#didnthappen
January 16, 2018 9:46 AM   Subscribe

When someone tells a story online, someone else will inevitably be ready with a two-word reply. “Didn’t happen,” they’ll type, or those who can’t be bothered to type can choose from an array of ready-made sceptical memes. New Statesman looks at DHOTYA.
posted by threetwentytwo (59 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
So much effort expended on both ends of an alleged lie. It's perplexing.
posted by Brocktoon at 9:57 AM on January 16, 2018


I'm not too keen on the phrase "incredibly plausible", Amelia Tate.
posted by crazylegs at 9:59 AM on January 16, 2018 [4 favorites]


The fact that others, who claim not to have misogynistic motivations, could freely mock Womack also speaks to an online culture in which we care little about the impact of our words.

No. It speaks to how misogyny is so much part of the culture that people are unable to recognize it in themselves.
posted by Obscure Reference at 10:00 AM on January 16, 2018 [38 favorites]


So much effort expended on both ends of an alleged lie. It's perplexing.

I'm puzzled by this. Why is it perplexing that a person being mocked and harassed for sharing a simple anecdote would expend effort to defend herself? Surely it's only perplexing if you assume that her entirely reasonable story is a lie.

You appear to be drawing an equivalence between the perpetrators of harassment and its victim. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but if that is what you're doing, I think it's very unfortunate.
posted by howfar at 10:13 AM on January 16, 2018 [13 favorites]


So much effort expended on both ends of an alleged lie. It's perplexing.

What effort was expended by Womack? She made a harmless tweet and was then mercilessly harassed by online trolls. And then she talked about her experience to a journalist writing a story about it.
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:14 AM on January 16, 2018 [13 favorites]


This is all sick and awful, but it reiterates to me, for myself...why share at all online, besides with close friends and family? It seems like it's becoming increasingly unwise and unrewarding. I've stopped sharing most things anywhere, but Twitter is especially dangerous, it seems. Metafilter excluded, of course.
posted by agregoli at 10:23 AM on January 16, 2018 [4 favorites]


So much effort expended on both ends of an alleged lie.

At the very least we're talking about two possible lies, not two ends of one thing. "Didn't happen!" would also be a lie, even when shouted from the safety of a flock.

The other characteristic of it is the low effort. You could probably set up a bot that simply repeats "Didn't happen!" everywhere and empirically measure how much social credit literally mindlessly repeating it garners. It seems to me that doing this sort of thing, finding claims that can be mindlessly or formulaically repeated for the maximum payoff, is elementary to building up political propaganda channels.
posted by XMLicious at 10:35 AM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


I remember when it was "Pics or it didn't happen", which at least gave the accused a chance to prove they really did have an annulled marriage with Britney Spears/get high fived by Bill Murray/smoke weed with Snoop Dogg.
posted by w0mbat at 10:37 AM on January 16, 2018 [11 favorites]


Why is it "political" to think that pictures of naked women aren't needed to sell books? Does any party have this in their manifesto?
posted by KateViolet at 10:40 AM on January 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


Yep, definitely doesn't make me want to get onto Twitter.

From my experience, a child saying such a thing is commonplace. I'm sure I said many things like that when I was a kid, too! So acting like it couldn't have possibly gone down like that is just weird to me; it drives home the differences in lived experience even within what is nominally the same culture.

I do find posts like this (look how progressive my/this kid is!) annoying, but it's a shame that the response to something that I find merely annoying is so massive. And there's no doubt that misogyny is playing a huge role in this particular example. I also think it's a symptom of something bigger than that. It's mob mentality writ large, where the notion of aggregations of people are entirely different than they used to be. If power structures find large demonstrations threatening by virtue of the number of people all in the same place expressing the same sentiment, maybe we ought to be a little more worried about online mobs where things like this can get so out of hand. This will only become more true as more and more of our lives are 'plugged in' and vulnerable to virtual actions.
posted by dbx at 10:41 AM on January 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


If you’re a man on Reddit and you post a Bilzerianesque story, you get thousands of upvotes and reddit gold. If you’re a woman and you post a realistic story, you get death threats.
posted by gucci mane at 10:45 AM on January 16, 2018 [19 favorites]


Why is it "political" to think that pictures of naked women aren't needed to sell books?

Literally anything that makes even a token attempt at humanizing women or minorities is spat upon as a liberal agenda, because humans are stupid and bad.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:48 AM on January 16, 2018 [32 favorites]


who paid “below £500” to acquire the Didn’t Happen of the Year Twitter account from its original creator.
The possibility that someone would pay more than £500 had not even occurred to me until the moment I read this.
posted by RobotHero at 10:50 AM on January 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


“I see it as a bit of fun,” says Harry, the 22-year-old from Coventry who runs the awards over Twitter (he didn't wish to disclose his surname).

O brave speaker of truth to power.
posted by chavenet at 10:56 AM on January 16, 2018 [29 favorites]


“I don’t think it was the fact it was based on feminism, I just think it was the fact it’s so unrealistic for an 11 year old to have such a political opinion,” says Harry.

Because no parents or other relatives talk to their kids about sexualized imagery in the media, and no kids look around and think, "wow, that's a lot of nearly-naked people." Especially no preteen boys ever think, "I want stories about spies and explosions and maybe rocket ships, not about sexy girls."

But it's absolutely not misogyny that drove the awards; they'd totally believe it was just as unrealistic if it were an 11-year-old niece who asked ‘Why do naked women have to be there to sell books?’ Which is a solid political statement, because party politics are split on whether scantily-clad women are good marketing for action novels.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:07 AM on January 16, 2018 [7 favorites]


I find it hard to believe that people are skeptical online.
posted by cjorgensen at 11:08 AM on January 16, 2018 [21 favorites]


Ok, so among the homophobic insults directed at her nephew (ugh, fuck twitter) they mention "balloon knot basher". What on earth is this supposed to mean?
Do I really want to know? Probably not, actually.
posted by Berreggnog at 11:20 AM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


they think buttholes look like the knot in a balloon
posted by poffin boffin at 11:24 AM on January 16, 2018


To just play devil's advocate a little bit, the Didn't Happen of the Year Award last year went to a pro-Brexit story, this year's other finalist was a story about a guy who accidentally packed his cat in his suitcase, and one of the quarter finalists was a guy who claims his 16 year old son decided to vote for Corbyn because "his teachers told him to", so they at least have some small claim to not being particularly politically biased. (Both of those go against what I think British anti-feminists would hold up as lies, I think.)

There is a huge amount of made-up stories online with more or less outrageous lies that fit the person's political viewpoint and are really pat with the desired narrative (see And that Marine's name? Albert Einstein (sorry for the Reddit link) for a right-wing US example).

So while this particular case doesn't seem like an outrageous lie to me, and the reasons it was voted Didn't Happen of the Year might well be misogynist, it doesn't seem like a bit of skepticism is out of place in general when it comes to these kinds of stories.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:25 AM on January 16, 2018 [5 favorites]


I don't think anyone is advocating against skepticism; I think the problem is people acting like aggressive shitheels.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 11:34 AM on January 16, 2018 [10 favorites]


I mean: “People are going to have to start getting evidence of things,” says Harry. “If they want to make claims on the internet, there has to be evidence."

Why? The stakes in this story are so incredibly low. Even if you think no 11-year-old is capable of that type of critical thought, it would be utterly unsurprising for a person that age to repeat something an adult (say, an aunt you admire) has said about a similar thing. I think that was at least half of my political or cultural opinions at age 11- repeating something my parents said that sounded smart.

It won the award because she said it's true even after some strangers on the internet were skeptical? What are you proving with all that cynicism?
posted by Emmy Rae at 11:37 AM on January 16, 2018 [19 favorites]


If you're bored and browse reddit, you'll see a lot of My view when I got up this morning and it's a spectacular photo of a sunrise taken in the mountains or whatever. I tend to be skeptical, but it's a pretty picture, I enjoyed it for 10 seconds, and move on.

For lazy people who might read comments before deciding whether to RTFA, “Didn’t Happen of the Year Awards” (DHOTYA).
posted by theora55 at 11:39 AM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


I thought it was going to stand for Didn't Happen Online, Thank You Anyway.
posted by rhizome at 11:40 AM on January 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


I feel like I live in a different world, or someone is screwing with me. I've spent too much time on Twitter since the election and have never seen this "didn't happen" anything like it, or the memes connected.
I feel like I'm reading those made up articles about what slang the kids are using all the time now.

“People are going to have to start getting evidence of things,” says Harry. “If they want to make claims on the internet, there has to be evidence."


Really, this is the main place I've seen that kind of talk.
posted by bongo_x at 11:45 AM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


I was accused of trolling Metafilter when I told the story in a MetaTalk thread of trying to kill my next door neighbor when I was five.

Which didn't bother me all that much because I have very ambivalent feelings about ever wanting anybody I come in contact with to believe such a thing about me in the first place, and it is a thing I very rarely share -- but I have told my last couple of partners. I had to; they had a right to know, since I am the man that little boy grew up into.
posted by jamjam at 11:46 AM on January 16, 2018


I don't believe that Balloon Knot Basher is a real insult. I kind of want to put it in my Twitter bio though. One of these statements is a lie. Unless it's not.
posted by AFABulous at 11:49 AM on January 16, 2018


I feel like I live in a different world, or someone is screwing with me. I've spent too much time on Twitter since the election and have never seen this "didn't happen" anything like it, or the memes connected.

So what you're saying is... this didn't happen?
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:50 AM on January 16, 2018 [5 favorites]


The aggressive denials of Womack's story are a stupid waste of time. None of the doubters know her or her nephew personally, and none were there, and 11 year olds say all sorts of things.

At the same time, we should distinguish those who simply doubted her story from those who called her or her nephew abusive names. These are not the same thing at all, and it is wholly inappropriate to conflate disbelief with abuse. Doubting stories of abuse can be abusive, but doubting a cute story about a relative isn't. Calling an 11 year old a "poofter" or "bent" is, however, abusive. Let's not discredit the latter with the former.
posted by andrewpcone at 11:50 AM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


it is wholly inappropriate to conflate disbelief with abuse.

Considering that a guy who spent “below £500” on a Twitter account to supposedly lead a chorus of disbelief for altruistic reasons just might be complicit in the associated abuse, however, is pretty appropriate.
posted by XMLicious at 11:55 AM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


Considering that a guy who spent “below £500” on a Twitter account to supposedly lead a chorus of disbelief for altruistic reasons just might be complicit in the associated abuse, however, is pretty appropriate.

Yeah, I agree that guy is complicit in abuse.
posted by andrewpcone at 11:56 AM on January 16, 2018


If people were to overstep the mark then it would be something I would call out

You know, when people say stuff like this, I always wish they would provide some idea of what they consider “the mark” to be.

(BTW, what's so unrealistic about a cat sneaking into your suitcase before you close it? I've never packed a suitcase without the cat trying something like that. It’s Cat 101.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:03 PM on January 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


Twitter is a huge medium. Anyone who goes out there looking for crouton petting is unfortunately misinformed about how humans go about their social business. You go to a hierarchy, step in on the ground floor and expect a lot of ooohs and ahhhh's over posts? Well, you'd have to be a celebrity and then again, that is no guarantee of sympathy, or acceptance. This woman took her nephew to the medium. I doubt she asked him for his permission, and since he is not really active in any of the whole thing, no one has abused him, but his auntie, who threw his privacy out the freakin' window, in the first place. You cannot go to lunch with wolves and complain about table manners.
posted by Oyéah at 12:05 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


“People are going to have to start getting evidence of things,” says Harry. “If they want to make claims on the internet, there has to be evidence."

I just can't get over this. A woman made an innocuous (and quite plausible) claim online, this Harry dude exposed her to a bunch of people by framing it as a lie, she was abused and people insulted the child in this story. What would the proof be? A video, right? Let's say she happened to be recording. If she put up a video, people would say she coached him to say that, for one thing. For another, now all of those internet assholes could conceivably find the actual child in the video based on his face and voice. "Prove it by potentially exposing a child to all the horrible things we are currently subjecting you to" is a totally ludicrous standard. She can't win here, except by shutting up entirely. How convenient. It's what the internet does best.

I assume Harry didn't expect this to take the turn it did, but now he knows he has that power. And what is his message? People better prove their stories or suffer these consequences.
posted by Emmy Rae at 12:06 PM on January 16, 2018 [18 favorites]


This woman took her nephew to the medium. I doubt she asked him for his permission, and since he is not really active in any of the whole thing, no one has abused him, but his auntie, who threw his privacy out the freakin' window, in the first place.

Malarkey.
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:08 PM on January 16, 2018 [4 favorites]


I'm not talking about Womack. I'm talking about people who put effort into actually lying to an internet audience.
posted by Brocktoon at 12:10 PM on January 16, 2018


Who cares if someone IS lying. Why bother challenging it? So bizarre people can't roll their eyes and move on.
posted by agregoli at 12:21 PM on January 16, 2018 [8 favorites]


Who cares if someone IS lying. Why bother challenging it?
Well, if they are lying about things that affect other people, such as "fossil fuels have nothing to do with climate change", "[political figure] supported [law]", or "[some named individual] slept with a bunch of journalists to get favorable reviews", that's, uh... worth challenging.
posted by inconstant at 12:26 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


That's not what we're talking about with this article.
posted by agregoli at 12:41 PM on January 16, 2018 [6 favorites]


I read the article. Your language was extremely general, and it's important to me that things not be generalized beyond where they should be.
posted by inconstant at 12:54 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


My language may have been general, but it's understood when we're talking in a Metafilter thread that we're talking about the article, which is about challenging personal stories and things that the challenger cannot verify. I don't really know what you're on about here, honestly.
posted by agregoli at 12:57 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


Well, if they are lying about things that affect other people ... that's, uh... worth challenging.

What if they are lying about things that don't affect other people? Your language did not account for that possibility and it's important to me that I be as pedantic as I can.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:58 PM on January 16, 2018 [10 favorites]


Who cares if someone IS lying.

Someone is wrong on the internet: Duty Calls.

I do think there is a tendency for people to call other people on bullshit. The irony is that often the lower the stakes the more people get upset about things, which is why church politics can be some of the most emotionally damaging arguments one can have. So even if this woman were lying, who cares? Got me. But everyone reads stories they don't buy, which is why "pics or it didn't happen" has been a rallying cry for years and snopes is so popular.

I don't have a problem believing a kid would say that sort of thing, since kids often say what they believe adults want to hear. My lawyer's kid is like 8 and she will spout off on the first amendment in a way most adults wouldn't understand. She's engaged with her dad enough that she can genuinely say some things, but she also parrots what she knows is the proper response. I have no problem believing this kid read the room, and said what would make his aunt proud. But even if not, I personally don't see a reason to challenge her over it, other than the fact that the stakes are so low.
posted by cjorgensen at 1:00 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


You go to a hierarchy, step in on the ground floor and expect a lot of ooohs and ahhhh's over posts?

Twitter is a hierarchy? This guy is what, the Duke of Tweets or something?

And there's no middle ground between vicious, unrelenting verbal abuse and "oohs and aahs?"
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:01 PM on January 16, 2018 [7 favorites]


> You cannot go to lunch with wolves and complain about table manners.

This is not some truth-to-power "this is how it is, man!" This is an argument in favor of the incredibly shitty status quo, and it sucks.
posted by rtha at 1:09 PM on January 16, 2018 [12 favorites]


You cannot go to lunch with wolves and complain about table manners.

So because some people act appallingly in shared spaces we should all just accept that and never complain? People use Twitter to share stuff with their followers, mostly their friends and people with shared interests. The idea that Twitter is a popularity battle royale where anyone entering accepts its brutal stakes seems pretty far from reality.
posted by howfar at 1:13 PM on January 16, 2018 [7 favorites]


When I was a kid we used to say "No way!" when somebody told an unlikely story. If it was true they would say "Way!"

Seemed to work at the time.

Maybe you had to be there.
posted by chavenet at 1:32 PM on January 16, 2018 [14 favorites]


The aggressive denials of Womack's story are a stupid waste of time. None of the doubters know her or her nephew personally, and none were there, and 11 year olds say all sorts of things.

I find it amazing that people would care enough in any way to bother and attack her.
If she said her nephew could fly I can't imagine caring enough to respond.
posted by bongo_x at 1:35 PM on January 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


This is reminding me of how Seanan McGuire said she can't share her weird animal stories online any more because shit like this happens.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:39 PM on January 16, 2018


When I was a kid we used to say "No way!" when somebody told an unlikely story. If it was true they would say "Way!"

We used the "Nuh-uh!" "Uh-huh!" variant.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:57 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


No way!
posted by chavenet at 2:47 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


What do you, fellow MeFites, think should be done about this. I can think of a few answers, but I'm curious what ideas others have. My thoughts are

option 1: Try to shift cultural norms away from abusive conduct. This seems basically impossible, as it takes a small number of trolls to poison any interaction.

option 2: Try to shift cultural norms so that expression of doubt is delegitimized. I don't think we want to do this, especially not for politicians. Anyway, doubt of politicians' claims is pretty ubiquitous, especially by those who voted against them, so I'm not sure how this would work

option 3: Pressure Twitter to enforce rules against this sort of dogpiling. This seems more workable, but I'm not sure exactly how the enforcement would work. Certainly calling an 11 year old "poofter" could be stopped without much reasonable objection, but I'm not sure how Twitter could decide when to suppress a given accusation of dishonesty. Like, "when too many people join in" would seem like a bad metric, because you'd just censor people from criticizing truly outrageous bullshit. Perhaps something more like "when we cross a certain density of abusive comments." This could apply to non-doubt forms of dogpiling too. This seems workable to me, but it still seems iffy to me to suppress outrage simply because some fraction of those outraged have acted unacceptably.

Basically, some form of option 3 seems like the best option I can think of, but even that seems hard to implement. What say you MeFites?
posted by andrewpcone at 2:52 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


This is reminding me of how Seanan McGuire said she can't share her weird animal stories online any more because shit like this happens.

She pulled back a whole lot after people threatened to murder her pets. I miss her - I like her a lot as the person I've seen via public appearances - but by the gods I can't blame her.
posted by Deoridhe at 3:47 PM on January 16, 2018


What do you, fellow MeFites, think should be done about this.

More people individually pushing back against it by saying "this is not useful", "this is not interesting", "seriously, dude, all you got is 'didn't happen'?" etc. would be a good start. It doesn't need to be some vast, hand-wavey, impossible-to-implement "eliminate abusive conduct" or "delegitimize expressions of doubt" or anything like that. Social pressure is an effective force.

There's a wide middle ground between "let's try to fundamentally change human nature" (seriously, my Zen teacher has repeatedly said things along the lines of "people have this idea that being nice to each other with no friction is our true and natural state, but we've got like 40,000 years of human history saying that's not how we actually are") and "do nothing".

And pressuring Twitter to enforce rules against this? Excuse me while I laugh so hard I pass out from lack of oxygen. Twitter's enforcement is notoriously ignorant and lax when it comes to things like overt threats. There is less than no chance that they're going to do anything about "didn't happen" comments.
posted by Lexica at 4:33 PM on January 16, 2018 [5 favorites]


What do you, fellow MeFites, think should be done about this.

In terms of immediate actions? Encourage people to make their posts private rather than public. Encourage platforms to make private posts and accounts the default unless selected as public explicitly. Provide granular, easy-to-use, and very visible tools for controlling who can read your content and contact you.

This is very much not me blaming anyone who was harassed for their behavior. People should be able to be normal people online (bragging about your nephew is perfectly normal!). Removal of assholes is the longer-term correct response, but it’s a game of whack-a-mole. I’m increasingly skeptical that it’s possible or effective in practice on the public Internet, or on large platforms with default-open policies.
posted by fencerjimmy at 6:30 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm not too keen on the phrase "incredibly plausible", Amelia Tate.

I read this and thought, no, it's totally plausible kids mirror what their parents say and . . .

And then I got your point and I literally died laughing. It's inconceivable that got by an editor.
posted by mark k at 9:17 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


@Joachim Ziegler: I'm not sure how voting works but it seems plausible that this went semi-viral (with the boxer mentioned in the story retweeting it early) and then the DHOTYA voting got overloaded with people who were just selectively skeptical about this one woman's story.

There's no reason to doubt this story and there's also no reason to believe politicians when they offer tidy convenient stories involving kids saying convenient things. But

the fact that an incredibly plausible story could be crowned the least plausible story of the year speaks to a greater political environment, in which online trolls stop at nothing to disparage and discredit feminists.

Yup. I mean there are probably three Trump tweets a day that are less plausible and more self serving than this. No way is anyone voting for this a "skeptic" in any normal sense. They are gullible oafs, blindly believing their own tribe members.
posted by mark k at 10:48 PM on January 16, 2018 [5 favorites]


There are two possibilites. One, the auntie is lying or she’s not. If she’s not lying, then she would be horribly insulted and emotionally attacked for something she didn’t do. If she was lying, it’d still be pretty horrible to make such a small lie to attract thousands of abuse.

When I was younger, I used to have a lying addiction myself due to a bad case of depression. Nothing big. But many many many small lies. One of the most damning things is how people react to you when you try to ask for help about lying — they criticize you, they attack you and they just hate you. This just reinforced my own need to lie — because I lied to get attention because I was deeply lonely — and so I just got more lonely and lied more.

It’s anecdotal and may be unrelated, but sometimes I wonder if there’s anyone out there who’s feeling the same way. Especially with the issues of people trying to so hurtfully expose these people. Would it actually make any benefit to change them?
posted by RoboticForest at 2:15 AM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


> poffin boffin:
"they think buttholes look like the knot in a balloon"

I'm irked that this is presented as a homophobic slur, because "balloon knot" is truly a wonderful euphemism for asshole.

Christ, what a balloon knot.

You could use that in polite company!
posted by chavenet at 3:38 AM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


If she was lying, it’d still be pretty horrible to make such a small lie to attract thousands of abuse.

That one. Something is askew when the Didn't Happen OF THE YEAR award goes to someone and something so trivial. Methinks the "pushing an agenda" criteria is projection.
posted by mrgrimm at 2:00 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


« Older Dreamy portraits of America’s forgotten women...   |   sexual liberation without consent is rape culture Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments