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)