annabethchasethyourdreams628:

annabethchasethyourdreams628:

tormod:

tormod:

tumblr peaked when we were able to cyberbully john green

this is the post that got me my first anon graphically telling me to kms

The cyberbullying of John Green included MANY people telling him to kill himself so like… Maybe none of this is very funny bc that shouldn’t happen to anyone

A significant amount of the shit people said about John Green during the worst of it were serious personal attacks from people who are about .2% familiar with his life or even his work, like this is a guy who’s always spoken openly about his mental health – his severe bouts of depression in the past and his debilitating anxiety and OCD (which is a central aspect of his most recent book, Turtles All the Way Down).

So like, I get that a lot of the insults and jokes were (or seemed) harmless, but this is a man who talks openly about not just his struggles but his flaws, and the flaws in his work, and whose online content is primarily focused on education (how many of y’all’s GPAs have been saved bc of crash course, honestly), human rights, discussing various issues with a staggering amount of research, insight, and empathy, and directly helping real actual people through charities like water.org and Partners in Health. All of the proceeds from John and his brother’s YouTube channel, as well as from John’s other online projects, now go to charity. After revealing that, John said “Let me remind you that it is far more generous for someone with $10 to donate $1 to a cause they care about than for someone with a million dollars to donate $100,000. It’s easy for rich people to seem altruistic, and we’re doing this because we can afford to.”

And to anyone who says he’s a public figure who should just have thicker skin: he’s a guy who wanted to write novels and who started making videos in his basement as a project to spend more time talking with his brother, and nothing he’s done somehow invites people to say he should go die or kill himself or that his work is somehow absolutely disgusting and harmful – when the complaints are almost always targeting literally exactly what the books ACTUALLY explore (the romanticization of people, especially young people, with a terminal illness and how their lives are just as real and full as anyone else’s; the flawed narrative of the manic pixie dream girl, of the girl/woman men idolize not for who she is but for their own messed up, self-serving, unrealistic view of her; the actual experience of mental illness as opposed to the prettied up or dehumanized/villainized versions we see in the media).

So yeah, it’s just hard for me to find the internet’s rabid hatred of and attacks on John Green particularly funny when I know for a fact that they have affected him deeply for years and radically altered his experience of the internet, the platform on which half of his career is based and on which he built an impossibly kind, thoughtful community (dubbed Nerdfighteria back in like 2008 – followers of the vlogbrothers whose defining characteristic is their work to help others).

I see how people could find a lot of it funny, but the reality of it is pretty fucking shitty.

TL;DR maybe don’t cyberbully anyone and everyone you’ve decided not to like, even public figures, and definitely realize there’s a line between harmless/funny/constructive and legitimately dangerous

From reading a lot of the responses to OP, I can see that most of the people reblogging it think it’s just referring to some fake post someone made as if john graphically described how he liked dick or whatever. If you think that’s not that big a deal, I mean, I agree, it’s not that big a deal in the scheme of things, most people with any significant following have that kind of thing blow up every once in a while.

What was a big deal was when every other post on this site (which used to call him Den Mother Green and which he had long been a very welcome member of – I remember the innocent “Is that John Green” meme fondly) was saying John Green was a disgusting evil sexist hideous pedophilic racist bigoted monster who should fuck off and die, I think originally bc of like the trailer for a movie based on his book? And that’s legitimately it??

Which makes you wonder what kind of horrible crap his inbox was flooded with (suffice it to say, it was disturbingly horrible and crappy)

So yeah, it was actually bad