How it got this far
It started the way it always starts. A bit of sniping under a post. One condescending comment. Then two. Then ten. Nobody pushes back, so the tone gets louder — because louder apparently works.
At some point it wasn't comments anymore, it was messages in our inboxes. And at some point it wasn't abuse anymore, it was threats — explicit, specific, aimed at our lives. Repeatedly. Across several channels.
That's where every discussion ends. We documented everything, preserved it, and filed criminal complaints. This isn't posturing and it isn't an empty gesture — it has already happened.
We won't be commenting on the specifics. No names, no screenshots, no details. This is not about public shaming and it is not about satisfaction. The matter now sits where it belongs and is taking its course — entirely regardless of whether anyone involved has since come to regret it.
If you thought a made-up name and a profile picture pulled off the internet would make you invisible, you were wrong. Anonymity online is a feeling. It is not a fact.
Let's talk about the tone
What actually concerns us isn't this one case. It's the climate it grew out of.
Because this tone doesn't come from nowhere. It grows wherever it's tolerated. It grows in comment sections where the insult stays up and the reply to it gets deleted. In groups where people wind each other up until sneering at human beings passes for humour. On pages that know perfectly well outrage performs better than fairness — and therefore deliver outrage.
And yes, that includes other fan pages.
We're not going to name anyone here. But everyone should ask themselves honestly how much they contribute. Anyone who routinely sharpens things up, who turns a trivial matter into a scandal, who knows their reach sets people on other people and does it anyway — that person is not a bystander. They're part of it.
Reach is responsibility. Not at some later point. At the moment you hit "publish".
The double standard
It gets particularly striking when you look at how some of these corners moderate themselves.
We're deliberately not going into detail and we're not naming names. But anyone who spends time in the relevant forums, subreddits and groups knows the pattern: you don't have to do anything bad there. Holding the wrong opinion once is enough. A calm question, a disagreement, a simple "I see that differently" — and your access is gone. No conversation, no explanation, no chance to sort it out. Banned.
And then the same people write to us about how we ought to handle criticism.
Anyone who hands out bans elsewhere for every dissenting word and then demands sweeping free speech from us might want to read that back slowly. These people don't care about free speech. They care about their speech being free, and everyone else's not.
We do it differently. Nobody gets removed here for criticising us, for disagreeing, or for disliking a post. People get removed here for insults, for incitement, for threats. The difference isn't complicated. You just have to be willing to make it.
Yes, we block too — but only when someone comes at us personally, or is transparently out for a fight from the first second. Not because we dislike the opinion. Because that kind of "conversation" was never a conversation to begin with. Nobody is debating there; they're provoking until someone loses their temper — and the only party losing anything is us: our time. Time we'd rather spend on the people who actually have something to say.
So if you do collect a block, you had to work for it. And as a rule, you know exactly how.
And then there are the reporters
A chapter of its own: the people who write to tell us they've reported us.
Sometimes matter-of-factly, sometimes with the clear implication that they've achieved something. We reply to those messages. Politely. We ask: what exactly is this about? What specifically is the problem? Let's talk about it — maybe it's a misunderstanding, maybe we actually got something wrong.
