Rant away: I've been frustrated about this for a while, and suddenly it all burst out in this post!
My wake up call about this actually happened close to a decade ago on Tumblr (back when I was still using Tumblr): in the wake of the 2016 US election, it was revealed that a lot of accounts that appeared to be innocuous fandom accounts, or accounts ostensibly belonging to Black people posting about anti-Black racism in the US, activists posting about abortion rights etc were actually the work of paid Russian propaganda networks. It was possible to check if you'd ever reblogged material from this network of propagandists, I did so, and discovered that a bunch of seemingly innocuous posts (fanart celebrating Black American women athletes like Simone Biles, Serena Williams and so on, random text posts about sexism, etc) turned out to have originated with this network. They were mostly either fandom stuff, or things on the face of it that seemed to be about social justice or marginalised identities in the US — but they had an incredibly sinister origin.
That moment was enough for me: lesson learned, and I never clicked retweet/reblog/share again without investigating the source in detail. I really wish other people would do the same. The above is a really stark illustration of how something seemingly light-hearted and insubstantial (pretty fanart of Simone Biles, for example) can contribute to something much bigger and scarier.
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My wake up call about this actually happened close to a decade ago on Tumblr (back when I was still using Tumblr): in the wake of the 2016 US election, it was revealed that a lot of accounts that appeared to be innocuous fandom accounts, or accounts ostensibly belonging to Black people posting about anti-Black racism in the US, activists posting about abortion rights etc were actually the work of paid Russian propaganda networks. It was possible to check if you'd ever reblogged material from this network of propagandists, I did so, and discovered that a bunch of seemingly innocuous posts (fanart celebrating Black American women athletes like Simone Biles, Serena Williams and so on, random text posts about sexism, etc) turned out to have originated with this network. They were mostly either fandom stuff, or things on the face of it that seemed to be about social justice or marginalised identities in the US — but they had an incredibly sinister origin.
That moment was enough for me: lesson learned, and I never clicked retweet/reblog/share again without investigating the source in detail. I really wish other people would do the same. The above is a really stark illustration of how something seemingly light-hearted and insubstantial (pretty fanart of Simone Biles, for example) can contribute to something much bigger and scarier.