Pile on by TRAs

[wopbamboo]

I am in the middle of a pile on by TRA's on Twitter.

I am not comfortable sharing my anonymous Twitter username on even here yet, but I wanted to ask, when trying to explain your viewpoint on feminism, and you become the subject of a pile on, what do you do?

I am stuck between not giving up, but the more I reply, the more of them pile on.

Help.

It must be very difficult to debate on Twitter. I've never tried. People make measured, logical arguments only to be torn apart by goady opponents. The thread structure doesn't help either - things get jumbled up and lost. But the worst thing is the character limit.

I get piled on by TRAs on Twitter, and have often taken it quite personally. I think about my favourite well-informed GC Mumsnetters and think: ‘I bet this doesn’t happen to them’. It makes me feel like I’m bad at debate.

You can't win because they cannot hear what you are saying. Closed minds, closed ears, closed eyes.

Just state your case to the world at large and, if subject to pile-on, blank it.

When getting a pile-on it's really easy to deal with by changing your notifications to only from those who you follow back, that way you can just ignore it. Obviously not if you want to engage, but if your notifications are blowing up and it's just nasty nonsensical stuff, then I find changing your notifications for a day or two deals with it fine. I also block a lot, if I see a TRA account I just block it now, mainly because they like to mass report GC accounts to get us banned. I used Cultblocker and while it worked well it does block a number of feminists, which was disappointing...

You can also just mute the conversation. If necessary protect your tweets for a day or two. But if you don't engage they will give up trying to goad you.

I see both the doctor and the lawyer have retweeted screengrabs of my tweets today so I must be in the crosshairs. I'm going to go private for a while.

I'd block them op. Seriously they are idiots and not worth the time or energy.

One of the advantages of running foul of one of the big name TRA's like Aimee Challenor (which I did by accident) is that you get put on a blocklist, whether terfblocker or another one, and after that you don't tend to get pile-ons from those you will never convince.

I was also given a tip for avoiding the worst of the real trolls on Twitter and that is to change your account location (not your visible one if you have one) to somewhere like Germany, which has much stronger social media harassment legislation than the UK. I posdt a lot about Brexit too and it worked a treat.

I'm on the block list. It's been great, actually. I'm no longer coming across most of the really weird/deviant ones and now it's generally people who I would class as 'well-intentioned but have partaken of much kool-aid'. Then we're generally debating in a fairly polite way, we're never going to agree, but onlookers are getting some information and maybe having a think.