Community and Bad Author Behavior Pt. 2

September 15, 2024September 14, 2024 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Last week in part 1 of “Community and Bad Author Behavior,” I discussed what to look out for when it comes to a writing or online community that enables toxic behavior from bad actors. In this week’s post, I would like to outline what we can do on a personal level and going forward as a community to hopefully combat this behavior and keep this pattern from repeating.

Recognize Manipulation

This is easier said than done, but being aware of the signs of an abusive manipulative person helps you avoid falling for another abusive manipulative person. Keep in mind that people who are manipulative are good at what they do. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t do it. Some things to look out for are:

love bombing– this is when someone showers another person with praise and attention while getting closer to them. Once they have the person close, they then withhold affection. This done to keep the person craving their attention and trying to get in their good graces. Someone who runs hot and cold with their “friends” might be love bombing.
gaslighting– telling you something didn’t happen or didn’t happen the way you remember it in order to make you question your sanity or to make them look better. Once again, it keeps the person off balance, and the story might even be spun in such a way that it makes the person apologize to the gaslighter and try to make it up to them.
testing your boundaries– often they will run over your boundaries by asking you to share more, give them more time, be more emotionally intimate, trust them more. If you set a boundary, they will ignore it. At the same time, they are allowed to have boundaries, and if you run them over, they will punish you for it.
controlling behavior– In online communities, you’ll often see things like, you can’t interact with X person; if you do y, you’re a terrible person; you can’t be part of the group if you like so and so; and if you do any of those things, you’ll be kicked out of the group. People want to be loyal and be part of the crowd, so they comply without much push back, especially if the person is adamant.
using DARVO tactics– DARVO stands for deny [behavior], attack [victim], reverse victim and offender. Often someone is at the center of drama from multiple sources will try to play it off like they are the victim in all cases. Yes, someone can be bullied by multiple groups, but if someone seems to be involved in drama constantly, it warrants looking closer because DARVO tends to be involved. It’s a “get them before they get me” tactic to keep public opinion and support on their side and a way to muddy the waters when they do bad things.
can’t handle criticism or being told no– most of this abusive behavior comes from a fragile ego or low self-confidence, so they pretend to be an authority in order to maintain an unquestionable position. They use this to avoid accountability and deflect criticism when they do something wrong. When you approach them to tell you they hurt you, they will blow up at you or do the “I’m sorry you feel that way” type apology.

Think Critically

Manipulative and abusive people rely on the fact that you will not think too hard about what they’re telling you. Trust is key when manipulative people build communities to insulate them because, in order to get away with things for as long as they do, people need to not see what is right in front of them. It’s a slight of hand. In part one, I talked about how in these communities we often see cult-like vibes and a culture where authority isn’t questioned. Both of these mindsets require people to not think critically about what they see or experience. People who are or have been part of high control groups (like certain religions) are often more vulnerable to this sort of behavior as they were raised in a similar environment.

People who require control to keep things in their favor do not want you to think too hard about what they’re saying or push back against their behavior. Once one person defects, there’s a higher chance others will too. This is why they often boot or smear people who leave them, to keep others from believing them or doing the same. One can push back against compliance or herd mentality by having a healthy amount of skepticism. You don’t have to be an asshole and loudly question everything, but you can keep in mind that you don’t truly know people, especially online. I have online friends, and I love them dearly, but I don’t know how they behave when they aren’t talking to me. Two people can have two very different experiences with the same person.

At the same time, if something feels fishy, dig deeper. During the FM situation early on, there were red flags that popped up for me that I ignored at first because other people seemed to support them. Once they bullied one of my friends right in front of me, I realized those red flags were definitely there and dropped them like a hot potato. Being a “good friend” only goes so far. If you see them do something mean, confront them. How they react to that criticism is a good indication of whether they are trying to manipulate you or not.

Don’t Be a Yes Man

Being loyal is a good thing. Being blindly loyal is a good way to end up with a toxic friend group. Manipulative people rely on yes men to always support them out of blind loyalty or because you feel indebted to them. Community is important, but let me say this, you owe awful people nothing. Cut your losses and move on if you realize they’re toxic. There’s often a sunk-cost fallacy with friends or people higher than you in the industry where people think, “if I just wait a little longer, things will get better” or “if I wait a while longer, they’ll promote my work to their followers, and my work will take off.” People will stay in toxic situations far longer than they should because they’ve already been there so long. At the same time, it can also be a “boiled frog” situation where things slowly become worse and don’t notice.

What I think is most important is to pay attention to what is going on in front of you with this person. If you see them doing something mean or shitty, call them out on it. Normal people don’t expect their friends to always agree or support them. Most of us know we can be irrational, petty, childish, jealous, etc., and personally, I’d like to be told if I have gone off the rails and been an ass because I know I need to apologize for my behavior and do better. One of my fears is that in the age of “your valid,” people take it too far or misunderstand what it is supposed to mean. Someone feeling jealousy is a perfectly normal emotion to have. How you act on that emotion is a very different story. Having a little vent in your group chat is one thing. Spreading falsehoods about that person to undercut them is another. If a friend is doing something bad, they should be called out on it. If they can’t handle the criticism once the heavy emotions have died down, then you need to reevaluate your relationship with them.

I was debating which heading to put this under since it straddles all of them, but if you are part of a friend group or friends with someone and you are afraid to disagree with them because you think they will put you on blast or smear you as they do others, that is a mega red flag. Just think about the situation from a more objective perspective. You are afraid to leave a group for fear of being bullied. That isn’t normal, and you shouldn’t tolerate it.

Move Away from a Punitive Mindset

At the heart of many manipulator-fueled pile-ons is a sense of justice, that the people engaging in the pile-ons are helping their friend or standing up for some greater social cause. It’s commonplace for manipulative people to take a personal beef or a perceived slight and spin it with a social justice slant, couching the crime in language that isn’t truly applicable in the situation (once the evidence/situation is looked at more closely) in order to get the “good” people around them to react more strongly. “Good” people don’t engage in pile-ons unless a threshold of unacceptability is reached, and the manipulator knows that. They can’t say, “I hate so-and-so who many of you are friends with, so unfollow them,” but they can say, “So-and-so is harassing me and said something hateful about me.” That’s the kind of thing people will jump on because they believe their friend. This all should have been covered in the critical thinking section, but this mob mentality falls under punitive justice.

Punitive justice is the belief that people need to be punished for their crimes in a way that is proportional to the behavior. The problem is that people with large followings and parasocial relationships can turn those people into judge, jury, and executioner for those they don’t like. As mentioned in part one, often there is no evidence presented at all to substantiate what they’re upset about, the yes men/enablers swarm around them to console them, and then they go off to exact justice, whether that’s through harassment, review bombing, or smear campaigns. The question becomes is there actually a crime? And if there was one, is this hornet swarm proportional to what the person actually did? Acting as a white knight or savior to another person is a symptom of this sort of punitive mentality. The dragon must be slain, and the other person rescued.

In a perfect world, the mindset should be that the person is held to account but with a focus on restorative or transformative justice. If there was something done to the other person, they should make amends and do something to restore that person to how they were before the offense or to do something to atone to the community. Punitive justice leaves little room for growth or doing better, and I would even suggest that it works in the manipulator’s favor in several ways. 1. if they play the victim, the person they’re accusing will almost always be worse off than them because they end up being harmed for something they didn’t do. 2. When the manipulator is caught, they will just delete all their accounts and pop up with a new persona.

Do I think they should be punished? Yes. I think withholding support and unfollowing people is something one should do if someone is awful. At the same time, I think there should be room for growth. If we watch from afar and see that this person is trying (emphasis on is), then they should be allowed back into the community after rebuilding trust and making amends to those they hurt. Unfortunately, without all the things listed above and a severe, sustained attitude change from everyone (myself included) in the writing community, I don’t know if this is even possible.

A Note on the Victims of Manipulators

A manipulative person leaves swaths of victims in their wake. There are the people they actively wronged through smear campaigns and bullying, the people they manipulated and abused in private, and the people close to them who were used and lied to. Those closest to them need to examine how they behaved after the abuse is exposed and remember that you can be a victim and a bully.

Something that upset me after the FM incident was how the people closest to them were consoled and coddled far more readily than those who were the victims of FM’s bullying campaigns and cyberstalking. I understand why. Those people had more of a community than their victims; they had each other. It felt like they were more upset about being in the splash zone of a scandal than that they had been complicit in FM’s abuse by enabling them and/or acting as a bully by proxy for them by engaging in their pile-ons against others.

Every single person I’ve talked to who was a victim of their bullying, cyberstalking, and abusive behavior all show signs of PTSD and anxiety from the experience. Seeing their profile pic became a trigger. My blood pressure would shoot up when they appear on my timeline, and I would go into anxiety spirals when they would start harassing me with sock puppet accounts. Now that they’ve been exposed, the anxiety has lessened, but these online harassment campaigns are not victimless crimes. People who were abused privately feel deep amounts of shame, and some haven’t returned to online communities because they feel they can’t trust people anymore.

This section isn’t meant to be a complaint section on what I and others experienced. It is meant to point that real harm is done when people enable manipulators and let their behavior go on unchecked, especially after they’ve seen the red flags. My hope is that as a community, we can be better about seeing the signs of a manipulative person early, not enable their manipulation, and think critically about what we’re witnessing before acting in a punitive manner at their behest.

Writing

Community and Bad Author Behavior Pt. 1

September 8, 2024September 9, 2024 Kara Jorgensen2 Comments

It’s been almost five months since the FM event went down (if you know, you know), and I have had many thoughts over the last few months. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I linked the first post above, and if you google the author, you’ll find plenty of info about what went down. This is less about them and more about how the writing community can create the [toxic] environment that led to this person doing so well and how we can recognize these sorts of conditions going forward in order to stop them before they start.

While I hate when my students do this, let me spell out my thesis for this post: Abusive and/or manipulative people cannot flourish in a community without support from those around them. No matter who is at the center of the mess, for a person to continue doing this for any length of time, those around them have to ignore bad behavior, explain it away, or join in. There are red flags to pay attention to or things we can do to avoid enabling this sort of behavior within our communities.

No Questioning Authority

Manipulative people, in order to manipulate efficiently, must hold a position of power. Grifters and other ne’er do wells often take up a niche and start posting authoritatively. It doesn’t matter if they are spouting nonsense about crystals or saying things about queer people that negate any and all nuance because if they say it in such a way where they posit themselves as an authority, people will believe them. This authority is hammered home by jumping on others who disagree. When others see them go after people with righteous indignation, they see that as confidence rather than weakness. By doing this repeatedly, they establish a hierarchy with them at the top OR they create a persecution narrative around disagreement from others in their community, which they can leverage for more attention and ultimately more authority as more people come in to support them.

From there, they rely on social compliance and herd mentality from those who surround them. Once a few people start saying they are an authority on x or y, others will agree and comply. Even if they don’t always agree, seeing many other people agree with the authority figure makes them either question their beliefs or default to what the authority said just in case or to maintain the peace. They might even create sock-puppet accounts that act as their supporters. Other people see the sock-puppet defending them and join in. Their marks are usually people who are less outwardly confident, those with less social capital (though they often end up as bullying victims later), and those who are seeking community protection. The fake authority figure appears larger than life and attracts people who want to do better or know more.

If you get involved with an authority figure who doesn’t like it when people disagree with them or they squash any discussion or dissent from people within the group, it’s a red flag. People who are secure in their authority don’t do this. They don’t worry people are going to usurp their position because they know where they stand and what they know and are confident in that. They can also handle criticism and altering their position with new information. Insecure people feel the need to put others down and make them look stupid in order to maintain their position in the hierarchy. A true “authority” or leader should be able to field questions and meaningful disagreement in order to have a discussion.

Group Think Vibes (aka it’s getting culty)

I remember being part of a queer writing Discord server once where the main person/owner of the server mentioned they hated Our Flag Means Death. Now, if you don’t know, A TON of queer people LOVE that show. This person said that in an online room full of queers, and not a single person disagreed with them. I remember sitting there like wtf is going on?? It was my first inkling that something was not right. I put the server on mute and backed away. Disagreement, discussion, and friendly arguments are normal in a business casual server like that. To see zero people disagreeing with the main person is bizarre and made me think that person must do something that makes others afraid to disagree with them, whether it’s anger, kicking people out, or using passive aggression to get them to do or say what they want.

This behavior gets worse when those in a position of power, like a beloved author, cultivate parasocial relationships with people in their Discord servers or Facebook groups, especially readers. Those readers are often following them on social media as well, and no matter what, the author is in a position of power within those groups. What begins as a mention of “drama” on a private server or Facebook group can become a swarm of readers and other writers attacking someone at the subtle behest of the person in power. The person in power has plausible deniability as they never named names or told their followers to go after them. On the contrary, they explicitly stated not to, but they wouldn’t bring it up there unless the unspoken message was to do their bidding. Bringing it up to a best friend or author friend who is also on par with you is one thing. To say it to people who look up to you is leveraging your power, especially if the group is substantially large.

The worst thing is that these readers get trained over time to become enablers by the person in power. If you do my bidding, you will get rewarded by being given attention, being treated like a white knight, or by thinking they are part of some larger social justice crusade (depending on how the disagreement is being spun). In reality, they are being used because they don’t see the larger context of the “drama,” how it started, or what role the person they like has played in instigating it. All they know is what they’ve been told, and because they trust and like this person, they don’t look deeper. People who go against the person in power or who don’t pull their weight are often booted from the group. This once again reinforces the enabler dynamic.

No Evidence or an Evidence-less Crime

I have mixed feelings about demanding proof from a victim as it can be traumatizing or impossible to prove. At the same time, I do think we need to be at least a little critical when someone starts shit with someone else on the internet, especially if they are trying to instigate a pile-on or harassment campaign. If someone is saying someone else is bullying, stalking, or harassing them, there should be proof somewhere. If someone is being accused of ableism, racism, transphobia, etc., there should be proof somewhere. People aren’t usually good at hiding that kind of stuff, and asking someone to show a post or two that prove they have done what someone said isn’t out of line.

One of the things that happened with the person mentioned at the top of the post is that they repeatedly leveled accusations against other people with zero proof. When people asked to see proof they offered to freely show, they never got it and received only excuses. The people who asked for proof weren’t part of the inner circle, so when they pointed it out, they either got hate from the in-group or were ignored. Later, it was revealed that there was no proof because those things didn’t happen. Whenever someone tried to point out they were being a bully, they would accuse the other person of something worse. Leveraging their following, they were able to quickly get public opinion on their side and silence the other person by playing the victim loudly for a crowd (it boils down to classic DARVO tactics).

It puts the other person in a very hard spot because if they react, they look angry, which can be used against them. If they don’t react, they look guilty. But how do you prove you didn’t do something? When I was dealing with *that person*, that was where I got stuck. How do I prove I didn’t harass them? How did I prove I hadn’t spoken to or about them in months? I couldn’t prove what didn’t happen, and they knew it. People who use these tactics know this and use it to their advantage. The worst part is that once it works and they see they can leverage their following and others to shut down the people who point out their bad behavior, they’ll do it over and over again.

Critical thinking? Don’t know her.

Something you may have noticed in all of the situations is people stopped thinking critically. When someone acted like an authority, they didn’t question that they might be wrong or they might be purposely ignoring nuance in a situation that needed it. When someone asked them to get involved in a fight that wasn’t their own, they did it. When someone was attacked for disagreeing, no one stepped out of line to stop them. When they accused someone else of wronging them, no one pointed out there was no evidence. As mentioned in the first section, grifters and bullies rely on herd mentality and compliance in order to get away with the bad things they do for as long as possible. People within their orbit stopped thinking for themselves and relied on someone else to tell them what to think or do, and this behavior had a social pay off for them.

The worst part is that grifters and manipulative people rely on “good people” to do their bidding. Good people want to help their friends or stand up for what is right. Good people don’t question that what they’re doing might not be the right thing because surely their friend wouldn’t do that to them. Unfortunately, good people are easy marks because they aren’t nearly as suspicious of those close to them as they should be. On top of that, they can gain social capital by participating in the harming of others. It feels good to stand up to someone they think is wronging a friend. They also often feel they will lose social capital if they don’t stand up for this person as they might throw it in their face later that they didn’t say anything in their defense, and thus they would lose standing within the group. The most loyal followers get the most social capital within the group.

Being an autistic person who tries to see the best in people, I have been burned a lot, and because of that, I have become suspicious and standoffish. I don’t wish that on others, but I do think it’s a good thing to have a healthy amount of skepticism and to remember that you don’t truly know the people you meet, online or in-person. Are they actually your friend? Is the relationship reciprocal or are you always coming to their aid? Would they drop you like a hot potato or go off on you if you disagreed with something they did? Are you afraid to distance yourself from them because you think they’ll call you out or go after you? If you answered yes to any of these, that is a major red flag, especially the last one.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I wanted to include this as one post, but it’s getting quite lengthy. Next week I’m going to discuss what can possibly be done to deal with this sort of behavior before it goes out of control. I also want to discuss the impact it has on those who the authority/bully turns against because these aren’t victimless crimes, and in online spaces, those victims are usually ignored or forgotten. Check back next week for more on community and bad author behavior.