1. @tryguys fan here. I am extremely disappointed to see @EugeneLeeYang saying this. There is NO justification for siccing an online mob on children and young adults who are not public figures over their social posts. https://twitter.com/EugeneLeeYang/status/1270080613026902019

2. A conversation I have with my Gen X friends all the time - we are SO glad that modern social media didn’t exist when we were young. All of us have things in our youth that we regret doing and saying. We get to laugh about it now and tell these stories at parties.

3. None of us had our college acceptance pulled, lost our jobs, or were harassed relentlessly for stuff we posted online when we were 15-25. Even if we were using Usenet or other early Internet forums, very few posts that old ever get unearthed.

4. We got to live our lives, make mistakes as everyone does, hopefully learn from them, grow up, have careers, maybe get married & start families. Sure we may have faced hardships but at least we don’t worry about a post, photo, or video surfacing that will take everything away.

5. I was raised an evangelical Christian. Although I remember starting to question a lot when I was around 15 I am certain that I must have parroted things I was taught that would get me unpersoned today.

6. I went to an extremely liberal liberal arts college where despite my background, my peers didn’t ostracize me and I gave me time and space to work out my sexuality and come out as bisexual and move away from the church.

7. Had I been kicked out of school and removed from what was a mind-expanding experience, I most likely would have ended up at home, in reparative therapy, and then eventually sent to a Christian college.

8. No one seems to consider that maybe the reason some of these kids are posting this stuff is because they’re in families and communities where they are learning it.

9. Young people don’t unlearn this stuff unless they have an opportunity to meet people who are different from them, learn from them, and build friendships.

10. I haven’t come across a single deradicalization story that begins with “I left my extremist group after being mobbed online, getting kicked out of school, losing my job, getting kicked out of my home, and losing all my friends.” https://twitter.com/keikoinboston/status/1139361958870884353

11. If you ex-communicate people who hold prejudiced views, where the heck do you think they go? They don’t just crawl under a rock or die in the desert. They find communities of like-minded people who welcome them.

12. What Skai and others are doing is ~extremely~ dangerous. Guaranteed she is pushing some of her targets farther to the right.

13. Either that or potentially to self-harm.

The adults praising her for this campaign harassment must have no empathy whatsoever.

14. If you have someone in your life who is being mobbed, if you care about their well-being at all, consider how to maintain ties with them and support them provided they aren’t being physically or emotionally abusive to you.

15. Whether people are mobbed for something they did or didn’t do, one of the few hopes they have of getting through it is support from people who actually know them.

16. And as frustrating as this is, if you know someone who seems to be teetering on the cliff of extremism, consider reaching out and trying to talk to them.

17. Your words are unlikely to result in change tomorrow but you have the ability to plant seeds of doubts that will grow into tiny cognitive dissonance plantings.

18. The best way to talk to people is to ask questions and counter with facts, not emotionally charged accusations. It’s late but I’ll try to look up some resources to add to this thread later.

19. Here’s my earlier thread on this.

Farther down I talk about what happened to a friend who was falsely accused in an offline witchhunt years ago and the effect that’s had on them. https://twitter.com/keikoinboston/status/1273341086136762369

20. I haven’t checked this out for myself but I keep getting reports that Skai has screwed up with several of her targets because she’s not fact checking any of the posts she’s sharing. Imagine if that was your friend/sibling/child.

21. An “oops, my bad” does not cut it after you’ve sent thousands of people after that person and tried to get them kicked out of school.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/06/12/how-teens-are-using-anonymous-google-docs-and-enlisting-a-youtube-star-to-out-allegedly-racist-classmates/#e8e16f11a788

22. I hope all the folks supporting this bullshit have squeaky clean social media histories because someone is for sure coming for your posts next.

23. Really bummed to do this. @tryguys got me through some rough times. But I’m not going to support a fellow queer POC artist who supports a teen celebrity ruining the lives of random teens/young adults over social media posts.