vent over the prevalence of creepy people online (tw)

[alriune]

so recently on tumblr a semi-famous user was outed as a pedophile and zoophile who was actively preying on real life children (including their niece) and had a website where people with abusive paraphilias (mostly pedophiles and zoophiles, but others along those lines too) could come together and preying on minors/animals/etc was not just allowed, but encouraged

it's been about a week or so since this all came out, and i've been frazzled since then because this user had extremely glaring red flags from the start and i've noticed how many people there are like them and who were adjacent to their circle in some way. yet every time someone bothered to point out how creepy their behavior was they'd get dogpiled

it freaks me out how many people were gullible enough to see nothing wrong with how this person behaved and how they were able to manipulate so many people by using progressive sounding language, and how many abusive people just like them are able to manipulate so many more people by saying the right things, and realizing the amount of times i've been exposed to predators online (though i was never their target, they were usually adjacent to some community i was in) and how they all act the same and yet no one picks up on it.

it makes me feel like i'm going insane trying to point out and convince other people that there's something seriously wrong with someone for me to then be blown off and then later for me to be proven right. i've been taking a break from social media in part because of this exact issue and it's been weighing on my mind a lot especially because this past year a now ex-friend has started rubbing elbows with these types (which was part of why i don't talk to her anymore but was a smaller part of a larger inciting incident)

[bikinksterboy]

I am far from properly educated on the subject, but if the person is transfem it's more than likely that it was a targeted smear campaign from a very small group who persistently do things like this. it's a fairly well-known phenomenon on tumblr to my knowledge

[alriune]

user was not transfem, plus there were pages and pages of screenshots and archived webpages of this person running a website in which actual, self-admitted predators would be able to contact minors in addition to several admissions from the person in question talking about grooming and molesting their niece and endorsing predators contacting minors

i'm very aware of the smear campaigns against transfems and it's bad and it sucks, especially considering events from the past month. the person i'm talking about had their website where they encouraged predators to contact minors initially discovered and exposed by a transfem, and they actually tried ganging up on a transfem friend of mine once.