On Spam, Humanity, and SU

I’m going to process this the best way I know how and just write until the uncomfortable feelings go away.

Thank you to everyone who’s offered an ear to listen and shoulder for me to muffle-scream into. And many thanks to the helpful advice everyone gave about how to manage my submissions so I can still accept them from you all while minimising something like this happening again. And thanks to the people who are just plain supportive and angry on my behalf.

What really gets me about the spam submissions (link to PSA), is that they don't have a point to them. There’s no cause, no advocacy, no agenda. See, even posts laden with anti-SJW sentiment, or racism, these try to justify their causes. These are consistent with something that they believe in. Spam is nothing like that. Spam serves no purpose but to enrage, to make people uncomfortable, to shock, to make life harder for the recipient by virtue of volume.

Coming from my background, of med and debate and history, images like that, by themselves, aren’t what made the messages disturbing. It was the context they were used in. In history, responsible journalism, medicine, you see mutilated people or bloody people a lot. And that’s socially accepted because there is a purpose for it. You’re learning about things so that they don’t keep happening to others. You’re figuring out how and why these things happen so that you can see the warning signs. You’re looking at the effects of selfish and prideful actions and seeing what they do to human beings just like you, so that you realise and empathise and as a person you never want this to happen again.

I like history and medicine, because they really bring everyone down to the same level. I know there are debates about medicalising everything, and how that at times can distance people from their humanity. But the medicalisation of man has brought about at least one social benefit. It’s shown us that on a very basic and fundamental level, we are all the same. We’re made up of the same carbohydrates and amino acids. We have the same genetic sequence as a species that activates different switches and different combinations to make us who we are as individuals. It’s really cool. 

One of the first things I was taught is never to react when you see a patient in a terrible condition. Because we all have different coping mechanisms. I had classmates who coped with being disturbed by laughing. It’s not inherently malicious; it’s how they dealt with the stress of seeing another living being subjected to such suffering. But it’s something you have to keep a look out for. It shows that when we’re scared, we do crazy things. That’s the kind of thing these posts want to get out of us.

And I think this is what made the spam submissions so reprehensible to me. The human body is a beautiful thing. It’s sacred because it ties in so much with how we interact with the world. Our bodies show us that we’re still a part of the natural, physical world and that gives us so many opportunities to grow with it.

But whether those images were real or fake, their intent was to disgust. They wanted us to hate and reject the human body. In fact, to get to that point, they perverted it, but notice, never beyond recognition. The reason we have such a knee-jerk reaction to seeing people-gore is that no matter how unemphatic we are, there is a heavy equalising factor there. When a person is reduced to those very carbohydrates, lipids, and amino acids, we still know that’s a person and that could have been any of us. But it speaks volumes that we can still identify with that. That is what makes us human.

So to me, the big question is why anyone would do something like that. Because doing that is distancing yourself from humanity. Doing that is an outright statement that you don’t identify with this group of people. And it’s definitely not because you’re better than them. Denying your own humanity reveals something about yourself. That you don’t feel human. And what does that leave? An empty husk of proteins and amino acids. Nothing else.

It’s very ironic that these people chose to target SU blogs. Because of all things, it’s a show that preaches the oneness of people. All shapes, all sizes, all types, all manners. Of course we’d be offended and bothered by it. But it also means that we still care. And that matters. 

The goal is not to be enraged and engage. That’s exactly what they want. In the same way a terrorist is defined not by his attacks but by the terror he spreads. These posts are meant to do the same thing. What we can do is block them, close off their channels, report, and drown out all of this with more love, because that’s what this fandom is great at. 

I doubt this will be the last time something like this happens, but I do believe that we’ll be more prepared next time and we’ll know what to do. No one deserves to see these things, and at the very least we can appreciate how roundabout Tumblr makes it for these people to even attempt to spam. If anyone else experiences these things, this blog, and I know, many others, are open to support.

PSA Re: Spammers on SU blogs

For those unaware, (as I was an hour ago) several SU blogs including myself have been receiving spam submissions over the past week or so. All of the submissions are submitted as email submissions. So I do suggest checking from there first. This is because email will refrain from showing images until you click on them. And this is important because each of these messages followed exactly the same format of two images and a one sentence post.

The images are unsightly, and for those who cannot view blood, gore, mutilation, corpses, and the like, I advise asking someone to deal with the submissions on your behalf. The second image is a frog meme, called Pepe the frog. And the post is fraught with sexist and racial slurs. The posters are also throwing in ideologies like Nazism and facism, and words like Hitler. Basically, they’re trying to be  as offensive as possible.

Because these are submitted over email, they can’t immediately be traced to Tumblr accounts and the poster cannot be immediately blocked. And you may also find yourself unable to block the email because it’s from “no-reply.tumblr,” which also sends you other updates about your blog.

I’ve been shown XKit to help with the problem. It blocks certain keywords for your submissions. Also, you can take the path of charging into this head-on and blocking each IP of the submission. Under each submission, there’s an ellipses (...) and an option to Block. This would be useful since the same address sends multiple messages. 

Also there are options on Tumblr to simply turn off submissions. This can be found in the settings of the specific blog. And there are also options to turn off submissions from email. 

No one deserves to see this, whether it specifically repulses or triggers you or not. The goal of these posts is to shock and offend you. Nothing else. If this is happening, particularly to SU blogs, then we as a community can come together and stamp it out.