The whole situation is all kinds of fucked up, and I don't know where I stand.
When all the shit went down yesterday, I saw a little bit of the beginning, before I had to step out. And what I saw was Sophia Banks suddenly accusing Chobits of rape, an accusation I had never heard before. Harasser, abusive sender of death threats, all around piece of crap, all those I'd heard, and I'd been able to personally verify them all myself just by looking at her twitter, But rapist? That was new. And it made me wonder where Sophia was getting rapist from.
And then Sophia started making tweets like this:
Now, I ask you, all of you, can you honestly say that doesn't sound like a dox threat? Can you honestly say that if, say, a gater did that, you wouldn't think it a dox threat? Can you say that if the target wasn't a piece of crap like Chobits, you wouldn't look askance at someone suddenly accusing a person of rape and then tweeting like that?
Now, I know that a few minutes later, Sophia tweeted that she had no intention of doxxing, and implied the threats were related to getting the police involved. But that makes no sense. If Sophia had enough info to go to the police, then she should already be doing so. Unless the victims asked her not to. But if that's the case, she can't go to the police without betraying the trust of the people who confided in her, so what good do threats about knowing Chobits address do? Given the whole context, despite the "I have no intention of doxxing you", those very much seem like dox threats to me.
And so, I cannot in any way blame Randi for thinking that those were dox threats. It was perfectly reasonable she saw them that way. Heck, I still kind of see them that way myself. Where Randi fucked up was apparently not looking at, or not fully realizing, the original context of Sophia's accusations.
Before making those tweets, the previous evening, Sophia had tweeted about how Chobits seemed a pretty fucked up and dangerous person. And then the next morning she tweets out a "general community warning" saying that some trans people had confided in her how Chobits had abused her.
In other words, these rape accusations didn't just come out of nowhere. They weren't "accusations with no victims" or whatever. People, apparently afraid to speak up themselves (and you can you blame them) told Sophia so that she could warn the community. Or at least that's what Sophia is saying.
And that is... well, kind of a complicated situation. Accusations without ANY specifics like that could easily be used to libel/slander innocent people, and so they make me uncomfortable, but at the same time, warning a fairly small and interconnected community about an abuser is obviously important, and it's perfectly reasonable for victims to not want to publicly expose themselves and risk further abuse, and it's perfectly reasonable for Sophia to share their warning for them.
So Sophia fucked up by talking about Chobits' address and how much personal info she knew, because of course that was gonna be interpreted as a dox threat (or worse, potentially) since if she was in a position to use that info to get the police involved she'd already be doing so.
And Randi fucked up by not understanding the full context of what was going on, and being too dismissive about the initial accusations and the reasons for them.
Unfortunately it's not a better world, and here's where things get really unfortunate. A lot of people were unhappy with Randi's tweets, and I don't fully blame them for being angry at her not understanding the full context of what Sophia was doing. But some went way too far, accusing her of being "buddies" with Chobits over nothing. Some started digging through Randi's tweet history, calling her "scum" because apparently there are some vague unspecified aspects of Obamacare Randi doesn't like.
And some told Randi that it didn't matter if the rape accusations were true, because Chobits was such a piece of shit. This pissed off Randi, who said they were trivializing rape by saying such things. And then these comments get taken out of context, and people seem to think that somehow Randi was accusing Sophia of trivializing rape, and the whole mess spirals out of control, and suddenly half my twitter feed is snidely subtweeting the other half.
And so it's a mess, and the worst part is, most of the people involved are, from what I can tell, sincere and with the best of intentions, it's just that misunderstanding built upon minor fuck ups built upon further misunderstanding built upon further fuck ups built upon twitter telephone to turn everything into crap.
I just want to give everyone on my feed a big hug and show them pictures of cute kittens, but it's probably not gonna work.