Recently Amanda and I did a Weedy AMA where we answered questions from the Podcast Patreon for a bonus episode – one that starts out pretty cogent and then derails a fair bit as I lose my train of thought.
One of the questions asked, to paraphrase, has online critique softened over the years, and why?
My answer was: Yes. Because safety.
Blogs used to be little micro-communities, and somewhat insulated from the larger internet, and especially from griefing trolls. That hasn’t been true for at least a decade, but it’s even worse now that there are seemingly legions of hobbyists who love to dox individuals whose opinions they don’t like, and engage in a campaign of harassment and misery over said opinion. It’s even more acute now that entire platforms have been given over to these fuckos, and the rhetoric of hate and divide has escalated to violence and assassination.
It’s trendy to attack someone and endanger them because their opinion is unacceptable. This happens on a large and small scale, and I know you have seen it. There are certain people who decide that other human beings aren’t people, or perhaps get so angry they forget. Consideration of humanity is optional, or altogether discouraged.
I started After Dark, in fact, partly to give you a place to comment where your comment, and your username, weren’t as easily accessed. I don’t want to stifle conversation but I recognize that being on the internet and having an opinion can bring on a world of hurt if some rando takes issue. Said randos don’t see their opposition as humans; they are targets to be destroyed.
Critique, as I said in the episode, isn’t softened because we’re all being nicer or whatever. Critique is softened (or not published at all) because I don’t want to deal with unhinged, poorly behaved fans, and especially when those unhinged, poorly behaved fans are weaponized as a collective. It sucks to moderate the comments on a post that’s reached a wider circle than usual, but that’s the job. I take the safety of the comments section very seriously because I, out here using my real name like a giant dumbass, know how dangerous, actually factually real-life dangerous, it can be. I want this to be a safe place to express your opinion.
So, let’s talk about Ali Hazelwood, who was allegedly bullied off Instagram because she preferred one Hunger Games character, and apparently picked the wrong one?
No, seriously. That’s what happened today.
If I’m tracing this fuckery correctly, 8 days ago, a user, allegedly a karma farmer, posted to r/HungerGames a clip of a panel wherein Ali calls Peeta “useless.” Which is clearly in context a hyperbolic joke meant for the audience of that panel? Yet even the comments on that post on Reddit seem to take her opinion so personally.
Hazelwood had, per the last crawl of a search engine because her IG page is in fact gone, nearly 600,000 followers, and she was pretty active, too. Allegedly her comments about Peeta caused such Intense Rage, the number of cruel comments and DMs caused her to nuke her account.
From what I’ve been reading, this situation seems to be a two-pronged problem.
Prong the First (not to be confused with Prong the Elder, or Prong the Haberdasher): Instagram has a shitty user interface.
Per Susan Lee on Threads, Hazelwood is fine, couldn’t figure out how to disable comments, so deleted the account.
Girl. I can relate. Instagram defies my attempts to use it, too.
Prong the Second: Some people are being really shitty, and it’s a continuation of a growing problem in behavior choices, emotional regulation, and access.
There’s a straight downward slope of a line between a person unleashing vitriol over an author expressing preference for a character (again: ??!?!?!?!!!) and doorstepping someone to scream at or kill them. Harassment online can lead to additional acts of violence. I’m not kidding, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating, either. The link between online harassment and offline violence is real, and being studied:
- UN Women: “FAQs: Digital abuse, trolling, stalking, and other forms of technology-facilitated violence against women”
- Pew Research: The State of Online Harassment
- Amnesty International: Online Violence
What’s most infuriating is that this behavior is from people who read a book in 2008 and take that book so personally that they decided to attack Ali Hazelwood about comments she made on a panel with other authors in a discussion that was meant to be tongue-in-cheek and entertaining for the people in the room.
But the behavior choices and lack of emotional regulation are alarming.
This isn’t neckbearded trolls with compromised assessments of their own position in the world.
This is us. This is allegedly book fandoms.
Stop it.
This situation, which is simultaneously scary and harmful, and deeply fucking unhinged and asinine, is a combination of a number of negative factors, each of which could be a whole essay.
- There’s the intense one-sided relationships some fans have with authors, with books, or with characters (or all three).
- There’s the flattening of an author (who is, in fact, usually a person, AI notwithstanding) into not being a person, but being an idea or a figure to be railed at or against.
- There’s the expectation that an author will connect with readers as part of their job, and will cultivate that connection on social media.
- There’s the social expectation of performing moral and ethical correctness especially online. Whether or not actual behavior is moral and ethical or correct is irrelevant. The point is the performance of correctness: like the correct people, like the correct things, etc.
- There’s the unleashed and encouraged rage that has led to real life violence that frequently starts online.
- There’s the knowledge that stating an opinion publicly might mean someone tries to harm, embarrass, or kill you.
Now, I have unleashed many a rageful opinion (I have many! Ask me about influencer children, mommy blogging, and child endangerment and exploitation) and I have most definitely hurt someone’s feelings with my opinion about a book or the genre or anything. But as I’ve said many times, the book and the author are very separate things. I see miles of distance between the book and the person. I’m talking about a book most of the time. It doesn’t have feelings.
For example, I don’t like Ali Hazelwood’s books. I’ve tried several. They are not my thing.
But to some readers, I’ve just written down some treasonous statements worthy of many, many angry email messages and social media DMs. Y’all, my inbox is a busy place, so please get in line. Your email will be deleted in the order in which it was received.
Apparently at this point in the timeline, readers with feelings about book characters felt that hurling rage and hatred about Peeta (PEETA) was and is acceptable behavior?
If it weren’t so frightening to see digital harassment turn into assassinations, this might have been a funny story someday.
Like consider the absurdity of telling someone who isn’t online that Ali Hazelwood, a world-famous bestselling author, nuked her entire Instagram because people were digitally abusing her over a joke comment she made on an author panel about Peeta, a 2008 character who isn’t real. And because Instagram’s UX sucks, don’t forget that part.
So, yeah, critique hasn’t softened. It’s retreated. Places to express a critical opinion are becoming fewer and more private, and to express a critical opinion is to invite a world of hurt.
Y’all. It’s a book character. Please calm down. You’re ruining things.
Apparently it does?
Can you just not?
I can’t figure out Instagram either. I keep trying, because there are lots of quilters there, but I find it confusing and I have better uses for my time – like reading good books.
I have not read any Ali Hazelwood books, but I seem to recall she had another issue earlier this year where people on the internet jumped all over her. I can’t remember what it was right now, probably will once I hit submit, but people need to just calm down and be nicer to each other.
This is so fucking sad and scary, and especially from the romance community which used to be a welcoming and supportive place (relative to the rest of the internet).
I had to scroll through the Reddit link you shared to even really understand why anyone would be upset about dissing on Peeta. Wasn’t that a pretty common fun and harmless part of the fandom for HG? Team Peeta vs Team Gale was right up there with Team Edward vs Team Jacob in those oh-so-harmless days of the mid-00s. And, I mean, she’s not wrong…Peeta is pretty useless he just doesn’t end the book with a morally gray vision for the future.
So many things about this are wrong, but one point Sarah made that really sticks with me is the idea of the performance of “right” and “correct”. Yes, there are big picture, fate of the country, take down fascism type opinions that are morally right and they contrast pretty sharply with the ones that are morally wrong.
But many opinions are just opinions and being able to intelligently discuss and debate them used to be safe and fun.
Fans shouldn’t be afraid to debate their favorite art with each other, and just as importantly they shouldn’t make their favorite artists afraid to discuss their art (or anyone else’s) with their fans.
I think people being abusive on the internet is an old issue. However, it feels escalated now when compared to the old-school flame wars and the like.
I have never and will never understand why some people are just so angry. Online bullying of any kind is so stupid. You have nothing going on in your life? You have to resort to bullying strangers? I just can’t handle that kind of BS.
Not sarcastic:
Maybe we should have adopted not just social distancing, but social media distancing, during COVID. Being rather antisocial at the best of times, I thought 6 foot separation was about 18 feet too close. And I’d say the same for distance-to-the-keyboard for any social media
privacy invasionplatform.I’ve been saying for several years that people will post the most awful, hurtful, ugly comments on a website and they would never, ever say that crap to someone’s face. They feel bold and/or brazen when they’re not having to show their face. Keyboard warriors.
Thank you for introducing Smart Bitches After Dark. I really appreciate the attempt to allow people a safer space to discuss books and ideas.
These problems have been around for decades. This is the”widening gyre,” and indeed, “the center cannot hold.” Free speech works best in a society that has non-legislated common standards of behavior and natural consequences for transgressing against those standards. Sadly we’ve lost most of this type of social restraint, especially since big money tech has learned how to monetize phony outrage.
It’s the feeling of being powerless that gets to me. That’s why I’ve been steadily paring away my online involvement on social media. I’m down to a trio of blogs (legacy tech!) that are sternly moderated or populated exclusively by civilized people. and a handful of newsletters from authors I respect. Then there’s Bluesky, where bland solemnity is the price of civilized discourse. Frankly, I think Hazelwood did the right thing. It’s not enough to not feed the trolls; you have to burn the trough.
Very well said, especially about the use of online abuse to silence women. Thank you.
“There’s the social expectation of performing moral and ethical correctness especially online. Whether or not actual behavior is moral and ethical or correct is irrelevant. The point is the performance of correctness: like the correct people, like the correct things, etc”
This!!! If you step outside the perceived correct opinion the ton of bricks come down. I have heard rumours that this is why several famous romance authors are no longer writing. I personally feel this is why romance in general is stagnating (just my personal opinion).
Ugh. I quit all social media several years ago and its been such an enhancement to my quality of life. On the rare occasion I feel the need to add my voice to a comments section, I take a breath first and think, is this really necessary, or am I just venting something out in to the void. Its trite to say, but a lot of these people need to go touch grass.
There are many artists/creators whom I don’t like (for many reasons! or no reason!) but if I don’t like them I DON’T FOLLOW THEM. Simple as that. Now if someone I like/respect shares an opinion that I don’t agree with, I may have to reevaluate my stance with them, but come on. Its a character in a book. I even LIKE Peeta. But he’s dull! (that’s the point of him I think, welcome to my Ted Talk).
The internet has really fostered the growth of parasocial relationships, and people thinking everyone “owes” them or should agree with them on all things. And that on the whole is Really Bad.
What a mess.
I saw this on Reddit last night and was like WTAF but sadly not surprised either. Having spent time on some of the Maasverse subreddits, people receive absolutely vile responses to their takes on a deeply entertaining but admittedly batshit and often completely silly bunch of books. Fictional books, set in a fantasy world. As emily.c says above, what happened to the lighthearted days of Team Edward v Team Jacob?
I think PamG is 100% right about natural consequences, as reflected by the fact that very few of the bullies would make their online comments in person. Decades ago I said something asshole-y to an acquaintance–it was meant as a joke, but I was really young and didn’t understand that we didn’t have the kind of relationship in which they would hear it that way. I can still remember the looks of shock on the faces of everyone else present and feel the shame–you can bet I never spoke to anyone like that again. Social media really insulates people from those consequences, especially since the algorithms have broken chronology so you aren’t reading dialogues in order.
Not that it should matter, but this doubly breaks my heart because Ali Hazelwood is the epitome of “one of us” romance reader turned author. She’s dedicated books to Nalini Singh because of how influential her work was. She’s been active in fandom spaces for ages. And now that she’s more famous, she’s used her platform and voice to highlight marginalized authors. To the point about the weird pararelationships people think they have with authors/famous people – I definitely don’t know her well. But what I’ve seen makes me respect her as an author and a human being, so I hate that someone who genuinely seems to be trying to do right by her fans and the world at large got so much hatred over something so truly asinine.
Very well written, thank you.
I’ll take it a step further, she’s allowed to dislike Peeta and not be joking about it. Please don’t get me wrong, because I LOVE certain characters , die hard Veronica Mars girlie, but people’s attachment to fictional characters ought to be studied. I know there’s a loneliness epidemic, and more and more you kind of understand why. Folks don’t know how to be human anymore .
Well I guess those trolls would hate me. I didn’t care much for either of those characters by the time I finished reading the original trilogy. I’m a Cinna girl 100%. (Especially after he was portrayed by one Lenny Kravitz, thank you very much.) 🙂
This is why I say I’m fan of something, but not as a collective fan ‘base’.
This is why I prefer the Outlander TV series to the books, and partly why I stopped reading them. (Yep, I said it. Not ONE damn regret after what some of the book fans out there put me through.)
It’s almost like having a negative experience with church or religion if you think about it. If you gang up on someone for having the slightest difference of opinion, don’t be surprised if they leave. Some fandoms can’t afford to act like this, and yet they do it anyway, and then bitch and whine about how small their fandom is.
It’s so wrong on so many levels.
As an aside, IG is effed up. First, they just started deleting my comments and restricting me from commenting, and by commenting I mean the required hashtag giveaway on some book giveaways. Then, I had my account suspended 4x for tagging friends. I was lucky and immediately got it back, with a fake apology, but I was restricted from commenting for 3 days after those, but the last time, they made me do a mug shot video to prove I’m human.
The alleged violation of TOS is “amplifying the volume”–I was tagging friends who were okay with me tagging them for book giveaways–I wasn’t being offensive.
There’s no help.
I feel bad for authors who now have to do their own publicity, and mainly depend on social media, which mostly sucks. I know some authors, like Minerva Spencer, have given it up entirely, and just gone back to websites and newsletters.
I think the internet stopped being fun when commenting by the common person (i.e. not a coder/software engineer) became easier, even expected. Back in my day, the best you could do was a really chaotic chat room or a clunky bulletin board. But now we’re all supposed to interact with each other and express every opinion and thought we possess and post pictures all the time. I hate it. And I do realize the irony of stating this here, in the comments section. But SBTB is *literally* one of only a handful of websites I visit for fun or news. Everything else is completely utilitarian. And I stay the hell away all the social media sites.
Now I’ve just got to figure out a way to keep those dang kids off my lawn.
This furor over a romantic fantasist’s take on one entirely fictional character calls to mind Vice President Dan Quayle’s 1992 screed about that immoral woman, Murphy Brown and her (gasp!) intentionally illegitimate child!
What on earth is even happening?! This is absurd, and it is quite disheartening that there are people who believe that bullying people online or in person is an acceptable action to take. (Sorry, I realize that sounds naive–I realize that yes, the world is full of jerks, but truly, it is hard to stomach that this is a thing…)
I STILL REMEMBER her friend/producer saying, “MURPHY. It’s DAN QUAYLE.” The writers of that show must have been like, what did we do to deserve such a gift?
@Lauren: Thank you! I’m honored you visit for fun and feel safe in the comments. Like I said, I take that part very seriously.
It’s driving me nuts as I am Team Gale, but have grown to appreciate Peeta. I came across a reel where the creator was agreeing that people who were Team Gale needed therapy in the comments. How condescending can you be?
It can happen to anyone. Just earlier this year, a fellow self-published “author” (I have my doubts that they were a real person or a front for a scam) harasses and stalked me for rating their book 3/5 on Goodreads…and then accused me of transphobia when I defended myself and attempts to clarify that I think 3/5 is a decent rating. Things spiralled and they fucking doxed me and sent me and my family death threats and hilarious fake lawsuit emails accusing me of “defamation”. Fun times! People on the internet be CRAZY.
@Sarah, this piece of was mention yesterday’s Book Riot podcast! I might have shrieked when both host mentioned how much they love the Smart Bitches site!
@CarrieA: A bit of a deep cut, but I used to write for Book Riot. One of my more popular posts was “I Drank Wine and Read the New York Times Romance Roundup.” This was before Olivia Waite.
@Amanda, that is so cool! I would have enjoyed reading that post, but it’s no longer on the site.
@Carrie A: Found it!
@CarrieA: Oh my gosh, that totally makes my week. Thank you for sharing! Off to listen!