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Attila vs the Lynch Mob Cult Savages: A Case Study in Twitter “Activism”
Attila Vinczer: The Men’s Rights Revolution Will Be Well-Hydrated
Today, the first in what will be an occasional series of posts on the Twitter activity — sorry, “activism” — of Men’s Rights Activists and other misbegotten misogynistic miscreants.
Sorry about the cheap alliteration at the end of the sentence there, but I’ve spent the last few hours reading Tweets from Attila Vinczer (@Alvhun) and I guess his penchant for tacky rhetorical special effects has rubbed off on me a little.
Attila, the “Activism Director” for Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men, is an energetic Twitter “activist.” While not quite as hateful or vicious as his colleagues Dean Esmay or the now-banned Judgy Bitch (aka Janet Bloomfield), Attila has developed a Twitter style all his own, spewing forth minor masterpieces of overwrought incoherence that are the unintentional result of his attempts to pull off complicated literary maneuvers without a mastery of the basics. There is a kind of poetry to them.
Welcome, my new imaginary Russian friends! Someone bought me another 5000+ fake Twitter followers today
I am killing it in the imaginary Russian demographic.
Добро пожаловать, мои новые воображаемые русских друзей! Пожалуйста, наслаждайтесь Моя прекрасная блог и аккаунт в Twitter.
This, Google Translate tells me, is Russian for “Welcome, my new imaginary Russian friends! Please enjoy my fine blog and Twitter account.”
I popped onto Twitter this morning to discover that I have suddenly become popular in Russia again. Or at least in Imaginary Russia, home to countless imaginary Russians used by Twitterers who aren’t as popular as they want to be, in order to pad their follower account and make themselves look more popular. If you are so inclined, you can buy these imaginary Russians (and imaginary humans of many other nationalities) in bulk from specialists in the imaginary Russian Twitter user business.
I pointed out that some MRAs may have bought tens of thousands of fake Twitter followers. Then some kind soul bought me a thousand of my own.
Fake Twitter followers Also not such a great gift
So last week I pointed out that several A Voice for Menners, as well as one of #GamerGate’s E-list celebrities, had managed to amass impressive armies of fake Twitter followers — more than 70,000 amongst the four of them. Generally speaking, one does not get that many fake followers unless one literally buy them from the sort of sleazy people who make a living selling fake Twitter followers in order to make oneself appear more popular.
The next day some generous soul bought me well over a thousand fake followers to call my own. When I wrote my post, I had a bit more than 5000 followers. Now I have more than 7000, with most of the new additions obviously fake accounts with Russian names, a tiny handful of spammy Tweets to their credit, and pretty much zero followers of their own. Here are a couple of them:
Twitter CEO on trolls and abusers: “We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left.”
A sad day for trolls.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has frankly admitted that his company has done a terrible job of dealing with trolls and abusers. And he’s promised to do better, declaring that Twitter would “start kicking these people off right and left.”
In a remarkably candid note to concerned staffers, obtained and posted online by The Verge, Costolo was blunt about Twitter’s failure to protect its users from harassers:
We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years. It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.
He’s got that right.
Costolo went on to accept personal responsibility for this failure:
Did A Voice for Men’s @deanesmay and @Jackbarnesmra buy thousands of fake Twitter followers?
Are Dean Esmay and Jack Barnes of A Voice for Men following in the fake footsteps of Superbad’s McLovin?
If you’re on Twitter, and have any number of followers at all, you’re going to end up getting followed by some bots — usually spambots looking for people to pester when certain keywords get used.
But when Twitter accounts have more than a relatively small percentage of fake followers, it’s almost certainly because they went out and bought them in order to make themselves look more influential than they really are.
Well, it looks like two of the most active members of A Voice for Men’s Twitter squad have done just that.
Twitter users @BlutalTheDog and @UnseenPerfidy recently ran “Twitter Audits” of a couple of AVFMers who are especially active on Twitter — AVFM “Managing Editor” @deanesmay and @Jackbarnesmra, co-host of AVFM’s Blue Collar Red Pill online radio show. The results weren’t pretty:
“Cultural Marxism” explained in helpful infographic (that somehow manages to avoid using “Le Happy Merchant”) With BONUS CRAP PICS
It’s all so obvious now! (Click to enlarge.)
I‘m sorry, did I say “helpful?” I meant “so convoluted that the diagram-maker eventually gave up drawing lines between boxes because even he couldn’t figure out how all these things allegedly relate to each other.”
I should note that in addition to being a mess, this diagram is also complete bullshit, and that “Cultural Marxism” only exists in the fevered imaginations of neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists, #Gamergaters and Bernard Chapin? For an actual history of “Cultural Marxism” as a boogeyman of the far right, see here. For more lovely “Cultural Marxism” infographics and memes, several of which do include “Le Happy Merchant,” see my earlier post on the subject.
Oh, ok. Here (after the jump) is a crapload of BONUS images I found by searching for “cultural marxism,” this time on Twitter. [CONTENT WARNING: All the bigotries, actual pro-Hitler Tweets, cartoon semi-nudity.]
7 Tactics of Highly Effective Harassers: How A Voice for Men’s Internet Hate Machine works
A Voice for Men mocks the fears of one of its targets of harassment
The self-described “Men’s Human Rights” site A Voice for Men is a hate site trying — admittedly not very hard, or convincingly — to pose as a human rights organization. In reality, as I and various other writers have documented in considerable detail, it’s an organizer and amplifier of hatred, directed at feminists and women more generally.
Much of this hatred is directed at specific targets, mostly though not always feminist women who have offended A Voice for Men’s founder Paul Elam. The aim is generally to terrorize feminists into silence.
I’ve written at length about AVFM’s campaigns of vilification and intimidation in the past; for a recent example as well as numerous links to discussions of past examples, see here.
Today I will look at some of the specific tactics that AVFM uses against its targets – providing, in each case, a recent example.
This, in other words, is how AVFM’s Hate Machine functions. [TRIGGER WARNING for abusive language, discussion of abusive tactics]
Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield tries to lie her way out of a Twitter suspension; here’s proof of her targeted abuse
Slightly censored screenshot of one of Janet Bloomfield’s suspended accounts
Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield may not have mastered the fine art of public relations in the real world, but amongst those who live in imaginary worlds of their own making she is something of a PR genius.
Bloomfield, A Voice for Men’s “Director of Social Media,” was recently booted from Twitter (again) for “targeted abuse” — evidently her harassment of feminist writer Jessica Valenti, which included making up inflammatory fake quotations and attributing them to her.
Antifeminist instigator and serial liar Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield attacks Jessica Valenti for having the abortion that may have saved her life
Janet Bloomfield, reporting from her bunker
Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield, lovely human being that she is, has resumed her harassment of feminist writer Jessica Valenti. Several months back, you may recall, the integrity-deficient Bloomfield tried to smear Valenti by Tweeting a series of made-up quotes she attributed to the writer.
The fact that the quotes were patently ridiculous, and utterly unlike anything Valenti has ever written, didn’t stop Bloomfield’s army of knucklehead followers from swallowing her lies whole – or, once informed that the quotes were fake, of declaring that they sounded like something someone like her would say.
On Monday, Bloomfield tweeted one of the more obviously fake Valenti quotes that’s been floating around online, and her followers once again responded with predictable outrage against Valenti. Their response included this lovely tweet below from a proud #GamerGater and rabid feminist-hater by the name of Sean Hudspeth:
A new low: One of Zoe Quinn’s harassers was selling rape fanfic about her on Amazon
The “book” as it appeared on Amazon
This is the final day of the We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
Every time you think they can’t go any lower, they go lower. This morning game designer and #GamerGate target Zoe Quinn discovered that someone was selling, er, “erotic fiction” about her on Amazon. Which is to say: a Kindle eBook apparently filled with explicit descriptions of her being gang-raped by five “upset” gamers trying to “teach her a lesson.”
Here’s the author’s blurb for the book:
