On this day, let's remember that the r/cth subreddit cyberbullied someone who was sharing their opinions about Zootopia in good faith to the point where they had a mental breakdown, and then many on the subreddit blamed the OP for being online in the first place. In my opinion, the sub's reaction to that post was an indication of the more troubling aspects of that community. I understand that many people on the subreddit tried to convince the zootopia person to leave the website, or responded to them in good faith, or chose not to engage with them, or even stopped engaging with them once it was clear that they weren't joking. Of course, this post is not directed at those people.
Irony poisoning can be a serious problem, and can lead to a lot of hurt feelings and a general lack of empathy, particularly over the internet. Being a part of the "dirtbag left" does not give you the right to be a piece of shit. It does not matter how "memeable" something is. It does not matter if someone's opinion reads like a copypasta. Please 100% do bully people with loud voices and opinions that actively harm others, but don't bully someone for liking a movie that has police officers in it, and don't bully someone for failing to coat their opinion in 800 layers of irony. Did the zootopia person have an unreasonably strong emotional attachment to that movie? Sure. Did the zootopia person come off as clueless and emotional? Yeah. Did the zootopia person have a strange and incoherent worldview? Seems like it. But that doesn't mean they deserved to be flooded with the ironic musings of legions of dril impersonators who were happy to make an epic post at the expense of a stranger on the internet.
Can we not be the people who dismiss complaints of cyberbullying with "you shouldn't be online if you can't handle it"? Can we instead be the compassionate ones? I've been really happy to see that this site has evolved past a lot of the original subreddit's shortcomings, and I hope that we can generally agree that the Zootopia incident was completely fucked. It's this sort of detachment that led to the Chris-Chan situation, which is the worst case of targeted cyberbullying that I know of. I think most people on this site can agree that Chris-Chan was extremely racist, misogynistic and homophobic, but she did not deserve to have her life unambiguously destroyed by the internet. Obviously the Zootopia thing wasn't as extreme as the Chris-Chan thing, but it definitely wasn't great, and I feel like both situations arose from the same sort of ironic internet detachment.
Basically, bullying people is justified if the person you are bullying is causing harm and should be silenced. But punching down is rarely acceptable, especially when you are punching down at someone for something as frivolous as liking a problematic movie. Just because someone is easy to single out, doesn't mean you should do it, and doing or saying problematic things to problematic people is still problematic.
I know that this post is kind of digging up ancient history at this point, but I still see that copypasta on here every once and a while, and I'm always a bit disappointed when I do.
(praying to god that this post doesn't become the next CTH copypasta)
On this day, let’s remember that the r/cth subreddit cyberbullied someone who was sharing their opinions about Zootopia in good faith to the point where they had a mental breakdown, and then many on the subreddit blamed the OP for being online in the first place
stopped reading there.
i sorted by new that day and saw the whole thing unravel; for every person making fun of OP there were 2-3 offering support and OP took each light jab at their post as a serious personal attack and jumped to suicide threats almost immediately. and once they did, the jabbers pretty much stopped. parody threads were made but calling that cyberbullying is a stretch.
The post is referencing multiple things that plenty of people (me included) have no knowledge of nor have any reason to. And also alludes to the completely unrelated Chris-Chan, who is an old YouTube figure that has nothing to do with the community. This makes it A) impenetrable
The post recalls this story & uses it as an example of why bullying isn’t ok. But in the exact same post, it says that bullying is ok by the very obtuse and nebulous parameters set by the OP. Which makes me wonder what exactly the OP has a problem with, since they seem to be approving conditional bullying that easily could lead to this exact same situation. This makes it B) incoherent.
Do I need to go on?
I was able to follow along with the post fine. It’s impenetrable to you. And to me, OP’s point was clear: punching up is good, punching down is bad. Bullying people for harmful opinions is good, bullying people for harmless opinions is bad.
Yea that’s not what the post is saying. You’re reading what you want to read. Whatever, I regret engaging in this stupidity.
This is exactly what the post is saying - that situation was bad and we should learn from it. Bully people who deserve it, not people honestly posting harmless opinions or effortposts.
No, copypasta of people genuinely sharing their feelings is actually quite mean, bullying behaviour, which should be reserved for actual bad people.
I was in multiple threads regarding this, and this whole thing about cyberbullying is massively overblown. There were a couple of people giving OP a hard time, but there were way more people trying to work out OP's weird ideological contortions. OP would respond to some 100% sincere comments by threatening to kill themselves. Up and down the whole thread the OP did that. Admittedly it was a bit hilarious because OP's entire history pointed to him being more than a bit horny for the cartoon cop. This revisionism needs to stop honestly.
edit- fuck this was a copypasta
Yeah I read a knowyourmeme article and it was just an awful list of motherfuckers harassing an autistic person.
I agree with you. That situation was fucked. Like, where is people sense of empathy. Like don't kink shame.
Perhaps that guy was misguided, but he didn't need to be bullied or shamed. Like, it was a very Reddit response, which is not good. Cth is better, the left is better.
The post is referencing multiple things that plenty of people (me included) have no knowledge of nor have any reason to. And also alludes to the completely unrelated Chris-Chan, who is an old YouTube figure that has nothing to do with the community. This makes it A) impenetrable
The post recalls this story & uses it as an example of why bullying isn’t ok. But in the exact same post, it says that bullying is ok by the very obtuse and nebulous parameters set by the OP. Which makes me wonder what exactly the OP has a problem with, since they seem to be approving conditional bullying that easily could lead to this exact same situation. This makes it B) incoherent.
Do I need to go on?
