this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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This man (who is 38) got exposed by my friend for messaging her 13 year old sister inappropriately in a chatroom. She screenshotted and also video recorded the chatroom and posted it online. This caused a years long obsession with her and he claims he's signed up on every site so he can monitor and report her. Besides stalking her and making a whole site where he archives everything she says so he can twist it to make her look bad, he's also doing this thing where he finds things he deems "questionable" about her (and also other people who exposed him) like:

  • "None of these toxic people like dogs. That should tell you everything you need to know"

  • "These people support piracy. I'm glad I have a conscience, I cannot say the same for the toxic people I've encountered."

  • "Every one of these people have been banned (because he spams reports on multiple accounts). The continued existence of my site proves I'm not the guilty party here."

He also admits to spamming reports on her, for instance if she makes a very obvious joke he deliberately takes that joke literally in the reports. He wants to get her banned. On his site he records himself clicking the report button and filing reports on her. He claims that he is the one being stalked and harassed.

This is an update for the previous thread. I'm helping my friend file a police report (she lives in the US, this man lives in Australia) but I'd like to know if there's a name for this particular aspect of the harassment.

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[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 3 days ago (1 children)

"Whataboutism." Firefox flags the word as misspelled, but it's just a new word and if you search it, you'll find a lot of articles. It's a controversial debate tactic in which you attempt to shift the focus from something you want to protect (or yourself) to something the other person wants to protect (or themselves).

A good example of this is when we say "Trump is in the Epstein files" and people on the right say "well so is Bill Clinton." Except the left really doesn't want to protect Slick Willy (or any child predator, for that matter) so it's not a good whataboutism. Normally you would point to something good he's done, but I can't come up with any examples.

[–] Eq0@literature.cafe 4 points 3 days ago

That would be a slightly different scenario. Here we have the accuser and the accused. Then the accused discredits the accuser by bringing in unrelated facts. As another commenter said, it’s an ad hominem attack. Whataboutism would be, in this context, answering “but Trump/Clinton/Julius Cesar did it too” implying (so it’s not that bad, they are worse than me)