Silence is Never the Answer When It Comes to Bullies and Trolls

By now you’ve probably heard of #twittersilence—a day of silence to protest abusive trolling on twitter. After reading the Daily Beast article about it on Aug 2 and seeing #twittersilence trending on Aug 3, I participated in the tweets but was soon astonished to see author Maureen Johnson participating. Not only was Maureen Johnson a twitter troll, having participated in several online attacks against me, Maureen Johnson was someone who egged on my stalkers and thought it was hilarious that they were sending me threats, as did her author friend, Victoria Strauss. Apparently, author Maureen Johnson also blogged recently about how she wished “all stalking would end.” Odd as she and her friends goaded on my stalkers with their words and actions time and again.

Participating in the #twittersilence wasn’t about Maureen Johnson, however. It was about raising your voice or taking a silent stand. Hundreds raised their voices and spoke out against bullies and trolls. Hundreds took a silent stand and did the same.

Personally, I was glad to see twitter take a decisive stand so quickly. Amazon had allowed my readers to be harassed and attacked on its site for years and had never done anything about it, except to punish readers who dared to report the problem while often allowing the harassers to continue without consequence. Why? Because Amazon chose to ignore the problems and pretend such problems don’t exist. Hello, Amazon, when you allow discussions and comments on your site, such problems will and do exist.

Perhaps Amazon will learn a few lessons from Goodreads.com, a company Amazon recently acquired. When faced with similar problems, Goodreads.com didn’t ignore the problems or pretend they didn’t exist. Goodreads.com took action.

In 2012, Goodreads.com added privacy controls to profiles to control who can see member profiles. Members also were then able to control who could follow their reviews, who could send them private messages, who their email address could be shared with, who their reviews could be shared with, and who could see their birthdate and age.

In late 2012, Goodreads.com banned sexual role-play in its discussion forums. Although sexual role-play was a large part of its daily traffic, Goodreads.com took this step to help ensure the safety of children at its site. Why such a site ever allowed sexual role-play is another matter altogether, but at least thousands of children who participate in Goodreads.com are safer now.

In early 2013, Goodreads.com took action again to prevent harassment and intimidation by adding an option to ensure only friends of a member could comment on a member’s reviews and profile.

All these things together make Goodreads.com a better, safer site. Your turn, Amazon. You willing to make your site a harassment/troll-free zone?

Yes, It is a Problem

So back in 2009 an indie author picked up the nonsense from Rothfuss and friends and started posting hateful reviews of my books and hateful rants on my Facebook pages—under a few dozen accounts before I finally got fed up, called her out and told her to knock it off. She did but in typical fashion she then got her friends involved because she believed that it was her right to harass whoever she wanted to.

One of the same friends, Angela Perry, who had written comments to my Facebook page at that time, came back recently and posted a hateful rant to my blog. The next week she went to Amazon and posted nonsense. A few days later, she went to Goodreads and posted a few hateful reviews.

She then posted nonsense along with links to her reviews and other nonsense to 1) my Robert Stanek facebook page, 2) my William Stanek facebook page, 3) the Reagent Press facebook page AND 4) my personal facebook account.

Clearly by including links to her nonsense, she wanted to me to know what she had done. I ignored all of the above until she started tweeting nonsense directly to my twitter account. When I replied and called her out on using multiple accounts to harass me, she replied with

@robertstanek This is my only account. Not everyone behaves like you do.

@robertstanek Ha! Erm, okay, you call the police and tell them I tweeted you three times. I'll mention your fraud. G'ahead. I'll wait.

Her goal obviously was to twist the truth, get her twitter friends riled up, etc. This is typical of what these people do. Angela Perry is of course a friend of those involved in the twitter nonsense last fall. Two new one star reviews on Goodreads recently from her friends as well and more nonsense elsewhere recently from the same.

Which brings me to the real point of my post: How a few malicious individuals like these cause harm, not just to me but to everyone in the book industry. They try to seem like a majority while in fact being only a few malcontents. Most of these people are other authors--competitors who believe they can do anything they want to harm another author.