Content Warning: This blog post talks about adult themes and sexuality.
If you’re under 18, sit this one out.
If you’ve been around the furry fandom for a while, you will notice that discourse tends to have a cyclical nature to it. I’ve written about this topic before. More than once. And even covered it from a security nerd’s perspective.
Most of the time, when unproductive discourse happens in the furry parts of social media, it’s promulgated by individuals that usually employ the same tactics and rhetoric.
After you’ve observed enough bad faith call-out posts on social media over the years, a rough outline for a playbook starts to emerge, which I will now describe.
A Playbook For Harassment
First, collect a bunch of screenshots from kink-oriented chat rooms and private 1:1 conversations that involve popular furries (content creators, etc.). Secret “After Dark Twitter” accounts for relatively popular furries are perfect for this.
The deeper you can sink your hooks into the private lives of adults that happen to have any sort of social media following, the better. Social engineering skills are useful here, but basic social-climbing behaviors can also be effective.
Next, sort the illicitly obtained screenshots into vague categories. It’s important that these categories be as ambiguous as possible.
You can spend as much time as you want on the first two steps. Once you have enough “dirt”, it’s time to weave your narrative.
Choose one of these vague categories from step two, and then describe it poorly. For example:
- If your victims are into ABDL kink, call it “cub porn”, so as to imply that they’re all pedophiles without actually calling them pedophiles (and opening yourself up to the possibility of being sued for libel).
- If their fursonas are typically drawn on four legs, your call-out is going to be about “feral” to imply that everyone involved is a zoophile.
To obfuscate your sleight-of-hand and lend your call-out some cheap credibility, include some people who are actually known pedophiles or zoophiles.
Next, dump all of this together into a Google Doc, making sure to confuse the topic as much as possible in your write-up so they think everyone is maximally terrible.
Once this is all done, post a link to your Google Doc on social media (usually with an accompanying video, so your victims cannot find it if they search for their own names, and so it’s more attractive to the sort of Internet users that have short attention spans and therefore more likely to “go viral”).
Have other people in your group boost it onto everyone else’s timelines. Sextortion cults like Furry Valley are useful for this, but so are private Discord servers full of people as hateful as you.
Now kick back and watch a mob get whipped up into a frenzy, as they spread hate towards someone for having a poorly-understood kink that they were practicing safely with other consensual adults.
Congratulations, you just made the Internet a worse place for everyone!
This Is Stupid
If you want to make the furry fandom a safer place–especially for younger furries–this isn’t going to accomplish jack shit.
Sexual abuse is a topic filled with unfortunate realities that society fails to grapple with. The biggest danger of sexual abuse isn’t some random sicko, but someone you know and probably somewhat trust.
A random adult that roleplays on the Internet with other consenting adults isn’t inherently a risk to any child, anywhere–no matter how weird you may find their roleplay.
And I write this as someone who is personally severely uncomfortable with many of the kinks in question!
Just because something squicks you personally doesn’t mean it’s harmful. The people that employ the sort of playbook I sketched out above are counting on that initial emotional reaction overtaking your ability to reason.
The purpose of these campaigns isn’t to protect children or animals from being harmed.
They aren’t even meant to enact vigilante justice on the abusers that evade law enforcement (though some of them do adopt that aesthetic if their audience is more amenable to it).
The goal of these campaigns is to provoke other people to harass them, so they’ll feel a deep sense of shame about something that isn’t fucking hurting anyone.
As with stochastic terrorism, the goal is to harm by proxy so that the person writing the Google Doc is never directly liable for any violence enacted on their victims.
If that sounds cowardly, that’s because it is.
This Isn’t Actually Helping Anyone
People that care about protecting kids from sexual predators don’t creep on strangers then drop intimate conversations into Google Docs to spread on harassment websites.
They help their communities organize resistance to the tactics employed by abusers.
They provide resources and help to people who are at risk of being victimized, or of being groomed into being an accomplice.
This is all boring, thankless, exhausting work–often done under some level of necessary anonymity.
Sure, it doesn’t get you a hundred thousand followers on your favorite social media platform. But having skin in the game and actually helping solve the problem isn’t meant to earn clout.
Why The Harassment Playbook Works
The main reason this works is because recent history has several noteworthy examples of furries with large followings being outed as horrible people.
In the aftermath of these discoveries, many of their fans dug their heels in and maintained absolute loyalty to the influencer in question. This fanned the flames of discourse for years.
Separately, many victims of real abuse have resorted to this sort of Google Doc expose for their abusers’ activities, because they couldn’t get law enforcement to take action.
If you’re looking to get your dopamine hits on social media platforms from taking down a big fish, there’s no more ripe an opportunity than the atmosphere this created.
Beware Of Bewares
As I mentioned previously, this “Google Doc expose” pattern has been employed in the past by actual victims desperate for their community to stop supporting their abuser.
Sometimes, when you see a Google Doc floating around accusing a furry of being abusive, that’s what you’re seeing.
Other times, you’re being handed a specially crafted piece of rhetoric that cherry-picks and lies by omission to make innocent people seem guilty of being terrible.
Here are a few things to watch out for to distinguish legitimate grievances from targeted harassment.
- Scope creep.
- Is the doc focused on a specific, focused group of people, or does it read like a hit piece on as many popular furries as possible?
- Actions, not affiliations.
- A legitimate call-out will focus on what harmful actions a person did, their victims’ stories, and the harms caused as a result of said actions.
- Harassment docs focus on weak ties (“they were in the same Telegram group as ____”) or a person’s interests.
- Past remediation efforts.
- Did the person in question immediately jump to the Google Doc outcome without trying anything else first?
- What are the incentives involved?
- Speaking out about a horrible experience is terrifying, especially if it was perpetrated by someone with a lot of wealth or social capital in your community.
- Conversely, trying to guilt the offending party or their audience into donating money to buy silence is simply blackmail.
- Is this part of a larger pattern?
- Is this the only callout a person has ever made?
- Is this the tenth callout this person has made this year?
- What other metadata can you use to judge the validity of the information you’re presented with?
This short list of things to look out for isn’t foolproof, but it should help most people reduce their error rate for assessing a callout on social media.
Closing Thoughts
It’s admirable to want to make the furry fandom a safer place for everyone–especially the most vulnerable among us.
It’s perfectly understandable to find other people’s kinks and fetishes uncomfortable.
But if you tread foolishly, you will find you cause more harm than good.
So please stop, interrupt your biases, and think critically about whatever you read online.
A safer and healthier furry fandom is possible. The biggest obstacle between you and your goals is yourself.
Header art: CMYKat
