EDIT: Bloomfield says she found the screenshot on Facebook. Details below.
Janet Bloomfield – A Voice for Men’s compulsively lying “social media director” – is at it again.
A couple of months back, Bloomfield – who goes by JudgyBitch1 on Twitter – decided for some reason that she could best serve AVFM’s social media directing needs by straight-up libeling feminist writer Jessica Valenti – by making up inflammatory quotes and attributing them to Valenti in a series of Tweets. She later boasted in on her blog that the quotes – which she admitted she’d conjured out of thin air – had inflamed hatred of Valenti and caused her to catch “a bit of hell.”
Now Bloomfield is pulling the exact same stunt again. This time, her target is feminist cultural critic and #GamerGate bete noire Anita Sarkeesian.
On Saturday, Bloomfield tweeted an obviously doctored “screenshot” of a tweet that Sarkeesian never made.
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/518538483405975552
Screenshot here in case she takes it down or gets tossed off Twitter again; here’s another screenshot including replies from JB’s fans.
How do we know this is fake? Well, whoever made this fake screenshot made one glaringly obvious mistake: this Tweet is way too long to be a real tweet. Twitter, as you probably know, has a strict limit on the number of characters you can use in a Tweet. 140. This fake tweet has 218.
Here’s what happened when I typed the same text into Twitter myself: as you can see, I went over the limit by 78 characters. That’s, uh, a lot.
As you can see, the “Tweet” button is disabled; it’s simply impossible to post Tweets that are too long.
Looking back through Sarkeesian’s Twitter timeline, I found the real Tweet that she posted at 2:32 PM on the 29th of September.
"Siskel and Ebert made their own 'tropes vs. women' video in 1980" via @Polygon http://t.co/5CxJxfH2YI
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) September 29, 2014
As you can see, not only does the time match, but the numbers of favorites and retweets is roughly the same as well; there have only been a handful more added since the fake screenshot was made. Whoever made the fake tweet obviously just screenshotted this real tweet and then pasted in new text using the same font used by Twitter.
The sheer incompetence is astounding.
Did Bloomfield make this Tweet herself, or did she simply pass along a fake screenshot she found somewhere else? Well, Google Images couldn’t find any other instances of this fake screenshot on the internet; Bloomfield appears to be the first person to post it. Which suggests that either she or someone she knows made it – or someone else made it and sent it to her, and she posted it on the internet without checking to see if it was real.
Given her proclivity for making up quotes and attributing them to her enemies, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that I think she had something to do with creating the fake screenshot.
EDIT: Bloomfield says she found the screenshot on Facebook, on a page called Feminist Crazy Quotes, where it seems to have first appeared. Here’s her Facebook repost of it. It’s not clear where Feminist Crazy Quotes got it, as I can’t find any other instances of the tweet on the internet using Google Image search. It’s still not clear why the supposed “social media director” of AVFM, a woman who seems to spend half her life on Twitter, would not immediately realize that the Tweet was way too long to be a real Tweet.
If you scroll down through the responses to Bloomfield’s tweet, you’ll notice that Bloomfield’s fans ate this blatant deception right up; inclined to believe the worst about Sarkeesian, they easily convinced themselves that this preposterous, overlong, literally impossible tweet was real. And Bloomfield was in the thick of it, egging on their hate.
@JudgyBitch1 @femfreq Does this twat ever NOT complain about anything? Her vagina must be dryer than California's crops this year
— BigAngryPhil (@TheBigAngryPhil) October 4, 2014
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/518539850656784384
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/518540314953650176
When one #GamerGater noted that the quote seemed a bit much, even for the hated Sarkeesian, another commenter pulled out the “radfem” card.
https://twitter.com/JohnCobalt/status/518540889715920897
It goes without saying that Sarkeesian is not, in fact, a radical feminist.
When a few other tweeters pointed out the obvious – that Sarkeesian’s alleged tweet was in fact way too long to be a real tweet – Bloonfield fell back on the same “logic” she used when she was called out for making up quotes about Valenti: well, she may not have said this, but doesn’t it sound like something Sarkeesian would say?
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/518541193169616896
No she wouldn’t. She didn’t. If she had, you wouldn’t need to use a fake screenshot to demonize her.
Amazingly, even after the tweet had been revealed to be fake, even after JB was reduced to claiming it was a “Poe” – just as she did with the fake Valenti quotes – the hatefest continued on, with dozens more tweets from JB’s peanut gallery denouncing Sarkeesian for her imaginary racism.
Here are just a few of them:
@JudgyBitch1 @femfreq Your racism is more disgusting than the anime that comes out of Japan. That's why you only cater to white women.
— Pepper #GoldenDeers 🔞 🪷 (@GintaxAlviss) October 4, 2014
@JudgyBitch1 @femfreq Obviously Anita who has constantly made racist statements about Japan. But a white woman like her oppresses minorities
— Pepper #GoldenDeers 🔞 🪷 (@GintaxAlviss) October 4, 2014
@JudgyBitch1 @JustLaurenB I don't like anime personally but i have to just say it. She's a cunt…….
— online larper (@Trektadactyle) October 5, 2014
@JustLaurenB @Ryang115 @JudgyBitch1 That is like Hitler saying to the Polish you don't have a culture.
Its basically it.— man-size lizard (@bio_nils) October 5, 2014
@DarkCityUK @JustLaurenB @JudgyBitch1 I believe even if she didint tweet that she probably thinks that way.
— online larper (@Trektadactyle) October 5, 2014
@JudgyBitch1 Gee, its almost like she wants to be criticized for her ignorance, just so she can call it "harassment": http://t.co/7ltBxaM6Ev
— Diogenes (@DioWallachia) October 5, 2014
One more prudent Tweeter suggested that Bloomfield might want to take down the blatantly fake screenshot, if only to protect herself.
https://twitter.com/PhoenixCE/status/518811930576691200
Ironically, while going back through Sarkeesian’s timeline to see if I could find the Tweet that was used in the screenshot, I ran across this:
For those asking my @xoxo talk should be online soon. In it I discuss how defamation, libel and slander are often deployed to harass women.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 1, 2014
And while most the overwhelming majority of this defamation comes from angry men, some of it comes from angry women – like Janet Bloomfield — who are every bit as dishonest and abusive as their male counterparts.
What sort of horrible human being goes out of their way to encourage further harassment and more death threats toward a woman whose has already been forced from her home by photoshopping a fake tweet and attributing it to that woman? She actually put effort into her poorly crafted lie. She wants to incite another volley of abuse. Remember when she tried that “I’m so concerned” crap here when she was trying to do the same thing? This is a pattern of behavior. She does not want these women to feel or be safe. She’s happy to lie to see them “punished”. She’s trying to silence them. She needs to be banned from Twitter.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/writer-trolls-conservative-lena-dunham-haters-on-twitter-with-fake-quote-gets-results/
Seems related.
Where are those peoples brains? Do they just leave them on their couches and type away? How could they not know that is a fake tweet? Bitterness can make people really stupid I guess.
How do people fall for this stuff?
Neither of those tweets remotely sounded like the women they were attributed to, but the haters don’t even hesitate to buy it.
At least the fake Lena Dunham quote was meant as a joke. The Anita Sarkeesian one was not. JB was actively stoking the flames of hate and clearly wanted to pass off her fake as genuine.
There has to be some sort of legal action that can be taken against JB. There are laws against defamation and she and her ilk are going to continue with this as long as they get away with it.
Lea
She’s just going to get a different account she really needs to go to jail or something. This needs to stop.
Somebody in the comments said we should retweet her own words. How about starting with “yellow perverts are the worst”? Then she can protest that she doesn’t really mean that, it’s being quoted out of context, because she was only underscoring lies she made up about someone she maliciously tried to injure.
But what’s going on is simply that she’s a racist and this gives her a way to make racist remarks while trying to have a plausible disclaimer, except that she blows that last part and is therefore left with just being a racist. A quotable racist at that.
Actually I think what JB intended is exactly what’s happened: the response from people friendly to her message has split into two groups.
The first group is the group of uncritical jerks already ill disposed to A.S. who are retweeting this as Teh Proof that Sarkeesian is the REAL bad guy because racism GOTCHA and also she hates nerds.
The second group are the ones who are scornfully saying WELL OBVIOUSLY it’s a joke and OMG you SJWs are so TOUCHY and she even says it’s not real. WTF why would you even make a big deal out of this? EVERYBODY knows she’s just doing it to show how ridiculous A.S. can be, NOBODY would take it seriously….
It’s a neat piece of ideological quarantine – the ppl who treat it as fact get a reason to be outraged at one of their favourite Femi-demons, and the people who are slightly smarter get a reason to feel morally superior to the SJW brigade who (in their eyes) are white knighting their heroine against imaginary attacks.
For this to work, both camps have to ignore or dismiss the existence of the other. But ignoring reality doesn’t seem like much of a problem for JB’s fans.
@Robert
Hopefully, at least one of the people to whom she’s attributed fake statements will sue her for libel soon. Jessica Valenti, for one, would definitely have a good case. JB admitted that she made the quotes up, and she gloated about the hell that Valenti caught because of it. You have pretty clear evidence of malicious intent right there.
It took over an hour for someone to Godwin the thread. Is JB losing followers or something?
Oh, and I love this story:
and this one:
I can’t decide who’s more pathetic: Bloomfield for making up an obviously fake tweet, or the people who uncritically accepted the obviously fake tweet.
It probably happened after she got banned from twitter for making a cake!
This Bloomfield seems like a terrible, terrible person. She and AVFM truly deserve each other.
I hope someone sues her for libel.
Barring that a #shitJanetsays tag campaign where we tweet things she really said, with links…not a bad idea.
1) Attribute nasty fake quotes to someone you hate
2) Present these nasty quotes to other people who hate that person
3) Use the willingness of your audience to believe that the person you all hate would say nasty things as evidence that the nasty things actually represen,t or are similar to, the hated person’s real views
4) Conveniently reinterpret the definition of “Poe” to turn your libel into a thoughtful internet experiment
I should have titled that. How about: “How to Make Friends and Influence People (If You Are an Unrepentant Liar and Pretty Much Just All Around Awful Person)”
I absolutely hate it when MRAs pretend to care about things like racism and mental illness, only to make feminism look bad, when they really don’t care about these things at all. Elam and his lackeys talk about suicide and depression in men, but they really don’t care about the plight of the mentally ill at all. They’d complain about taxes if the government decided to put money back into mental health centers.
Now, Bloomfield attempts to paint feminists as racist, despite not caring about racial issues at all. MRAs are the type of people who don’t believe in institutional racism and make “I’m not racist, but…” statements all the time. These are probably the very same people that think that Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin were criminals who deserved to die.
Now she’s cackling about being called out.
That’s like laughing because someone pointed out you shit on the floor.
@strivingally, I think you have it pretty much correct. JB never intended for this obvious piece of fakery to fly in the face of reality. But it does allow her to stir the rage froth among her more gullible followers, while creating a (just barely) plausibly deniable smokescreen of “satire” or whatever. She really does remind me of a toddler making up totally ridiculous lies to get attention. The point is not to be believed or even taken seriously, the point is to turn the spotlight back on herself.
Also, is “yellow perverts” an actual thing that people say about anime fans/creators? Or did JB literally make up a new racial epithet while trying to prove that someone else is racist?
ikanreed:
Exactly. I’ve been watching her videos and following her on Twitter for years now, and I’ve never once seen or heard her use a word like “perverts” or “losers”, not even out of sheer frustration when people were tweeting her images of videogame characters raping her. She is nothing if not measured.
Also, the replies on this are absolutely priceless.
https://twitter.com/Rithimrabbit/status/519127766659510272
https://twitter.com/Dogsplained/status/519128946643046401
“Well I mean, sure, it’s probably fake, but it’s like totally something she would say.”
And yet no one has managed to produce a single racist tweet from Anita so far. C’mon lads, if she really is such a monster, it shouldn’t be difficult to find a real tweet expressing her awful views?
https://twitter.com/lolwtfidk/status/519128812546957313
Also this. These people are really not too familiar with Occam’s Razor if they think that Twitter went out of their way to make an exception to THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ENTIRE PLATFORM just for Anita Sarkeesian.
Also, classic conspiracy theorist tactic: attributing completely disproportionate wealth, power or influence to the presumed of agents of the conspiracy.
Jody,
Didn’t JB get the memo? Women aren’t supposed to giggle about their bodily functions. We aren’t even supposed to have them. That’s what I learned yesterday!
…they actually went to ‘oh, she must get extra characters’?
Every time I think I’ve plumbed just how stupid they can be…
Could the Twitter matriarchy be made any clearer?!?
Tinyorc
http://m.memegenerator.net/instance/48292834?urlName=Spodermandetector&browsingOrder=New&browsingTimeSpan=AllTime
It’s okay, I’m sure the comment about extra characters was just more satire.
Unless you believed it. Then, OMG, isn’t Sarkeesian THE WORST?! More proof her and the SJWs are running the interwebs!
Gosh, didn’t you realise THAT was satire too? God, you SJW types are so eager to get your panties in a bunch…
Repeat ad infinitum. Nothing means anything, ever, except when it’s proof that the people we hate are terrible.