Mastadon shuts down Wil Wheaton after attacks from SJW mobs, trolls as they win again
Wil Wheaton decided to take part in a little protest called #DeactiDay in August. The Star Trek Next Generation co-star joined a bunch of people to delete their Twitter accounts because, among other reasons, the social media platform had refused to oust hate-spewing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Upon leaving Twitter, Wheaton began his search for an alternative social media space that would provide him with the things he still enjoyed about engaging online, i.e. jokes, cat pictures, and the occasional dopamine spike.
He turned to the hot new leftist microblogging site, Mastodon, but found more of the same.
I found a harsh reality that I’m still trying to process: thousands of people who don’t know me, who have never interacted with me, who internalized a series of lies about me, who were never willing to give me a chance. I was harassed from the minute I made my account, and though I expected the “shut up wesley”s and “go f**k yourself”s to taper off after a day or so, it never did. And even though I never broke any rules on the server I joined (Mastodon is individual “instances” which is like a server, which connects to the “federated timeline”, which is what all the other servers are), one of its admins told me they were suspending my account, because they got 60 (!) reports overnight about my account, and they didn’t want to deal with the drama.
On Mastodon, founder Eugen Rochko wrote that he was unhappy with how the situation was resolved. “An admin was overwhelmed with frivolous reports about him and felt forced to exile him,” Rochko wrote.
“Mastodon the software will investigate ways to help mods deal with large numbers of duplicate reports and blacklisting reports from dubious sources. mastodon.social will continue enforcing our anti-harassment rules,” he tells The Verge. “Everything is too recent to give you a more in-depth answer on that.”
“I’ve said before that I think it sets a dangerous precedent on how a large group of people can mobilize to drive anyone off the fediverse,” wrote Rochko on Mastodon. “Mob rule is universally dangerous: Mods and admins must examine evidence and decide based on wrongdoing and danger, and not on how many times someone was reported.”
Why the attacks?
A few years ago, when Wheaton began recommending people use a blocklist created by a woman named Randi Harper—which, unbeknownst to him, contained a lot of users who were trans or supportive of trans voices.
“When I found out, I did everything I could to remove those women from the list I shared. When there were still innocents on the list, I stopped sharing the list entirely,” Wheaton says.
Check out Tim Pool’s video on the story below.
The other issue is Wheaton’s friendship with Chris Hardwick.
Following Chloe Dykstra’s public account of the abuse she endured in a relationship with an unnamed “nerd mogul” who was pretty clearly Hardwick, a lot of people expected an outspoken feminist like Wheaton to publicly condemn the actions of his friend.
At the time, Wheaton said that he needed “some time to process what’s going on and put words to my thoughts.”
Those words never materialized, and a couple months later he was off Twitter for good.
“I don’t deserve to be treated so terribly by so many random people, so I’m not going to put myself in a place where I am subjected to it all day long,” he says. “Please do your best to be kind, and make an effort to make the world less terrible.”
You can read Wheaton’s entire essay here.
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