online lynch mob – Katrina Stuart Santiago

Hate and lies don’t stop in a time of a pandemic—we are after all under a government that lives off this kind of propaganda. But when it comes from regular people who deserve respect for fighting for the poor and oppressed, the farmers and the peasants and the workers, you can only be taken aback, to say the least. That they would even take the time to fashion you as enemy, throw shade in your direction, especially on social media comment threads where discrediting a person is quick and easy, here and now, well, there is a time of reckoning for that.

This is not that time, but it is the time for some clarification. So let me take precious energy to talk about the accusation that I “defended a rapist” last year. A controversial, sensationalist statement to make, a juicy piece of news to hear about the person who wrote a review of Ang Huling El Bimbo in 2018, and questioned its handling of the rape of the lead character Joy; the same person who likes to see herself as a feminist, who writes about being woman in this country, who builds upon the kawomenan of many others. But of course via people like artist and peasant advocate Donna Miranda, what will surface is nothing at all about what I’ve written, or the play in question. Instead it will be this statement from her: “Gusto ko man basahin ang review na yan nahihirapan ako bilang nagtanggol ng rapist yung manunulat a year after.”

What a way to take down a person: throw a one-liner, attack her, try to ruin her credibility. Who cares if it’s true?

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I happened upon the case of Nacho Domingo too late. It was Sunday, September 29. I asked a friend who had posted about social media responsibility and online mobs what he was talking about, and he told me to do a Twitter search for his name.

It yielded little, though the few tweets that came up were ones of mourning and condolences, a lot of regret. By later in the day more and more tweets surfaced that were turning defensive: this is about frat culture, they said. The system is to blame for his death, many others said.

The blame game on Twitter seeped through the rest of the week, with some accounts coming out with names of “people who killed Nacho,” which just continued the cycle of blaming and shaming, bullying and mob rule that brought upon us this death to begin with.

I spent the rest of that Sunday and early last week going through Twitter accounts and mining it for information. Facebook was pretty wiped clean, and there wasn’t much to see there. But Twitter, with its 140-character, shoot-from-the-hip demand — so much of what transpired remained there even as many deleted posts. The sadness grew as this process revealed what it must have been like for one person to see this unfold, and not just on Twitter and Facebook, but also, now we know, in his phone’s inbox. (more…)

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