Fandom and Context Collapse
From Winterfox to MsScribe to the Loss of Isabel Fall—What Can We Do?
The internet’s social environment, though it may mirror many familiar social environments humans inhabit, has a few types of interactions that are fairly distinct from those that exist outside of it. One of these is the concept of the “context collapse” which generally occurs when a piece of information leaves its intended online space and audience only to be misunderstood on a basic level by a separate audience who is unaware of the context behind that information. An example of this might be a YouTuber whose content is perfectly in line with YouTube’s social etiquette finding that their video has “escaped” containment and is now floating around without any sort of contextual base on Twitter whose social structures and etiquette is fundamentally different. It may occur when a user’s tweet is screen-capped and then shared independent to the thread from which it spawned: a fairly common type of context collapse attack utilized by bad actors to force-feed a false narrative to unsuspecting audiences who are only interested for the entertainment value of “cancellations.”
We’re all guilty of this. Whether it’s the perpetuation of a context collapse or the unwitting belief in the new narrative, it’s hard not to get swept up. This is why it’s called a “collapse.” Much like a crowd collapse, a context collapse is dependent on the behavior of human beings to unwittingly move forward while oblivious to those who already know what’s happening, crushing the truth under the weight of shock and affront. When the truth is unable to control the narrative, the lie will gain a life of its own, surging in waves to harm as many people as is possible who’ve tried to get to the bottom of things or who were at the head all the time.
This insidious method of attack has been utilized in some pretty infamous instances in fandom, notably the attacks committed by the now-notorious Winterfox (AKA Requires Hate, pyrofennec, acrackedmoon, etc., real identity: Benjanun Sriduangkaew) on her fellow science fiction/fantasy writers, or the attacks against Isabel Fall for her short story I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter which Emily St James famously used as an example of Twitter’s “structural lack of context and nuance.” There have been an untold number of these kinds of attacks, some larger and some smaller, but most are simple little lies told through the dissemination of unfortunately-worded tweets or even just instances of the victims of these attacks being mildly asshole-ish while the attacker acts irrationally harmed in order to foster a sense of having been irreparably damaged enough to require a larger response than is otherwise called-for. These are further aided by any community’s collective damage and paranoia caused by their inability to identify flawed allies versus enemies.
During the heat of the moment, it’s sometimes difficult to determine who is the victim of a context collapse attack. The amount of time it takes for a creator or victim to build up enough context to satisfy the audience is often enough time for them to already have been crushed by the effect of inertia, rendering them completely unable to build back their career or even find the motivation to do so. Relatively popular YouTuber Kwite was accused earlier this year (2023) by a random redditor of rape back in 2018. In the interim between the time the lie was told and the time Kwite was able to put together a complete and comprehensive timeline of events and indisputable proof of his innocence, his reputation tanked and has never fully recovered as his motivation to create after allegations and the mental stress of them took their toll. The liar was determined to be Kwite’s former friend Orion whose fabrications were carefully orchestrated to create as much confusion and collapse of context as possible in order to harm Kwite’s creative endeavors and online career. Plenty of other YouTubers distanced themselves from Kwite, some saying some pretty questionable things about him when pressed by their fans to condemn him which added another unnecessary layer to the “canceled” cake on top of a nearly 80,000 loss in subscribers.
Much of the time, context collapse and the types of interactions based on it are unhindered and even aided by normal self-defense mechanisms provided by websites and social media platforms. Chain-blocking, that is blocking whole swathes of one detractor’s followers or everyone who liked a tweet, can further the collapse of context by making it completely impossible for the blocked subsection of audience to access any truth that might come out from the affected parties. Having been blocked is also often taken personally when it should not be (reminder: Do not take the impersonal personally) but provides a type of mentality of “if they weren’t guilty, they wouldn’t have blocked so many strangers” which is just on the whole obviously a fallacy. It offers something of a companionship aspect for those who were previously unaffected by the drama and those who are major instigators of it and those tenuous and often meaningless ties can serve to further harm the victim of the attack and further collapse the narrative. This could be seen even before Twitter and mass blocking with the lies spread by MsScribe against the exclusive Harry Potter fanfiction site Gryffindor Tower.
At current there is no actual guide for surviving a context collapse attack but Kradeelav’s “Cancelled Resources” page does offer some options for mitigating the effects of a campaign leveled against online creators. Is there anything else that we can do? Is there some way we could get ahead of context collapse attacks? Is there a way to prevent them from happening or develop a social structure that is not conducive to making them? Who knows! After all, it is often near-impossible to know when one is happening around you and they are difficult to discover by design, whole Google Doc call-outs standing upon a bed of loosely-related dateless screen-grabs that amount to pillars of sand or Gabby Hanna-esque YouTube clap-backs with grainy unrelated tweets flashed for .5 seconds as a backsplash for “evidence” while the maker relies on the shock of the allegations to cover for shoddy “research” and blatant lies.
Unfortunately the presence and proliferation of context collapse attacks sometimes will add an extra layer of difficulty in identifying people who actually aren’t a good person to spend time around. With arguments that abusive posts didn’t “come from so-and-so” when they might actually be a sockpuppet account (tactics seen utilized by MsScribe and Winterfox) or someone acting on their behalf with or without their explicit knowledge. We’ve also seen indirect threats, such as Winterfox’s recent 2022 Tweet implicitly urging users to DDoS attack another user’s mastodon instance, being characterized as “satire” or “not that serious.”
Hopefully, as we get more savvy to the ins and outs of the types of human behavior that allows for context collapse, safeguards can be designed to prevent these types of things from happening. What those might look like: one cannot even begin to guess.