You all got the memo about #EndFathersDay fiasco, right – the phony “feminist” hashtag, seeded and spread by 4chan trolls, that aroused so much consternation on Twitter the other day, and that took in so many who’re already given to thinking the worst about feminism?
It would be nice if we could just dismiss this whole thing as trolls being trolls – no harm, no foul. But there’s a bit more to it than that.
For one thing, the troll campaign worked. At least on some people: While feminist writers quickly rushed in to point out that the whole thing was an antifeminist hoax, more than a few in the right-wing media were taken in utterly.
On the National Review Online, Molly Wharton warned that “Twitter anti-fatherists” were taking aim at a holiday that they said “glorifies rape, patriarchy, and child abuse.” The Washington Examiner railed against #EndFathersDay as “the latest ridiculous hashtag from the feminist outrage machine.”
On Fox News’ Fox & Friends, antifeminist author and “Princeton Mom” Susan Patton went further:
They’re not just interested in ending Father’s Day, they’re interested in ending men. …That’s really what they want.
A similar warning came from the self-proclaimed leader of the self-proclaimed Men’s Human Rights Movement:
https://twitter.com/AVoiceForMen/status/477679872761135104
The Daily Caller tried to play it a bit cooler, acknowledging that the phony campaign had started with 4chan but contending that “feminists quickly picked it up and ran with it.”
The evidence? The alarmists cited tweets like this one, from “Phoebe Kwon” a self-proclaimed “Lesbian, Korean American, Feminist” from “San Fransico.” [sic]
https://twitter.com/PhoebeKwon/statuses/477262894552195072
Kwon was also responsible for this charmingly subtle Tweet – I’m not sure how the right-wingers missed this one.
https://twitter.com/PhoebeKwon/status/477294012492431362
Had any of these commentators looked closely at the “outrageous” tweets cited as evidence of this feminist anti-fatherite uprising they might have figured out that something was up: They all seemed to come from a tiny handful of Twitter accounts, most with only a few followers, many of them festooned with elaborate Social Justice Warrioresque self descriptions, like this one, from @CisHate11
Polyamorous Pansexual Otherkin (faerie), Marxist Misandrist. Fucker of the patriarchy. I majored in womyns studies and procrastination
Phoebe Kwon, one of the most-quoted of all the alleged anti-fatherites, not only spelled the name of her alleged home city wrong; as one We Hunted the Mammoth reader pointed out to me, her avatar was actually a stock photo:
And, oh yeah, 4channers – at least those in on the joke – have acknowledged her as one of their own.
As the Daily Dot noted, this was not the first time 4channers had angered the gullible and annoyed real feminists with a fake feminist #hashtag campaign. In January they got some traction with a phony “thinspo” campaign “BikiniBridge,” celebrating what one Tumblr blog called “the graceful space created by a woman’s hip bones suspending bikini bottoms from their abdomens.”
This was followed by the even more ridiculous Operation Freebleeding, which denounced tampons and sanitary pads and all devices used to staunch the flow of menstrual blood as tools of the patriarchy.
So, some trolls trolled some people. Big deal right?
Well, not exactly. Because this isn’t just trolling for the sake of trolling. This is trolling with an agenda.
If you scroll back through “Phoebe Kwon’s” tweets, you’ll see that “her” account originated back in August of 2013, in the midst of a Twitterstorm around the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen. While that hashtag was a real one, started and promoted by feminist/womanist women of color to critique white allies (and “allies”), 4channers jumped into the fray with fake Twitter accounts in an attempt to poison the discussion and further divide feminists along racial lines.
“Kwon” and other faux accounts also jumped into the more recent #YesAllWomen hashtag with deliberately and sometimes ridiculously inflammatory tweets.
https://twitter.com/PhoebeKwon/status/367766686503407616
https://twitter.com/PhoebeKwon/status/367460519776485376
The trolls behind these campaigns aren’t just trolls out to create chaos, though they are that. They’re also racist, homophobic, transphobic bigots out to fuck over feminism.
Indeed, a few months ago, a writer for Roosh Valizadeh’s Return of Kings blog who goes only by Douglas reported that he’d gotten a mysterious message from someone called “Bavarian,” who told him that 4chan’s antifeminist campaigns were all part of something called “Operation Lollipop,” a “black propaganda” campaign to fracture feminism. Bavarian wrote:
I was told you are interested in my group’s (Codename: Lollipop) ongoing operation against the PoOs (People of Oppression). My group poses as feminists on twitter. We bait other PoOs into agreeing with us as we subtly move them more and more to the extreme. The purpose is to make moderate feminists turned off with the movement, as well as cause infighting within the group. …
We manly pose as women of color and argue with white feminists. We “check their privilege” to the point that they are fed up. For example, if they say “it’s not our time to talk, white ladies, it’s our time to listen,” we say “the last time white women just listened, George Zimmerman walked free.”
The campaign began during Hugo Schwyzer’s public meltdown, which Bavarian described as filtered through his own racist lens:
This group started when the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen started trending. It referred to an incident where the feminist Hugo Schwartz [sic] had a mental breakdown and revealed on twitter that feminism was a fraud. He further revealed that WoC were incompetent and only got in the way of the movement. Some white women offered him sympathy and told him to get help. The WoC got angry and started the hashtag.
Bavarian pointed him to a page documenting the phony tweets, many of which come from the same accounts that posted the most outrageous #EndFathersDay tweets. (The site he linked to is now down, but this blog, still available through the Wayback Machine, appears to be some sort of mirror.)
Douglas, for his part, was delighted by the deviousness of it all.
I can only imagine the chaos such an operation would wreak upon the feminists. I look forward to seeing how it all works out. Maybe it will cause the level of mistrust to skyrocket to levels that would hinder the feminist machine. Maybe it will give me more things to laugh at on the internet. All I know is this concept is quite dastardly and funny.
It’s all a bit ridiculously cloak and dagger, but I don’t think we can dismiss it as a joke. The people behind it are trolls, sure, but they are also nasty bigots obsessed with fucking up feminism and “progressives” in general. And people still get fooled by these campaigns.
Now that we know what they’re up to, the trolls may find it harder to fool quite so many people in the future. They may keep trying, to lesser and lesser effect. Or they might come up with something a bit more sophisticated. I guess we’ll see.
EDITED TO ADD: Check out the Twitter hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing, devoted to exposing these fake accounts; so far they’ve IDed 200 or so. This Storify is useful, too.
Well do you?!
“Do you have any persuasive measures aside from smack talk?”
Anything else you can bring to the table?
It’s trollnderdome!
Coherent arguments? In the comments section of a feminist comedy blog?
You have come to the wrong place.
I think this calls for another horse guys. So sorry that you’re an ableist piece of shit.
Ableism is another one o’ them stupid SJW words.
Can we email David to ban this fucking ableist troll? Please?
Yeah, how dare people care about social justice! What terrible people they are for not wanting to be bigots!
Yeah, ban me. I’m distorting the echoes in your chamber by not being a loony SJW.
“Coherent arguments?”
Which you didn’t bring any??!!
“In the comments section of a feminist comedy blog?”
Now we’re comedian?! LOL,At least we’re not extremist anymore…..
<blockquote>I’ve never heard of “greentexting” before (I’ve never been anywhere near 4chan). What is it supposed to mean?</blockquote>
to my understanding. Greentexting is like a blockquote/linebreak feature in 4chan. When people put the > sign before a line makes the preceding text green. They use it over there to quote each other (and then calling them a f*g), make “amusing” stories and call the OP a f*g. 4chan isn’t really original.
Oh man, Macai. Does that take me back. Still hurtin’ from being run off Something Awful for being a disturbingly misogynist, neutron-star dense, pathetic excuse for a person?
“Can we email David to ban this fucking ableist troll? Please?”
Nope.it takes out all the fun.Engaged with him…
I am at a loss. How am I so bad at html? I don’t think I could bork this many blockquotes in a row if I tried.
Once more, with feeling:
Agreed.
This is just about pixels on a screen to him. It’s an amusing past time, insulting women and telling them that their lived experiences never happened.
I had a guy tell me aspects of my appearance were sexy and could he help me carry my things to my car this Sunday while I was checking out with snacks for my fam right before a road trip.
I know if he’d seen my husband gassing up the car or the kids in that car he would not have offered to do something for me a sack could and did do. It was a come on and it was not pleasant.
It’s also the exact kind of thing that guys like this would tell me I should appreciate.
That’s not a compliment and an attempt to do me a favor. It was creepy and embarrassing and I never stopped smiling, but I could not get away fast enough. I excused myself politely and never stopped smiling because it could have turned from, “Hey, Sexy can I help you carry that to your car?” to “Fuck you, b*tch!” being screamed in my face (or worse) and I did not need that before I took the kids to see my father’s grave on Father’s Day.
Now, I don’t think that guy knew he was putting me in that position. I’m sure he knew it was a come on, but not that the come on was creepy. He may have, but he came off as not having a clue. I don’t think he knew how nasty that shit is. For all I know, it’s worked for him in the past. I think he really thought I might take him home and bang him for being so “nice” and “thoughtful” and that was the only thing he considered. My feelings, my plans for the day etc. weren’t on his mind. What he wanted was.
That’s why we talk about harassment etc. We need other women to know they are not alone and we need men to know that this behavior is not OK. Me existing in the same space as a strange man is not inviting him to tell me how my appearance affects his boner.
Asking to follow me to the parking lot after telling my about his boner? Yeah, that shit is just scary.
The problem does not lie in this happening once. It lies in knowing that these things can happen anyplace and at any time. It lies in knowing that I can’t really tell the difference between sort of self centered and hopeful for a lay and enjoying making me uncomfortable and being willing to take that discomfort to the next level if I’m not “grateful” for the attention.
Most men will never know what that feels like and many of them won’t ever care because they see women as objects who exist for their gratification anyway. That point of view being popular, does not make it right.
Dude, you just outright refused to present a coherent argument. A threat to our thinking you are not.
“Social justice warrior” and “loony” are supposed to be insults.
therealmacai, why would you think being concerned with justice and anti-bigotry would be an insult? Why would you think having a mental illness would be an insult?
You’re really bad at this trolling thing.
It’s almost like it’s a crime to want to be a decent human being who doesn’t hate women! *eye roll*
Someone came onto Lea in a grocery store. She politely declined and the guy doing so dropped the issue and moved on with his life. #YesAllWomen are oppressed, this is not #FirstWorldProblems.
“I’m distorting the echoes in your chamber by not being a loony SJW.”
No,you are the ECHOS….
Two trolls enter, one troll leaves!
Two trolls enter, one troll leaves!
Two trolls enter, one troll leaves!
…I love it.
Awww, did the troll get a sad when I pointed out that he’s an immoral asshat with no right at all to spew his bigoted bullshit here?
Aww….pudd’n, do you need a fresh diaper and the snot wiped off your lip?
So sad, so very sad when you show people who you are and they laugh at you and tell you you CAN do what you want, ELSEWHERE and that doing it makes you a horrible person.
I suppose I could go punch a pony in the face, but that would make me a shitty, shitty person and while you clearly revel in your shittiness, most people do not.
Yes, you will shortly be banned and before you are, you will be told exactly what a disgusting, mewling little toad you are. Go cry us a river, hater. We’ll go for a pleasure cruise in it.
I dated this guy, I’m sure of it.
The trolls try to spout the most ridiculous nonsense they can. Whichever we deem more entertaining is allowed to keep posting. The other one gets banned.
“Someone came onto Lea in a grocery store. She politely declined and the guy doing so dropped the issue and moved on with his life. #YesAllWomen are oppressed, this is not #FirstWorldProblems.”
The correct imaginary situation would be someone came onto Lea in a grocery store.She politely declined but the guy persisted,she snapped,and the guy called on her for being such a bitch saying that was totally uncnecessary and calling on the guys to agree with him women are such evil because they oppressed men with their butts.#YesAllMen are oppressed, this is not #FirstWorldProblems.
…Really?
Here’s some very good advice for you, therealmacai
Take it.
Another situation…
Someone came onto Lea in a grocery store.Grab her butt and she slapped the guy for doing so dropped he brings up the issue in manosphere and accussed women were asking for it and claiming that there is lot of false rape accusers in real life and and moved on with his life. #YesAllWomen are oppressing the meeenz, this is not #FirstWorldProblems.