re: #78 marjoriemoon

It wasn’t just her. It was tens of thousands of people every day for a couple of weeks.

Many had their emails locked out, as well as their phones because their Android logins were no longer working. Access on a professional level and personal level for many people was entirely disrupted simply because they were accused of not being “real people”. Simply being reported as a Pseudonym account was enough to get you banned.

It happened to famous people as well, by the way.

I wasn’t, however, portraying all of that in the poster. What I was portraying was an attitude best exemplified at Google by that engineer who posted that you should report people you suspect of using a pseudonym - which tens of thousands of people apparently did. That declaration was fascistic, as was the declaration that we’re not real people - the implication that locking out our digital communications (some of which we had literally paid for, might I add), was perfectly acceptable.

Nobody actually died from it, nobody was imprisoned, but merely stating that we should weed out all those who aren’t “like us” and lock them out suddenly, without any recourse whatsoever, was over the line. In fact, he had to backtrack and apologize, and Google had to go back and re-instate people after they got raked over the coals for it.

I merely was trying to point out that telling others to report people in such a manner, to make them “disappear”, was tantamount to the same idea in real life. I know that nobody actually was killed or rounded up, but it was the same effect - and I wasn’t the only one pointing this out. A lot of Germans, who are very sensitive about that sort of thing, called Google on it and declared it a completely fascist policy. Many of them also threatened to sue Google over it, and the German government started looking into allegations of abuse with Google’s policy over this.

I still stand by it. My graphic, and thousands of others, and thousands of articles decrying Google’s behavior and stance, made them back down. They were ashamed of how they handled the people who were depending on Google as a communications medium (and I don’t just mean a silly social network, but their android phones and email) were re-instated, for the most part.

When somebody in a position of power starts telling others to point out the “different” people so that they can get rid of them - virtual or otherwise - it is no different to me than what any fascist regime has done. So, I don’t apologize for it and, unlike Breitbart’s use of the cartoon, I am not agreeing with the notion of the poster. What I’m saying is: I don’t agree with that. Being called a ‘nym is the new Jew, Gay, or “other”, and I was fed up with a ton of people being treated as if they were simply things to throw out into the digital dustbin.

And, I can tell you, if my Android phone had been locked out because of them, as a paying customer of Google’s, I would have gone far more ballistic than I already had gone. They had no ethical right, they tried to erase our identities, and I wouldn’t stand for it.

I still don’t. They still have an unclear policy. But after we got so pissed off, and practically every single publication reamed them for it for months, they appear to have quieted down at least for now.

I’m sorry if that poster bothers you, but that’s the point. The point is that when people start telling you to point to entire groups of other people so that they can be forcibly removed from your sight, that crosses the line of bigotry. And to me, regardless of if people are put in actual concentration camps or not, bigotry is still bigotry. That poster was merely a reminder of what bigotry really, in the end, looks like.