I might be opening a can of worms here, but I've had a bunch of people I care about hurt recently by what I'm about to talk about so:

People with large followings? We need to be incredibly careful about how we leverage our followers and presence online (especially on this site)

What do I mean by leveraging your followers/presence? It's using the influence you have over the people who follow and see what you say and have them do something on your behalf

When you say or do something, it WILL have a rippling effect on the people who see it, and the range of reactions goes from people ignoring it to people having some level of their perspective/viewpoint changed to people acting on it

The more followers you have, the greater the number of people you might have an effect on, and the greater number of potential people who will act on something you said or did is

Now some of this is intentional, such as when we make a call for action re: promoting/sharing something, asking for feedback, or bringing awareness around problematic stuff, and when we use our presence for productive awareness and action, a lot of good can arise

Unfortunately, as is the nature of social media, we often do this unintentionally too - there is a phenomena on this site that when you QRT/reply to a tweet, it gives implicit (even if not expressed/wanted) permission for your followers to add on and often escalate the situation

And that's not necessarily your fault! Social media is weird and it's out of our control how people react to something you say

HOWEVER, it happens anyways even if we don't want it to, and to not be aware and accepting of that reality is irresponsible and causes harm

And over the past few years I've seen this happen over and over again

A major example includes bigger creators replying to critique from a smaller creator, bringing in escalations of harmful replies from their followers to tear down the person who brought up the critique

Another example is people with large followers venting to people who have positioned themselves as their "attack dogs", who then go to publicly attack whoever was the subject of the venting

At a certain point it turns into dogpiling - even if you don't mean for it to be

This is not to say you're not allowed to share feelings/thoughts/opinions or reply to people or vent or protect yourself or be human and yourself online

But you have to be aware that your words have power, and you have to be careful where those words are aimed publicly

Especially when it's not a situation of protecting yourself from harm, and when it's a situation where your words are potentially aimed at someone who is vulnerable - e.g. a marginalized person, someone who is young and still learning, someone who has a smaller presence than you

I've fucked up on this many times, and I've apologized for it, and I'm learning how to find the right times/places/scenarios to venting privately to friends who won't escalate the situation unless I ask rather than publicly

I think we all need to do that

(And just because I know I'll need to say this: all of this goes doubly so for anyone who is privileged in some way as it compounds everything I said above, and this should not be used to tone-police marginalized people who are protecting themselves from bigotry)