Thread by @AnaMardoll, There's a lot of good advice going around Twitter right now on [...]

There's a lot of good advice going around Twitter right now on how to avoid abusers. I think I would like to write a ramble on how to not become one.

It's my belief that just about anyone can become an abuser over time, and that a lot of times abuse can start as a series of not-great behaviors that amplify and intensify over time.

Almost all the behavior I've been thinking about for this thread is stuff many(most?) people have done at least once. This isn't a "template to identify abuse/abusers". There's other threads for that.

This is just a list of things I watch out for in myself, as a self-check.

1. "Am I forgetting that I could be wrong?"

Self-assurance isn't a bad thing! But toxic people tend to *forever* stop entertaining the idea that they might be wrong. That they might have misunderstood or misinterpreted; that there might be another perspective.

This leads to:

2. "Am I framing everything as Me Against The World?"

There are people who hate me, sure. TERFs and abusers exist. But there's a vast sea of individuals who aren't allied with my abusers against me.

We saw these in action with a recent person called out in the book community; if you unfollowed and blocked them, you were "with" their abusers, and either duped or a betrayer. There was no room to just be a person who looked into the matter and found their behavior unacceptable.

Had they chosen to remember that (a) they could be wrong and realize that (b) a lot of trustworthy sources believed they were in the wrong, they could've backed down, listened, apologized, and mitigated the damage they caused to their reputation. They chose not to.

This leads me to:

3. "Am I assuming Bad Faith too quickly and too broadly?"

Again, there are people who act in bad faith online! But when someone has begun to believe that *everyone* criticizing them has a personal vendetta against them, that's a worrying red flag.

I've been on the receiving end of harassment pile-ons. I was hounded for a couple of particularly bad days because I criticized " gender reveal" parties.

But I didn't assume everyone running on me was personally acting in bad faith. People make mistakes or are misinformed, etc.

#3 isn't just for call-outs, though. I try really hard to educate on here in ways that *don't* assume everyone else is maliciously wrong.

Red flaggy language like "I'm disappointed in so many of you" or "a lot of you don't seem to care" or "I would've thought fellow [marginalized] people would understand" all evoke shame and guilt responses, especially in abuse survivors like myself.

(Here's where I point out, again, that I'm guilty of this behavior in the past. It's one reason I try so hard not to write like this *now*. I realized it was unhealthy and unfair.)

Really, all three of these boil down to a reminder that I can be wrong and other people can be right. But I think it's important to remember that all the time and not just mid-callout.

And because I learn best with specific examples, I'm going to pull out two exhibits from very recent experience.

Exhibit A: An author I followed wrote several threads in which they characterized "soft-blocking" as gaslighting abuse.

Soft-blocking, in case you didn't know, is a way of shaking off a follower by blocking and unblocking them in quick succession.

If you have neurodivergence which causes you to doubt your own recollection, soft-blocks can be disorienting. "Didn't I follow them last week? Did they soft-block me? Or did I forget? Or did Twitter bork up?"

But a person's right to safety means more than my own comfort.

If someone soft-blocks me, I may be hurt but I affirm their right to set boundaries. I recognize that the issue might not even be me (hell, maybe they like having a very specific number of followers) or that if it is me, I may have done something wrong (#1).

I remember that they are almost certainly right about what their boundaries need to be (#2) and that they're acting in their own best interests and not necessarily in bad faith against me (#3).

Keeping these things in mind leads me to NOT call out someone who felt unsafe around me as an "abuser" for asserting a Twitter boundary (and in the process proving they were totally right to feel unsafe around me!).

This is what I mean when I say that remembering these things at all times (and not just during callouts) makes me, I hope, a better and safer person to be around.

But most of all I really want to highlight the shaming language: the I'm Really Disappointed In You stuff that sends me instantly back to childhood and my own abusive parents.

Someone I trust did this recently on an issue; basically did the "both sides have wrong people on them, I'm disappointed in so many of you, how could you?" rhetoric without ever staking out their own position or discussing the issue in detail. Scolding without clarification.

For a lot of abuse survivors, that just triggers an instead shame and guilt spiral. We want to rush to reassure our friend that we're on their side, and to reassure ourselves that we're on the right side. We're scared of being wrong, of being outcast.

If you're going to stake out a position and educate on here, my belief is that you need to *do* that. It helps no one to just vaguely come out and say "I see wrong folks on BOTH sides of the Kitten Juggling issue, and I'm ashamed of so many of you."

Okay? How is that actionable?

Accounts that do that a lot, that use vague finger-waving to shame their followers without staking out a specific position that people can agree or disagree with make me nervous. They're cultivating *followers* in the non-Twitter sense of the word. Folks who follow their leader.

That's why I'll try to hammer out my threads with details and examples, and I'll try to bookend with reminders that I could be wrong, that there could be things I haven't considered. I don't want people to "follow" my lead. I'm not a leader. I'm just a fool with a keyboard.

I also have a really malicious autocorrect, so now I have to seed corrections throughout this thread. My apologies.

I will add: Persistent harassment makes it *harder* to not fall into these errors.

When you're being hate-mobbed, it's very easy to fall into a Me Against The World mentality. Humans dig in and get defensive.

I'm NOT talking about callouts. I'm talking about how it's hard to accept real criticism when it comes sandwiched between death threats from other people.

Knowing that, I've deputized a few key friends to *take my keyboard away* if I ever get hate-mobbed and start lashing out.

That might be a useful idea for others, too, I don't know. It depends on whether you have someone you can trust to do that.

AND I'll add that there are a lot of people on here who like to see Social Justice people fight, and who will back you in a fight no matter how wrong you might be. So be careful who you listen to.

Again, knowing this, I have some trusted friends who I can go to and say "am I wrong?" and they're good enough friends to say "yeah, you could be handing this better" when I am.

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