For my birthday, I hope you'll indulge me sharing my *own* research.
One of the more insightful responses I got to my thread was something to the effect of "Quote-tweets are talking *about* the person, rather than talking *to* them." And, a lot of the time that's true. Not always, but often enough to matter, I think.
It dovetails neatly with my own framework for understanding harassment campaigns, advanced in my paper "Toward a Formal Sociology of Online Harassment." https://ht.csr-pub.eu/index.php/ht/article/view/274
In brief, a harassment campaign can be understood as an inverted pyramid with three layers, bearing down on an individual target, depicted below.
The third order, up top, is the crucual part of my theoretical framework. It gives a formal visual visualisation of what Alice Marwick calls the moral motivations of networked harassment. This is where people talk *about* the target, creating moral licence for abusing them.
The quick and dirty way I describe each layer is this:
Third Order Harassment is talking *about* the target.
Second Order is talking *to* the target.
First Order is *doing something* to the target.
Quote tweets, in my qualitative estimation, played a significant role in third order harassment (so do forums, like Kiwifarms, or various subreddits). Third Order Harassment performs a marshalling function, calling targets and psyching people up to attack them.
When I think of the devastating abuse that nearly destroyed author Isabel Fall's life, I am starkly reminded of how even just discoursing *about* someone (she had no visible web presence whereby people spoke to her directly, after all) can still be destructive. A game of telephone that went wildly out of control. Amplification, reinforcement, and ratcheting up of a sense of mission.
I hope this adds further context to what we're discussing. https://www.wired.com/story/social-media-harassment-platforms/
@Quinnae_Moon I make reference to this post quite frequently. Thank you for writing it.
