender is a target. Anyone who voices any support for the offender is a target. Anyone who fails to denounce the target is a target. Anyone who doesn’t denounce the target strongly enough is a target.
If you’re a faculty member and you get a complaint like this, you damn well better remove the professor, regardless of how you feel. If you don’t, you become the next new target. “Look at this faculty dean, supporting institutions of entrenched racism at our university! We’re going to go to the administration! We’re going to go to the alumni!”
So what happens is you make a reasoned, considered, and perfectly rational decision to do as the mob says, because you come to the reasoned, considered, and perfectly rational decision that you don’t want your own life upended by the mob.
Too many liberals are addicted to the feel of this righteous virtue. It feels good. I know; I’ve been there, I’ve felt it. It’s heady. It’s intoxicating. It lets you feel powerful when you’re confronted with the hopeless pervasiveness of institutionalized injustice.
You can’t stop the structural, institutional racism that permeates the American social fabric, but goddamnit, you can do something about this professor that said something you might’ve heard as a slur! And that feels good. It feels powerful.
In a sense, we liberals sacrifice our own as an antidote to the intractability and powerlessness of the injustice around us. It’s dangerous, especially if you’re part of a disenfranchised subcommunity, to attack the institutional structures of oppression head-on. So turning on your fellows becomes a safety valve, a way to deal with the rage and despair you feel every day.
