What My Final Month on Twitter Was Like
Harassment, Impersonation, and the Subversive Power of Having Unusual Hair
If a “Lauren L Walker”, aka @NotABigJerk on Twitter (yes, that is her actual ironic handle) ever Googles her name and finds this bit of writing, I hope she learns a lot of life lessons, among which, to cross out the names of the human beings she’s decided to roast for the hit of cheap dopamine and self-importance she evidently craves. Since she didn’t do that, causing me weeks of annoyance from her many followers, I’m using her full name here in forced recompense.
Don’t get me wrong — I, too, enjoy a good roast. We’ve all done it upon encountering someone on the internet who, like Lauren, seems desperate for a whipping — but even if only in fear of being “Zucced”, the primary reason you should anonymize the content you’re mocking is quite simple: you cannot know what your followers will do with this information, and the behavior of your followers and their values will reflect poorly upon you.
It’s tempting to leave the name and profile picture, right? We can surely all appreciate the humor in many Facebook tag groups suggesting “uncover the name — I just want to talk” and if it was a public post, it’s fair game, right? Users can still do a full text search for the public thing that was said, so why hide the name? Because human beings on the internet tend to be passive and lazy. For every hundred trolls who decide to hunt down the offender, ninety-nine did so only because you made the grunt work easier for them by handing them identity on a silver platter.
So it was that a couple weeks ago, just before Elon Musk went through with acquiring Twitter with the intent to set it on fire and burn it to the ground, I woke up one morning to an unusual quantity of strangers in my mentions —mostly men of course — making fun of my awesome hair. Now, I spent an average of 15 minutes on Twitter a day, so I didn’t have a huge following and never particularly cared enough to seek more. It was the place I went to for up-to-the minute news, unfiltered moments from the lives of various actors and writers I like and admire, and a place for me to discuss Star Trek with a small circle of fellow Trekkies. This means my Twitter was tumbleweeds on your average day unless it was one of those rare occasions in which I happened to tickle the algorithms in just the right way and one of my tweets was inexplicably shared widely. To wake up to harassment without a source tweet was confusing, but not terribly hurtful initially — Of all the things I might feel self-conscious about regarding my appearance, my hair isn’t remotely one of them. I have thick hair, I swim, and at 43, I don’t have the fucks for hair upkeep more complicated than a good towel. It’s short to minimize the six hours of drying time I endured when it was long, and it’s a classic 60s bowl cut because I like its face-framing properties more than any other haircut I’ve ever had. I enjoy the sensory comfort of it never being in my eyes or needing to be swept behind ears, and I’m also one of those insufferable creative types who, despite solidly being an introvert, likes to look a bit unusual — revels in it even.
Men on the Internet inexplicably live under the fantasy that their basic opinions about women’s appearance is wanted. They cannot comprehend that we simply walk away concluding that they are shallow and basic — and immediately mute or block them. But since it kept happening throughout the day, and since Twitter is a place of patterns, I was curious to find the source, so I looked through their recent likes and replies until I found this:
My original tweet had been a reply to the kind of quick Variety piece which reports on the highlights of someone else’s journalism — in this case a longer, kinder piece in GQ, interviewing none other than the famously cantankerous, celebrated comic book writer Alan Moore, who expressed that he hadn’t seen yet another iteration of his work but railed against it fiercely anyways — in this case, HBO’s critically praised, boldly experimental limited series sequel to his Watchmen that featured a team of writers in which white men were squarely and refreshingly in the minority.
For those unaware: like plenty of artists, Moore wasn’t treated particularly well by the big bad corporation that originally paid for the rights to his work — in predatory ways that hurt his artistic integrity and wrested creative control from his darlings. It is, quite simply, something that happens to creatives every day — Moore is just among the most privileged of the lot of them.
Thus, for decades — one rare interview at a time — dissing any other artist’s interpretation of his work and revisiting his Big Grudge has been Moore’s modus operandi. The trouble being — an axe to grind, no matter how fair the initial fight — gets old for those watching from the sidelines, especially when real human tragedies continue to unfold all over the world that put the pain of artistic integrity squarely in its place on high. For plenty of readers, myself among them, Moore’s charm has long since dried up of sympathy. So in a moment of eye-rolling irreverence, I tweeted in reply:
“Well we’re all embarrassed by Alan Moore. HBO’s Watchmen is one of the greatest works of art possible to make out of a television show. Roddenberry hated some of the best things Star Trek ever did, too. Alan Moore just announced to the world he doesn’t have good taste.”
Plenty agreed with me, a few disagreed with me, and I responded to a few of those. Some hilariously assumed my tweet must mean I am unfamilar with Household Name Alan Moore, so I clarified that I have an art degree — of course I knew damn well who he was. A few especially lazy readers then somehow took this to mean I was saying my opinion had more weight because I had studied art, rather than simply clarifying why I was especially aware of his legacy. But Twitter thrives on misunderstanding as its baseline, coated in the appealing myth of literary concision. Plenty of writers like to claim that Twitter’s character limit improves their writing, but these same writers can be found exclaiming that’s obviously not what i goddamn meant, peon because one man’s effective shorthand is every literalist’s excuse to call you out for forgetting to tweet obvious subtext as a disclaimer. For those who understood my tweet, it was pretty clear that knowing who he was was precisely the point.
Does Alan Moore have good taste? Of course he does, but he has the kind of singular, narrow good taste that comes with the kind of genius that looks down on all other equally-valid forms, thereby diminishing his own virtues in the end considerably.
HBO’s Watchmen, which received twenty-six Emmy nominations and won eleven, is one of the few comic book screen offerings genuinely deserving of critical praise on every level. The series took an aggressive stance against systemic white supremacy especially within law enforcement, and by dismissing it because of a decades-old grudge, Moore unknowingly fired up those racists who absolutely hated the HBO series when it was released. He’s old and experienced enough to know better.
Thus, my subjective tweet that I’d say again in a heartbeat, that was a public tweet under a major entertainment publication, caused me to recieve zero harassment until it enraged one random and simplistic woman with unfortunately, a lot of equally-dim followers: one Lauren L Walker, whom I initially assumed was some kind of Alan Moore superfan, but there seemed more to it than that. And I am just neurodivergent enough to be open to personal criticism just in case I had missed something, so I looked at the comments under her post for context clues and found none of interest or value. Instead, everyone either mocked my awesome hair, accused me of knowing nothing about Moore, utterly missing the point themselves — or labelled me a filthy liberal in service of licking HBO’s boots. This was especially ironic since Alan Moore’s net worth is about a million dollars, yet he famously doesn’t give a shit about money, walks to the grocery store from his modest home, and gives away much of his royalties to his co-creators. The genuinely redeeming charm of all that aside, his suffering has never been financial and he has the privilege to remain a Serious Big Respected White Male with a Platform, if he chose to wield it. And therein lies my issue with him.
Having been surrounded by creative types my entire life, and having taken years of art history, Moore’s story is one of comparative success. Most of the artists who go through something like this are people you’ve never heard of, who do not have the luxury to grant or deny rare interviews with GQ, who cannot afford lawyers, and who were paid exactly once and never again for work that was then profited from for decades by everyone except the creators. And THOSE people somehow tend to be infinitely more gracious about it than Moore, who stopped writing altogether due to his wounded artistic integrity and could afford to do so. Moore is the poster child for the white male intellectual who did great work decades ago and has since completely checked out of the burden of bettering humanity, and I could respect that if he had simply kept to that script honestly. All he ever has to say in any of these interviews was something like “I’ve not seen it and have no interest in anything that takes my source material elsewhere, whether it is an improvement or not, so I have no opinion of it and don’t want to.” Instead, he lashes out and provides headline writers fodder to endear him to the worst kind of people.
As for Lauren L Walker, I had dismissed her by the following day and subsequently deleted my Twitter for Musk-related reasons along with everyone else, when one of my friends sent me a link to a Twitter profile containing my pilfered name, profile picture, bio, cover photo, and location. “Is this… you?” she asked. The account, run by some sort of basement-dwelling incel with the Twitter handle @valgravel91 was using my identity to post the worst kind of content, and a visit to his likes confirmed he had only ever found me because of Lauren L Walker’s sloppy Twitter practices:
This was the first thing Lauren had inadvertently done that had bothered me, and the only reason why I bothered to write about this experience at all. Had her shallow followers stuck to broadcasting their uncultured hair opinions, I would have left the lot of them alone. But someone using my identity to say vile things was horrific. I reported the account to Twitter, and they somehow concluded that they have no idea what a deceptive identity even is:
This was the final nail on my Twitter coffin. When my identity was stolen, I assumed they would rule sanely. This was a TEXTBOOK example of their very policy by their own description. So I might have considered staying (and simply not using the app) to park my identity in case it happened again (without a Twitter profile yourself, you have zero hope of fighting fake profiles) but Twitter proved that they can’t even offer the most basic protections for their normal, everyday users — the people who are what made Twitter valuable in the first place, without which, there are no masses to stoke the egos of celebs.
I won’t miss it.
