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.
Can someone with knowledge of twitter explain why JB’s tweet only has 7 replies now? The archived copy in this article has dozens and dozens; did all these different users independently decide to delete their tweets? Am I not seeing the full display somehow?
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/518538483405975552
What the ever-loving hell. Way to go Judgytwit, you once again prove your mastery of PR by casually appropriating racist slurs to showcase your concern over supposedly ‘racist’ content.
As one of those ‘yellow bastards’, I’m thrilled that she feels she has the cultural right to use that derogatory term so freely on such a public platform. No, really. Especially in response to an obnoxious tweet that she likely cack-handedly generated herself. I’m sure my special snowflakeness will be soothed with the reassurance that ‘bastards’ may be being used by this asshat as a gendered slur and so will only fully apply to male Japanese family and friends.
I’m sure Twitter will also be thrilled when I flood their complaints box. FFS, what a complete asshat.
@Robert Ramirez:
IANAL, but in this case I don’t think Sarkeesian could successfully sue. For a libel suit to succeed, the plaintiff has to demonstrate that the lie caused them harm (unless the lie is libel per se). That is, they have to demonstrate that, due to reading the lie, one or more people behaved differently than they would have if they hadn’t read the lie, with the difference harming the plaintiff. For instance, someone was going to hire Sarkeesian for a job, read the fake tweet, changed their mind, and didn’t hire her. Thing is, anyone who would hire Sarkeesian would never believe the fake tweet, while the type of person who would believe the fake tweet wouldn’t hire her regardless of whether or not they had read the fake tweet.
I’m not sure the “sure it was with malicious intent, but these people would hate her anyway” defense would actually stand up in court.
@fruitloopsie, your link is not working!
There really is no bottom to this barrel of nimwits, is there.
If they weren’t all so feckin’ racist themselves, they’d be halfway to China by now.
The fake tweet isn’t racist because, to the extent it’s true, it describes anime that are made by and for otaku. Most Japanese people would be insulted by the idea that otaku are representative of Japanese in general because otaku are considered perverts and losers in Japan. In other words, they’re already a group that gets generalized, even by themselves. And the manga/game/light novel/anime-oriented otaku have formed a particular subculture. Generalizing about sexism in the media aimed at that subculture is no more racist than is generalizing about the sexism in AAA games.
Of course, since a lot of otaku-oriented anime follow the formula of “apparent-beta/actual-alpha Gary Stu kicks everyone’s ass while surrounded by half a dozen cute girls who want to leap on his dick,” I can see why MRAs would be defensive.
Tinyorc
How about now?
http://memegenerator.net/instance/48292834?urlName=Spodermandetector&browsingOrder=New&browsingTimeSpan=AllTime
@Buttercup: No, I see it too. Definitely from bad copy-paste job.
“The fake tweet isn’t racist because, ”
There’s no need to analyze fake messages, so what are you talking about?
The low-res over-compression shadow on the text of the fake tweet is because JB got it from an image uploaded to Facebook – I created my own fake tweet and it looked fine on the generator site, but when I uploaded it to FB it looked like crap.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/lemmetweet/tweet/imgs/QwvdnzAUTBdFEJjOyYxDbaob.jpg20141006-2-1h80kbo?1412628688
vs
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152771017699808&set=a.159832174807.145078.775614807&type=1&permPage=1
@Binjabreel:
What I said wasn’t something that would be used as a defense, but was rather my guess that Sarkeesian wouldn’t be able to find anyone who’d changed their behaviour towards her because of the fake tweet, where the change in the behavior would be something a court would consider damages in the context of libel. She has to find at least one such person as evidence that the lie caused her “actual damages”. If she can’t find any such person, she can’t simply go to the court, say “well, obviously there were actual damages”, and then force JB to demonstrate that there weren’t any damages. If the lie was an example of libel per se then the existence of damages would be assumed by the court, but I don’t think that’s the case here.
What about proving that there was a clear increase in the (I assume continuous at this point) stream of online harassment she gets right after the publication of the fake tweet?
@Sarah:
Again, IANAL, but I don’t think that would fall under libel laws. I think I’ll go ask an actual lawyer about it.
idledillettante sez:
I’m talking about the message’s content because the contents are being called racist when they’re not. (Well, the implication that Japan puts out an inordinate amount of sexist and misogynistic forms of media is, but that’s not what the MRAs are losing their shit over.)
@Matthew
To be fair, might it depend on what country the case is held in? Isn’t Sarkeesian Canadian? From what i understand virtually every country has stricter libel laws than the US, making it easier for cases to be brought before a judge, so it’s not unthinkable that a case in a Canadian court could be successful for Sarkeesian.
The racist/non-racist attributes of the fake tweet are irrelevant. Because the tweet is fake. It was faked by someone who clearly meant it to be racist, because JB called it racist, and accompanied it with racist commentary.
Doing a textual analysis of a fake tweet to determine whether or not it is actually racist is a strange exercise and a waste of time. Any lack of racism in the fake tweet represents a failure on JB’s part to insert the racism that she intended to be there.
Buttercup
I can see it too. It’s like they pasted line by line, or something. Hell, PhotoStudio has a text feature that gives much better results than that, and it’s way less sophisticated than Photoshop.
taitasanchez
That’s very hard to imagine indeed.
It’s even harder to imagine that JB knows what PR means…
@Policy of Madness
Have you see the update to the OP? JB isn’t the source of the fake tweet. And there’s nothing wrong with pointing out that the contents aren’t objectionable (in the way people are objecting to them) for the sake of those who do criticize sexism in anime. After all, this isn’t just about Sarkeesian but about the MRA’s attempt to characterize any criticism of sexism as unforgivably outrageous.
The tweet claiming Faknita was “granted a ton more characters” was simply hilariously stupid, but this one in response to someone pointing out that the fake tweet has too many characters to be legit makes so little sense that it broke my brain. The well worn cliche “truth is stranger is fiction” isn’t a difficult concept #GG dude, what have you done to it? This person’s non-excuse/fake explination is even less coherent than JudgyB’s, which is quite a achievement.
The gray halo is just jpg artifacts. It’s just something that happens with jpgs as you lose fidelity.
Well, I would be extremely shocked if any of these people watched a single piece of media that Anita Sarkeesian or Lena Dunham actually created.
I have to say, as an anime fan, I think you might be getting the wrong idea about it. It’s just a medium, animation from Japan. Within anime there are several different genres, and every genre has a distinct style and characteristic.
A whole lot of anime is aimed towards girls and women. Look at something like Vampire Knight, Ouran Host Club, Fruits Basket etc…
Many appeal to both girls and guys, such as Death Note, Inuyasha, etc..
And even in the genres that tend to appeal to guys, not all of them are like that.
I don’t mind criticizing certain titles and tropes within anime. There is some problematic stuff, even within my favorite shows (such as Ouran Host Club), but reducing it to a “medium for perverts” isn’t really fair.
But again, this tweet is fake, so there’s no need to analyze it. I’m just responding to one of the comments here.
I asked a lawyer who knows about this stuff (at least for U.S. law), and his answer was “it depends”.
@David:
IIRC, the U.S. will only enforce a defamation ruling from a foreign government if it’s a ruling that, in theory, could have been granted in the U.S. courts. So if JB lives in the U.S., has no assets in Canada, and never visits Canada, that won’t be of any help to Sarkeesian.