(At Least) One of My Friends Hates Me

My exciting journey through the world of online slander!

Something pretty terrifying happened to me this week, so I figured I’d let you all in on my experience. It might be pretty dumb of me to draw more attention to myself by talking publicly about the situation, but I think there are some lessons to be learned from it, and I’ve never done a good job of shutting up, so here goes.

Last week, a series of posts were made on a few local Facebook groups related to the claim that a local restaurant has allegedly hired someone with a sexually-oriented conviction. The gist of most of the hundreds and hundreds of comments related to that situation are essentially along the lines of “pedos should all be publicly hung”, “pedos shouldn’t have any human rights”, “they’d better fire that person or nobody should ever eat at that restaurant again”, that sort of thing.

Posts like that give me a lot of feelings, for a lot of reasons. I’ve spent a lot of time working with folks who are connected to the criminal justice system, including those with a history of sex offenses. Much earlier in my career, I also completed an 80-hour program that taught myself and my co-learners the basics of providing treatment to minors who are themselves sexually-oriented offenders. In addition, I participated in our local Second Chance Citizen Circle for many years, helping people come back to our community from incarceration, as well as running a pilot program with the state trying to reduce recidivism across those who had been convicted of a wide variety of crimes.

I care about human beings--deeply--and I also care about having compassion for others. I know how difficult it is for victims of violent crime and sexual assault, and have walked alongside many clients struggling with their traumatic pasts. I have also done the same with many people who have committed those types of crimes and will spend the rest of their lives trying to atone for those acts. I taught a graduate-level class on social work with child abuse and family violence for many years, and that gave me even more empathy for individuals on both sides of the equation--both those who have harmed others and those who have been harmed by others.

I know that I’m not alone in having done silly things as a kid. Growing up overseas, I know I benefited from the fact that when I made dumb mistakes, I got in all kinds of trouble (but not any legal trouble). I’ve always felt so much compassion for people who will forever be judged by everyone around them for choices they made on the worst day of their lives, because I know that could be many of us. I’m not saying everyone has the capacity to commit sex crimes, but everyone has the capacity to break the law. And that should be enough to give all of us pause when we start to dehumanize others.

In all this work and life experience, I have also found myself very concerned about the impacts of all this stigma and hatred directed toward those with criminal convictions. How does it make them react, how can they exist in the world and find any sort of redemption or forgiveness, and how can they ever be healthier or at least less directed toward harming others in their lives, if they’re treated with constant threats and dehumanization and such a massive degree of hate. In addition, one of the foundational values of social work revolves around dignity and worth of each person—I am bound by the ethical principles of my profession to care about everyone, no matter what they’ve done. Sometimes that’s harder and sometimes it’s easier, but it’s always worth it.

That’s the context. So after reading those comments, and getting more and more frustrated, I made a Facebook post on the 15th. Here’s the post in question, for your viewing pleasure.

I made this post out of frustration at the way that the folks in question were being attacked online, frustration at the perception that it’s wrong to ever give a job to someone with a legal history, and frustration that a restaurant which has been around for a long time (albeit under new ownership) would potentially be harmed due to this series of attacks.

Today, I noticed that I was invited by a friend to a local Facebook news group that I hadn’t previously seen. I thought “cool” and requested to join. Then I saw WHY my friend had invited me to the group, because this post was right on top.

I think I freaked my wife out a little bit with my reaction at seeing this online. Not because I was so upset, but because it just felt so weird to see myself pop up in this context. It was more than a little stunning. After I showed it to her, I held my breath and went to the comments. I know, I know—never read the comments. Still, I just had to see. The thing that mitigated a great deal of my stress is that everyone who commented (for the most part) was agreeing with me and choosing not to take the bait. I was glad to see multiple people who know me from the community coming to my defense, or at least liking the comments which were supportive of me.

But let’s stop for a moment and consider how scary this situation was, at least at first. The most worrying aspect to me (other than lumping me in with “pedos”) was that they’d gone to the trouble of looking up my profile on the library board’s website. That profile talks about my current employer, my prior employment history, the town where I live, even the fact that I own a dog. Any of those things could potentially have caused real problems for me, if the post had gotten any real traction.

And then I thought to look up the person who made the post, and that’s when things got a little weird. You can see that she goes by the name “Teri Shannon”. Her profile says she lives in my community, works at “Fiscal” and graduated in 2018. Her Facebook account appears to have been created the first week of October, at least both pictures linked to her account were uploaded that week. She has a public profile, with three liked organizational pages (two local restaurants and an organization dedicated to womens’ issues). And that’s it. Nothing else.

Here’s her profile.

Naturally, I ran her profile pic through a reverse image search.

Here’s her picture:

And guess what? Surprise—this isn’t an actual person (or if it is, it’s not an actual person’s photo). You can see below that someone used a photo from a stock photo site as their profile pic, and aside from that and their cover photo of a generic covered bridge, that’s all they’ve uploaded. As this picture shows, this stock photo shows up in multiple stock photo libraries online, and has been floating around since 2018.

In case you’re curious, it was originally uploaded to Unsplash (one of those stock photo sites where folks can download free pictures) by a guy named Ronny Sisson. In case you were wondering, he’s not local to me either.

In addition, there is no “fiscal” person for my county, so it’s a fake job as well. I’ve looked at the personnel directory for the county, and she’s not in it. As far as I can tell, there’s nobody with that name in this area. And the photo certainly doesn’t seem to align with someone who supposedly graduated in 2018.

If you’re curious, the second photo on her profile was taken and watermarked by a person who takes pretty foliage pictures and has no local connection either.

All I can conclude from this information is that someone made the decision to create a fake Facebook account in early October, and that the only thing that person has done with that fake account (so far) is request ownership in this local Facebook group and intentionally try to harm me and my public image by arguing that I’m “advocating for the pedos”.

If you were wondering, she did respond to some of the comments in the thread as well, this time suggesting that the library isn’t a safe place for kids due to my “troublesome thinking”.

It’s a weird feeling to know, for sure, that there is someone in your community who wants to hurt you. That happens, especially as someone who’s been out there in the quasi-public eye for a while. But having someone go to the trouble of creating a fake identity in order to do that same thing feels much more insidious and much less run-of-the-mill. It’s a pretty unsettling feeling, honestly, which is part of the point. I don’t know who’s behind this nastiness, but I’ve got my guesses. The end (for now) of this incident is that the admin of the FB group in question immediately deleted the post once I provided them with proof that it was a smear attempt from a fake profile. I’m not specifying the restaurant involved or the group where this happened, since neither of those are super relevant and I don’t want to further contribute to the pile-on effect.

I think it’s possible that some of you might benefit from hearing about my takeaways from this experience, which is one of my reasons for writing this post in the first place. My second reason for writing all of this up and putting it out there publicly is to ask for the help of all those who read it: not necessarily ONLY your help for me (in case the same thing happens again in the future). No, I’d like you all to be on the lookout for posts like this one, so you can try and take action to help all those whose lives could be negatively impacted by those who seek to do harm to others in this toxic, malicious, and underhanded way.

I’m a big believer in the power of collective impact, which refers to what we can do when we are on the same page and all dedicate our efforts and energy toward the same goals and aims. We can provide more oomph to a cause when we work together than when we work on our own.

It’s pretty clear to most of us that many aspects of our public discourse are currently broken, or at least seem broken a great deal of the time. ‘Toxic’ doesn’t even begin to describe how negative and nasty our interactions can end up looking, especially in a lot of online spaces. I’m a long-time veteran of the online world—I’ve been involved in virtual communities (including BBSs) going back to the mid-90s. But the types of trolling and rage-baiting and the doxxing and other types of toxic behaviors that I regularly see right now are in a whole different universe of nasty than they used to be. There are a lot of reasons for why this might be the case, but I think that there’s a real permission structure that exists for a small but dangerous group of people to do or say anything in order to harm others. The only thing that’s going to stop them from acting this way is if we defang those efforts, if we don’t allow ourselves to be silenced by those efforts, and if we eliminate that permission structure by making it unacceptable to act this way. That means calling it out when we see it. That means not feeding the trolls by giving them more opportunities to do more damage (but also not remaining silent). It’s a fine line sometimes.

When I look at the comments thread on that post, I’m very grateful to all those (both people who are in my life and those who don’t know me at all) who pushed back on the accusation against me. I’m also VERY grateful to the one person who tagged me in the first place (you know who you are, and I’m so glad you did)! Someone told me that one reason my friends and professional acquaintances who saw this post didn’t tell me about it could be because they didn’t want to make me feel bad, but let me tell you that it could have been much worse than it was (so far) if that person had never informed me. If you know me (or know anyone) then when you see someone making claims like this, I would argue you have a responsibility to push back when nastiness like this post pops up on your timeline. And if you don’t feel comfortable exposing yourself to danger as well, then you can always reach out to administrators, to the person in question, etc. behind the scenes instead of doing it publicly. But you have a responsibility to do SOMETHING. Want to know what you can do? You can stop nonsense like this from harming someone you know, or even someone you don’t know.

I have no real opinion on this restaurant, which is one factor that increases the absurdity of the whole situation. I’ve never actually eaten there, to be honest with you. But I don’t feel like treating their decision to give someone who has made mistakes in their past a chance as though it should be sufficient reason to (metaphorically) burn the place down is reasonable. If you saw a terrible car crash on the interstate, you might have the natural impulse to look out your window as you drive by. But you certainly wouldn’t stop your car, pull out a baseball bat, and take a turn smashing out some more of the headlights on the vehicles who crashed in the first place. Why would you see a post like that and contribute to the horrible toxicity of so many of these Facebook groups? Feel free to weigh in on your opinion, but I’m begging you to care about your values in these discussions more than you care about being part of a club who are doing their best to hurt others.

I’d also like to point out that yes, my post was set to private and friends-only (as you can see from the icon in the screenshot).

And yes, that means someone on my friends list is the one who tried to hurt my life and career, OR someone on my friends list passed on that screen shot to the person who did it. Both of those situations make me feel sick to my stomach, since I would rather feel a sense of trust and values alignment with the folks who are a part of my online community. That said, I am not going to go down the rabbit hole of culling my friends list and trying to make determinations about who hates me and who doesn’t. I don’t think that would benefit my mental health, and it also wouldn’t help my ability to stay connected with folks (which is something that matters a whole lot to me).

So if it was you, know that you have caused pain to me and those who love me. Not as much pain as you’d like, perhaps, but I hope the harm you did was enough for you to move on to your next target (or maybe decide to stop acting this way entirely). That’s probably overly-optimistic of me. If you’re the one who did this, and you continue to feel the need to try and damage me in the eyes of others, I’d urge you to spend some time considering your motivations for doing what you did and whether it’s truly representative of who you are and what you value in life. If you would like to have a conversation with me about your choice to spend your time to look up information about me, my wife, my previous and current employer and position on the library board (not to mention the time to create a fake account with fake photos and request membership in this group, in addition to the time it took to respond to comments in the thread), then I’d be open to having that dialogue with you. I don’t understand why you did what you did, and I think it was a horrific choice on your part. But I’m always glad to talk with anybody, even those who have made horrific choices (which you already know from the fact that I have no issues with doing therapy with those who have been convicted of sexually-oriented offenses). If you want to talk, let’s talk.

I’m glad to have a dialogue with anyone reading this about what more of us could do together to try and improve the quality of discourse as a community. That’s regardless of your political leanings or regardless of the lived experience you bring to the topic. Let’s talk!

That’s it for this week, folks. I hope you have the chance to rest and recharge this weekend, and that you’re doing your best to take care of yourself in the midst of everything going on in the world right now. Know that I care, I see you, and that there are lots of us out there who try to act in ways that are consistent with our core values of love, hope, caring and compassion toward others.

Take care, and stay safe out there.