People are spreading @socialistdogmom’s tweet without her clarification & it’s wildly misleading. Feeling guilty that an online Nazi who personally threatened her later committed a mass shooting isn’t ‘refusing to stop the Tree of Life shooting’ or however they’re portraying it.

Plenty of us get threats online from far-right assholes. Usually, we report to Twitter & block. it’s rare that Twitter - let alone cops - take them seriously. If one of the assholes I blocked on here killed people, I’d also feel irrationally guilty. Key word: irrationally.

Anyway, this tweet is over a year old and is an example of how bad faith anti-leftist jerks (whether far right or alt-centrist) incite dogpiling & mass reporting by selectively sharing screenshots out of context to misleadingly trigger people’s fears of antisemitism

We’ve had multiple instances of this tactic of being used in recent months to drive dogpiles of Black Jews & lefty Jews by misleadingly portraying them as supporters of terrorism or as antisemites and this is functionally identical.

I don’t know if the same people are driving this dogpile as the ones who pushed the others, but everyone needs to do a better job of internet literacy & look at date stamps & look for context before blowing up screenshot claims like this.

Stuff like this is done because bad actors know that if they can misrepresent something so as to trigger people’s emotions about bigotry that it can be easy to make something go viral without context & make people feel as if they are acting out of righteous anger.

Note also that the tweet is over a year old - it’s from November 2019. Anyone who clicked on the original tweet would have been able to see the clarification that followed a tweet or two down the thread that the threats she didn’t report were threats Bowers had made against her.

Anyone who took a screenshot of that 13-month-old tweet to share it without context *would necessarily have been able to see the follow-up tweet* clarifying that she didn’t see any threats by Bowers vs. Jews & was expressing a sense of guilt over not reporting his threats vs. HER

I don’t know who did the initial screenshot & acontextual sharing and who knew the context but shared anyway vs. who was genuinely taken in & upset by the misleading presentation, but sharing a year old screenshot in a way that eliminates key context feels deliberate & malicious.

It sucks to realize that something that triggered your legitimate fears of bigotry was a selective misrepresentation likely circulated because someone cynically knew it would do so & wanted to incite & direct that anger. It sucks to feel used like that.

It’s not typical Twitter practice to question if the screenshot being shared is legitimately antisemitic or sexist or whatever or in context before retweeting or expressing rage. But there’s now a pattern of ppl trying to trigger us into dogpiles vs. other Jews & vs. allies. So.

Fair or not, it’s important to be more cautious & skeptical of the source of call outs, particularly over ambiguous tweets or old ones being surfaced years later for no discernible reason. There might be real cause for concern. But it can also be an attempt to misdirect our anger

(The flip side of this is this isn’t an excuse to dismiss leftist Jews’ concerns about antisemitism. The right often tries to cynically divide the left, but that doesn’t mean the left is free of unconscious bias or systemic bigotry & doesn’t need to listen/reflect/improve.)

Predictably, the jerks you’d expect continue to lie that @socialistdogmom didn’t report threats by Bowers vs Jews & thus aided the Tree of Life shooting, even after repeatedly being told she was only aware of him threatening her *personally* & didn’t report threats vs. *herself*

More predictably, these assholes are also portraying this as a fight b/t Jewish & non-Jewish leftists, calling the *many* Jewish leftists correcting them non-Jews or goyim, and telling Black Jewish leftists that white women “matter more to y’all than Jews.”

This isn’t particularly shocking, since (unlike people who were genuinely misled & apologized / unlike people still offline for שבת) these are largely the same jerks who spent weeks attacking Black Jews & leftist Jews by misrepresenting tweets to portray them as antisemites, etc.

To be clear: when I say “these people” or “these jerks” or “the people you’d expect”, I obviously don’t mean Jews writ large. I mean “these specific assholes who we’re familiar with from a preexisting pattern of similar misrepresentations about & bad faith attacks on other Jews”.

One would think this wouldn’t need clarification, but, naturally, these jerks are already posting tweets claiming that our generic references to their circle of trolls actually mean “(((these people)))”.

In case those people are reading this from behind blocks (given past history, I assume they are): You aren’t being bullied by non-Jews to defend antisemitism. You’re being criticized by Jewish leftists (& others) for spreading a vicious lie even after being repeatedly corrected.

Continuing to repeat this lie even after it’s been made abundantly clear to you that the only threat @socialistdogmom knew of & didn’t report was a threat against herself is motzi shem ra & it’s appalling.

also, it’s weird to claim leftists need to be more understanding of Jewish trauma & how sensitive we are about antisemitism before criticizing people for *spreading a lie accusing someone of being complicit in/indirectly responsible for an antisemitic mass shooting*

Feelings and trauma, no matter how real or understandable, don’t absolve people of responsibility for their actions, for jumping to conclusions, for spreading misinformation without due diligence, or for accusing her of being responsible for Tree of Life.

Plenty of Jews were pointing out that this was false last night. If you genuinely misunderstood, the ideal response is an apology & acknowledging your error, not...claiming that Jewish trauma writ large should somehow give you a free pass.

also: the fact that some assholes replied to tweets spreading misinfo with antisemitism doesn’t retroactively justify spreading the lies, nor is MC responsible for them? like...that’s not ok, but *falsely accusing someone of refusing to stop a mass shooting* is still fucked up.