So, this post was prompted by two instances that I saw transpire on the bird site, as well as some general thoughts I had for a while on the matter.

One was a developer talking about accessibility and showing a screenshot of a review that was publically posted below their game’s Steam page… and the other was by a VTuber who shared a disgusting DM they received after posting a picture of themselves… and then sharing a reply they got, again publically, but this time unintentionally inciting harassment.

I just wanted to share some thoughts on this because I have mixed feelings about it. I also wanted to share why I think the way I thought about this until now is/was problematic.

This is a less planned out and more impromptu post, so pardon my rambling but I think it’s important to have these discussions and I would love to hear some opinions from other people on this.

Edit: Just to absolutely make sure that people don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not accusing the VTuber there or the developer of inciting harassment. The developer in question tried to obscure any identifiable information about the reviewer in question. The VTuber most likely didn’t have any ill intentions. That said, I find the latter case still quite reckless.

UPDATE (October 15th, 12:30am): The VTuber in question removed the tweet that was inciting the harassment a person has received (more on that later). I asked them to do so. They listened. The damage most likely has been done already, though.

1. The case of the developer
2. The cases of me criticizing LTT, Mr Beast or JKR
3. The case of the VTuber
4. Naming and Shaming versus Raising Awareness
5. Do Celebs need to take accountability for their fans’ behaviour?
6. I’m trying – Closing Words

The case of the developer

So, on September 28th, Aaron San Filippo, the director of indie dev studio Flippfly (who are working on Whisker Squadron: Survivor right now), released a tweet, talking about a negative review they got.

“Someone actually changed their positive review for Whisker Squadron: Survivor to a negative one, because we added some optional accessibility options to the settings screen that included the option to reduce incoming damage a bit and/or slow the game down a tad. Sorry, not sorry.” – they said.

This review over here was previously positive and was then updated after an accessibility update was released that made it so that people were able to reduce the game’s speed and reduce damage taken.

That said, apparently the achievement for winning a run jumped up in its completion rate from 1.9% to 10.3%, according to the user review, which they attributed to more people being able to win runs thanks to accessibility… Aaron San Filippo, however, noted that they fixed an issue with how the achievement was counted, so now more people actually got the achievement.

Personally, I play this game and I love it (review out soon?) and even with the accessibility settings, I don’t think it’s gotten much easier. It just find it easier to get into the game as opposed to being objected to dead runs every single time as a new player.

I don’t touch the Game Speed setting, personally, since I’m impatient. That said, I did change the damage slider because my reaction times are poor and with less damage, I get punished less for having a hand-eye coordination disorder that prevents me from being fast and reactive. It’s something I was born with that we’ve tried to fix… but I can’t seem to fix it.

Anyhow, in this case, Aaron shared the screenshot of the review publically, calling out this person and clarifying why the achievement percentage went up. The intent here was to utilize this specific response to their game to talk about accessibility in games.

The person’s name was not visible and, with how Steam is built, you cannot search for specifically worded reviews that easily. So, finding this person and targeting them is not something that would occur with that high of a possibility.

The cases of me criticizing LTT, Mr Beast or JKR

Just briefly, I wanna talk about public figures.

When someone with a huge platform does something problematic, I think it’s okay to talk about it since chances are people have already seen it anyway. In that way, I’ve talked about the wizard game, Mr Beast, as well as Rammstein and even Linus Tech Tips.

These are public figures. Reporting on them, sharing my thoughts and opinions… I think that’s fine. Even without me writing about this, people are likely to target them.

Rather, I hope that by talking about these things, I can inform people of my (hopefully more civil) thoughts and then give insights about why certain things (like mocking abuse accusations in the case of Rammstein) are a no-go.

I also hope that by sharing these thoughts and appealing to an audience that reads these, I can tell them to not harass these people. At least I hope that is clear with the tone.

That said, public figures already deal with lots of shit being thrown at them, so I think calling them out for stupid shit is perfectly fine… Like Justin Bieber posting a picture of a destroyed Gaza and stating that he’s “praying for Israel”.

The case of the VTuber

So, a VTuber with a relatively large following tweeted out about a message by a creep they got after posting a selfie. The creep sexually harassed them. This VTuber posted a screenshot of the exchange without showing the name of the creep in question.

I think this is fine.

You cannot verify the identity of the person in question and because it’s something vile and disgusting, raising awareness about this important issue of sexual harassment is important.

What then happened, though, is that some blue-check-marked random claimed that this VTuber has now “learned their lesson” which is some vile gaslighting and victim-blaming on this random person’s part…

The VTuber wanted them to clarify and another random person chimed in, claiming that this was the “obvious outcome” for posting pictures of oneself and that you should be prepared for it.

[Edit (Oct 15th, 9:17am): I had some weird sentences here, so I changed the sentence structure so that it makes sense.]

This is also some very backwards thinking, defending the creep in question, blaming the victim, and just being an idiot.

Anyhow, Random 2 then argued with some people and called it “dark humour” – something about which I wanted to maybe write another post. I replied to them and told them that there was no punch line or anything that could signal that they were joking. They deleted most of their responses afterwards.

I then messaged them privately because I genuinely wanted to understand what they meant, because they also mentioned there being some “context” and whatever. Turns out they’re autistic and struggle with phrasing (just like me!) – which of course doesn’t excuse this stuff but it explains at least part of it.

We chatted for a bit. I gave them feedback on why people thought that Rando 2 was siding with the creep and defending them. They were very happy about it.

[Edit (Oct 15th, 9:19am): Turns out they essentially meant something along the lines of “welcome to the internet” or whatever which is a lot worse. I forgot to mention this for clarification because I originally thought this wasn’t important.]

We also talked about the death threats and other vile shit they got because of this exchange.

So, they deleted their stuff and all is good, right?

Well, no. As you can see up there in my censored image, the VTuber with a following of 4K on Twitter decided to post a screenshot of Rando 1 and Rando 2 to publicly name and shame these two people.

Their followers can always see the screenshot of this interaction.

I reported this as it’s inciting harassment which is against Twitter’s ToS. I also messaged them to please take it down. To no avail.

Important Note here: What the creep did is vile and disgusting. What Rando 1 said is also vile and disgusting. What Rando 2 said was also vile and disgusting but apparently misguided and they apologized to the VTuber about it. I do not condone any of this stuff… but I also don’t think people should message others over this, telling these humans to unalive themselves.

So, that said, I assumed positive intent with the VTuber but they decided to still leave up the tweets, even talking about how this went viral and whatnot. I find this vile, too.

My censoring of those two people (plus the creep and the VTuber) took me less than a minute. People can probably still find the persons in question on Twitter… but I ask you to please not message and harass them. They’re humans, too, no matter what they have said.

UPDATE (October 15th, 12:30am): As I also mentioned in the edit at the start of the post, the VTuber did take down the tweet in question which I have asked them to take down. But they also criticized me for writing this blog post about the situation “without their knowledge”… which is odd.

Naming and Shaming versus Raising Awareness

So, as you may be able to tell, I have mixed feelings.

[Edit (October 15th, 9:28 am): In this section, I used the term “person of public” when I actually meant “public figure”. English is my third language and in German, a “public figure” is called a “Person öffentlichen Lebens” or rather a “public life’s person”, so I kinda went from there to “person of public” but I’ve now corrected it.]

I think a “public figure” deals with a certain amount of toxicity either way, even if they say nothing wrong. That’s bad obviously.

That said, a public figure has a platform and if they use it to promote harmful ideas or to incite harassment then that’s bad as well.

The difference here about the incitement of harassment is that on Steam, you cannot just search for the wording of a review and then harass people. On Twitter, you can just look for the wording and/or the username and then start telling them to off themselves.

The VTuber in question didn’t tell people to harass this person… but they also didn’t say to not do that. They have 4000 followers, so they should know that some of those are going to do problematic shit like that. Censoring names literally doesn’t take that much time. I do it in paint and even colour-coded the people. I’m either just very skilled in Paint or this person is lazy.

What I’m trying to get at is that people aren’t defined by their mistakes even if they haunt them. People are still people and even if they make mistakes, they shouldn’t be harassed over them, and telling people to unalive themselves is not a good thing either.

By sharing unacceptable behaviour publically, you don’t incite harassment necessarily… but you also do not say anything against it. If I were to see a friend getting treated badly, I’d get upset.

Sharing this stuff is risky. You don’t know who sees it is and what a crazed individual will do to the person in question.

Meanwhile, raising awareness about something that has been publically said is important, obviously, and I don’t want to tell this person to not do it… but I’d like to differentiate between sharing this stuff about a public person and sharing this stuff about a private person.

Do Celebs need to take accountability for their fans’ behaviour?

This is a topic that is quite difficult to answer… but especially in circles like Dream‘s community or Taylor Swift’s stans, it gets quite toxic.

So, to answer the question, I don’t think celebrities or people with a big platform or people of public need to take accountability for their fans/followers. They’re not their parents…

BUT… I think when you have such a big influence on your audience, you can say something about the way people deal with certain subjects… you CAN do something about it.

If you have a big following somewhere, you need to be more wary of your actions and words. If you post a screenshot of a person being horrible, you’ll probably invite people to attack this person, even if that is not your intention.

A simple “Please don’t attack this person” can be a powerful deterrent to most people. It doesn’t help against all of them but it does make a difference. Sadly, most celebs with toxic stans… and most public figures (from YouTubers and VTubers to streamers and other people) don’t do that.

I’m trying – Closing Words

I’m not perfect. I’m only human. (Well, a Lich but still humanoid.)

I’ve called out people like that in the past probably and I do criticize people that sell stolen artwork quite often… but I’ve been trying to not do that in a certain way as much.

For this post, I censored the names of these people, for the most part. I don’t want anyone to attack another person over any of this.

On platforms like Twitter, I want to lead by example.

Instead of publicly shaming or naming people that don’t have a huge platform, I instead sometimes engage in “subtweeting” aka talking about the subject matter without revealing who this is about or what prompted this tweet. (Edited this to reword this for clarification)

So, for instance, on this matter with the VTuber, I said something along the lines of “Blaming Victims and siding with creeps isn’t ‘dark humour’. That’s an insult to comedy” because one person there in that example did exactly that: Say something bad, and then call it “dark humour” when people got upset at them.

I didn’t reveal their names or show a screenshot. I didn’t quote-tweet or tag anyone. I didn’t even directly quote there. Instead, I chose to talk about the subject matter without painting a target on anyone’s back.

I think this is a much better way of doing things. It’s certainly healthier if you wanna engage at all with the subject matter.

Quite a while ago, I thought that if people post stuff publically on social media, they should be aware that anyone can see their posts. At the same time, I also thought that people should be aware that freedom of speech doesn’t equal freedom of consequences…

I still think the latter is true. If you’re being a bigot or an idiot, you should be aware that what you say carries power and meaning, and that it can cause upset. If you spout bigoted nonsense, it’s obvious that someone will call you out for it.

I do not, however, think that the “consequences” of their utterances have to be death threats and harassment. I do not condone that. Don’t do that.

Rather… report people like that or block them. You may tell them off but remain civil.

But also, if we could get rid of bigots by talking to them, we’d have no bigots… it’s not our responsibility to “debate” them when reporting and blocking are effective and valid tools, especially when you don’t have the spoons or energy to constantly talk to and with bigots.

So, when I talk about a developer of sorts like I did with the Dinkum dev, the Domina dev and the Forager dev, I’m torn. The same goes for publishers, of course, like Nacon, for example.

Is it fine for me to talk about this or is it not? Are these people of public or are they private people? What do I need to do to make sure that nobody attacks them?

And well, I’ll need to think about this for a while but I think for now, I’ll try to make it even more clear that nobody should go out of their way to harass these people or attack them. They’re still humans, after all.

Treat others the way you wanna be treated. Be kind to yourself and kind to others. Do not condone harassment but do not participate in it either. Lead with love and be an example for others to follow. Don’t join the mob and stop sharpening your pitchforks.

And I think slowly but surely by figuring out these questions, I can maybe make a difference in the way people treat others… and maybe you can, too. Idk. What are your thoughts?

Also, in regards to creeps like the one up there, I’ve got thoughts as well but I didn’t go into detail about that here. I may write another post on the topic of social media and what we share in our lives, and I may link back to this one for that.

Just in case it wasn’t clear enough: I do not think that anyone deserves to be attacked, harassed, sexualized or abused. I don’t think that the randos were right.

But I also do not think the VTuber was in their right to paint a target on the random people’s back and I think it’s actually despicable to share screenshots of the interaction after the fact as they’re inciting harassment by doing so. Even unintentionally.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.