For those who haven't heard yet: a radio show booked an Australian "Gender Critical" :up-yours-woke-moralists: man to argue against trans rights. But people checked his Twitter likes and they were half GC and half... trans porn. : YEARS worth of it. So he cancelled his appearance and deleted his account 😂 :thonk-trans:
Thread <--- CW transphobe reciepts
Many older 45+ people have a view of the internet as this not-real thing where their actions have no consequences. Also that it's so large and unwieldy that nobody will ever stumble across your skeletons because finding them is too difficult etc etc.
It's behaviour from people who are mostly clueless about the internet.
Our older internet terminology reinforced this "IRL" implies that the opposite (online) is not-real. I've always pushed back against IRL as a term because it's really not healthy to view the internet as pretend or that actions and relationships and activities here have no consequences.
back in the day your government name wasn't associated with your online handle like that. it was very much not real a lot of the time because you could just walk away or make a new account. nobody knows you're a dog on the internet, after all.
racism, sexism, etc would still be felt as real by the people subjected to it even if you were passively not indicating your gender or minority status of course, but again it used to be possible to just leave or you could even get away with flaming right back in ways that are much less possible today, especially if your job is publicly online.
Yeah but a name is a name.
It doesn't change the fact that everything here has always had real world consequences, and that the relationships and emotions people feel engaging with other people online are all real. It's never been make believe and the concept that it was all fake is what made people apathetic to all the most awful shit that was left to fester on it.
Even now this notion of IRL vs fake is one of the barriers that keeps the space from being properly regulated, it keeps shitholes like 4chan protected.
there were no real-world consequences for me or my opponents from yahoo chess having textchat.
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Still are
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