Haters II: How to Spot A Hate Campaign

[Note: This is a long one, but I won’t be posting next week, so I thought I might as well post something now that will last through my absence. Enjoy!]

This week, I’ve picked up my very own hater! (Please see the comments to this post if you’ve missed the excitement.)

It seems kind of ridiculous – who am I, that anyone would even bother doing the hater bit with me? But someone has! So this seems like a good time to revisit the subject of haters, and how to spot them online on the occasions when they’re a little less obvious than the one here on my blog.

The internet is a brave new world for haters. It used to be that haters were limited by being identifiable. In order to spread their poison, they had to communicate it directly, by telephone or in-person conversations – and the risk always existed that what they said would be traced back to them. Their words could be directly connected with their face and their name, and they might end up being held accountable for anything they said.

With the advent of the internet, however, all of that has changed. People can hide behind screen names, announce their identities or not, claim to be someone they are not, present themselves as several different people – the possibilities for deception are virtually endless.

Further, the anonymity of the internet has made accountability pretty much a moot point. On occasion, a hater’s poison can be traced directly to them, but it’s rare. When Kelly (Secret Shadows) admitted, in a momentary fit of conscience, to posting three viciously hateful comments about her adjunct therapist under three different names on a public website, that tied those comments directly to her – but most haters do not have those kinds of moments. They thrive on the fact that, even if people know who they are, it can’t be proven, and they are careful not to provide that concrete proof. As a result, they are free to say whatever scurrilous nonsense they choose, secure in the knowledge that there is not likely to be any accountability for it whatsoever.

This being the case, it is necessary for each of us have our own common-sense defense in place as we surf the web – and part of that defense is knowing how to recognize a hate campaign when we see one. Here are some tips on what to look for.

1. Haters run in packs.
Any time you see a flock of people “coincidentally” descending on the same place at the same time, all repeating the same negative message, odds are that they are haters.

Haters never stick their necks out all alone. Individual people with personal gripes post single comments, as their individual spirit moves them. With haters, what you see is post after post after post written by what appears to be a veritable crowd of different people. They will claim they don’t know each other, or that they knew each other “way back when” but they haven’t spoken for years – and yet, by the magic of fate, with no coordination whatsoever, they all just decided to come to the same place at the same time to write the same nasty message about the same subject.

Well – I’m sure we can all see what bullshit that is.

Of course the haters know each other. They have their own places where they congregate, bonding in their negativity and coordinating their more public hate campaigns, and when they head out to the public arena, they do it in concert.

Haters also tend to enlist backup singers – people who aren’t actually part of the hate campaign but who don’t know any better than to support it. The backup singers don’t usually understand the real issue with the target – likely they’ve been fed the same lies that the haters are about to make public. But they don’t have to know the truth, because the only purpose of the backup singers is to sing the praises of the haters – their honesty, their victim status, what an all-around wonderful person they are, and how we should believe every terrible thing the haters say about their target because haters are just that trustworthy.

Normal people venting about real issues do not have backup singers. But haters almost always do.

The backup singers will also claim to have just happened to find the hate campaign. Like the haters themselves, they never admit to being part of a coordinated effort – but really, how many people can be involved in something before the “it’s all coincidence” story loses its last shred of credibility? I top the limit at four – because four people can’t even manage to meet at a restaurant for dinner without some serious coordination and planning – so the idea that all these haters and their backup singers just happened to get together is just plain ridiculous.

The pack is never as large as it appears, though – it is usually a relatively small group of people posting multiple times under different names in an attempt to appear substantially more numerous than they are.

The goal is to accomplish through numbers what they can’t accomplish through logic or evidence – that is, if ten people repeat the same gossip or tell the same lie, then maybe people will be impressed by the volume and forget about the fact that there is no concrete proof to back up whatever they’re saying. Concrete proof is never part of a hater’s arsenal, because the things they’re saying are never true.

2. Haters are self-referencing.
Haters generally run their hate campaigns in places that have no direct connection to them. For example, Secret Shadows and the others involved in that hate campaign didn’t post their comments in her blog, which everyone knew was hers and where accountability might be an issue – instead, they all went to post at the same random review site under anonymous names (further decreasing the likelihood that any of it happened by happenstance).

But in lieu of actual proof to back up what they’re saying, haters might offer a reference to another group or blog or site, constructed by themselves, where the intrepid surfer can view more examples of the same message being espoused. Of course, this is still not concrete proof – but it is another site broadcasting the same message, and sometimes readers fail to realize that it’s just the same people saying the same things.

What the haters don’t offer (because they can’t offer it) is anything concrete that readers could check out themselves for independent verification. Haters can’t use facts, because facts will never support what they’re saying – so instead, they try to create such a volume of crap that it overwhelms the facts. They want people to assume that, because the same message is said so strongly so many times in so many different places, then it must be true.

But this is a false conclusion – no matter how often a lie is repeated, or in how many different places, it is still a lie.

3. Haters get personal.
Also in lieu of proof, haters take things to a personal level immediately – their approach is never about a person doing a bad thing, it’s always an attempt at character assassination.

Why do they do this?

Well, the first reason they do it is that everyone loves drama. When things get juicy and the gossip and accusations start to fly, do readers even care who’s telling the truth? Or are they just enthralled by the spectacle of watching people zing each other?

The point of a hate campaign is always to distract and discredit, and making things personal is the best means to the end – haters distract from what the target is saying or doing by taking the focus of the discussion straight into the spicy heat of personal confrontation, and they discredit the target by attacking them on a personal level and hoping that some of the shit they throw will stick.

Hate campaigns attract attention, and the haters want the attention focused on them, on what they’re saying, on what they want other people to think about the person they’re attacking.

The other reason that haters get personal is that the personal level is the emotional level.

Haters use rhetoric geared toward provoking an emotional response – both from the target and from the spectators. They use loaded words and catchphrases intended simultaneously to demoralize the target and to turn the reading audience against them – hoping that, with emotions provoked and engaged, nobody will actually think about the messages enough to notice that they have no substance.

Does this sound like any other situation with which dissociative survivors are familiar?
Who else tries to hook people through their emotional responses in order to slip their messages past common sense and rational thought?

Programmers do. Manipulators do. Liars do.
And that’s really what haters are – they are manipulators, trying to manipulate you, the reading public, into swallowing their poisonous hatred and to turn you against their target.

But instead of blindly believing them, it is worthwhile to ask yourself why it’s so important to them to discredit their target. Why did they choose that particular target for destruction? What does that person or group or cause represent to them?

Thinking about it from that perspective can throw a whole new light on a hate campaign.

4. Haters have no point except hate.
Haters have plenty to say – but what prompted them to say it? Why did three, or ten, or fifty people suddenly show up at the same place to talk smack about someone?
Why did even one person show up here trying to insult my character?

The world may never know…

They’re not going to explain themselves. There will be no A=B, cause-and-effect connection that can be made. The real reasons behind the haters’ actions, whatever they are, will never even be hinted at in the slew of negativity that makes it into public view, because haters really aren’t there to explain themselves to us.

Their goal is to cause as much damage as they can to the public perception of a specific person, group, or cause – nothing less, nothing more – and their goal is not going to be furthered by explaining themselves, because if you knew the real motivations behind what they were saying, you would probably think twice about listening to them.

If you knew that hate campaigns were being engineered by predators, to discredit the sources of information available to us so that we are more likely to stay their victims – would you be as likely to believe what they said?

If you knew that a hate campaign was part of a borderline revenge tactic best defined as “I imagined that you hit me, so I’m hitting you back ten times as hard”… would you still consider it to be valid? Would you still want to support it?

Probably not – because you’d feel pretty stupid believing or supporting the haters if you knew that’s where they were coming from, right?

So we need to ask ourselves why it’s so important to these people that we hate their target with them, because the haters will certainly never tell you – they’ll just show up, start the blitz, and hope that nobody remembers to ask.

5. Haters never let go.
We’ve all been angry or suffered hurt feelings in the course of our lives – but how long do these feelings normally last?

Assuming that we’re not talking about our feelings toward perpetrators, and that we have enough self-awareness to separate those feelings from the feelings that are evoked by other events – how long do the feelings last?

How long do we wish we could exact revenge on a person who made us angry? How long do we want to hurt back in response to feeling hurt? How long do we have to keep venting about something before the emotions wane and it’s just not that important any more?

In short, how long does it take before we get over it?

We might continue to feel some emotional response for a while, but the kind of emotional intensity that drives us to do something about it is a much shorter-lived phenomenon… unless you’re a hater.

Haters go after their targets like rabid dogs. They don’t get over things and move on – because in truth, whatever natural emotion they might have felt regarding their target (assuming they ever had anything that might be called a reason for their feelings) has long since been subsumed in a soupy morass of bitterness and resentment and desire for destruction that has nothing to do with the target and everything to do with the individuals themselves.

And this is why, although people with normal and genuine complaints or reactions are generally satisfied with one public statement of their feelings (and many never feel the need to make a public statement at all), a hater just never runs dry. Haters spew their venom over and over and over – not just for the few days when an emotional reaction might be expected to remain intense, but for months, or even years, long past the time when anything natural or reasonable could possibly be driving them.

So what is driving them??

There’s that question again – and it’s the most important question to ask yourself when you see a hate campaign in progress – why does it matter so much to them? Why are they putting in the time and the effort to seek someone out and beat on them over and over and over? Why do they keep showing up to grind the same old axe?

WHAT, EXACTLY, ARE THEY TRYING TO DESTROY BY CLUBBING US ALL INTO SUBMISSION WITH THEIR HATEFULNESS, AND WHY ARE THEY TRYING TO DESTROY IT???
And what would it cost us if we let it work?

We might not be able to answer those questions – I know that I certainly have no answers, even with regard to myself. Why do I merit a hater? I have no clue – but clearly someone thinks I’m worth the time and the effort. So I guess I must be saying something that someone doesn’t want said.

So… think about it.

There’s not much we can do to stop the haters right now – the law is a long way from catching up to the speed with which the internet is growing. No doubt, in future decades, the anonymity factor will be removed – precisely because of these kinds of abuses – but it hasn’t happened yet, so right now the haters are running amok.

But even if the law can’t stop them, we can – because it’s our belief they’re after. It’s us that they’re trying to manipulate. And it’s up to each of us to decide how much credence we’re going to give the haters.

Do we believe their lies? Buy into their messages? Follow where they lead?
Or can we hold on to our common sense – step back from the dramatic intensity of the fracas, consider what they’re trying to accomplish – and wonder why?