you see this post? okay, you've read it? keep it in mind for now.

last year, i hosted a urlfest called 911fest. we had open submissions, and so a lot of artists i knew or had mutual friends with submitted sets. one of the sets was made by an artist called weirdwyrd.

a week before the urlfest, i announced the lineup on Twitter. this generally got a lot of backlash because i have a reputation in the scene and a lot of the people connected to me do too, so people started piling hate onto it. there were a ton of 14 year olds on Twitter throwing around shit like "lol pedofest" "lol 911fest more like groomerfest" "when are you inviting $knownPedophile onto 911fest".

but most of the hatred was focused on weirdwyrd specifically. i got several messages telling me they were a sexual harasser; some people going as far as alleging they harassed multiple people, including minors.

now i know how quickly made-up bullshit can snowball on the internet as i've been the victim of it myself. i wanted to make sure to research this thoroughly with the rest of the 911fest staff, before making a decision on whether we should platform weirdwyrd or not.

back to that picture at the start of this post.

on January 14, 2022, shirin (the owner of GOOP HOUSE) posted this message in the GOOP HOUSE announcements channel, asking everyone to block weirdwyrd pre-emptively. the GOOP HOUSE staff had banned weirdwyrd from the server with no explanation, and they were now going around asking people what the hell happened. shirin mentions very directly that weirdwyrd was banned for "sexual harassment". they started sending a "sob story" to several members of the Discord server, and this prompted the announcement to be made as shirin wanted to warn people of them venting about this in people's DMs.

after this, they rebranded to 'weirdwyrd' and they started being active around my spaces a lot more. GOOP HOUSE posted a second announcement to warn people of this name change.

shirin never posted any actual proof for this claim, just a message telling people to block them. at this point i think i was also not aware that weirdwyrd was this same person, so i saw no issue in interacting with them. in June, one of my friends made me aware of the allegations that were posted in GOOP HOUSE, and provided me with some extra context that they got from asking both weirdwyrd and shirin about this directly.

shirin also provided a screenshot of weirdwyrd asking traceybrakes, another staff member, why they got banned from dariacord. this prompted shirin to investigate the situation and ban weirdwyrd from GOOP HOUSE. at first glance, this seems like a really bad situation! also, do note that shirin specifically uses "barely legal" to describe the admin of this server. this will be important later on.

now what is this "sob story" weirdwyrd has been sending to people?

this does paint a different picture of the situation; that of someone who woke up to mysteriously find one of their Discord servers missing from the server list, asking a lot of people in a panic about what caused them to get banned, and then getting no response other than even more bans for reaching out. the interesting thing is that they do not appear to know what caused the ban. i've been through this myself, too, with these same people; they just paint you as a Bad Person™, and because you're a Bad Person™, you must already know what evils you committed and do not need to be talked to about them. even when you... don't know what you did? why would someone not know what they did, especially if it's something as serious as sexual harassment?

now is a good time as ever to mention that weirdwyrd is extremely neurodivergent. heck, in trying to get this situation figured out, i've interacted with them very personally, and it's not hard to come to this conclusion. there were several instances in which they'd keep on being obsessive about being banned everywhere, or they'd talk about topics that other people wanted them to drop and they just would not stop talking about it. it was genuinely very annoying to deal with.

so, shirin/GOOP HOUSE's side of the story is that weirdwyrd "sexually harassed" someone, then "harassed" server staff/members about getting banned.

weirdwyrd's side of the story was that they didn't do anything like that, and they have no idea what they did that got misconstrued as "sexual harassment" or just "harassment" in general.

since it was unclear to me which side was right, i continued to platform them. not uncritically, for the record! but without any solid proof, i wasn't going to do anything. and the one thing that was missing here was solid proof. but people kept bugging me and the rest of the staff about it.

so, our urlfest is scheduled in about a week from now. we've been getting a lot of responses about weirdwyrd being platformed, with some people going as far as alleging they're a literal pedophile. most people just called me and the staff groomers, and when asked for proof, just blocked us. the usual. you get used to it at some point.

some people however tried giving me some actual info to work with. one twitter user posted a summary of weirdwyrd's behavior.

so, get this! we've gone from "sexual harassment, against several people including minors" to "directly talked about kinks in a server with minors in it". this still sounds bad, sure. but this is very importantly not the same thing. and not even this is what actually happened. we'll get to that.

once again, the framing of "harassment" comes into play here. we've seen the "harassment" in question, we've seen weirdwyrd's DMs to these two people. does it look like harassment to you? better question: what does it look like more? actual, straight up harassment? or someone who is desperately messaging lots of people to ask what happened because they don't know how to read the room?

i've also yet to see any evidence of them creating alts to rejoin GOOP HOUSE. they have created alts, i'll mention that later on, but i'm personally not aware of any situation like that actually happening with GOOP HOUSE. this person never provided any proof for this claim either. they didn't provide proof for any of their claims, actually, besides just saying that they were there when it happened.

here's the thing, though. all these Discord servers mentioned are public. the people involved in this situation are there. you can search through their messages. you can DM them. guess what we ended up doing?

me and the rest of the 911fest staff got so many negative responses to platforming weirdwyrd on our urlfest that we decided to investigate the situation so people would just shut up about it. by "we/the 911fest staff" i mean myself and lyn2u; she was much more active in- and familiar with the spaces all of this stuff occurred in, and did most of the investigative work into all the Discord servers this happened in. i mostly contacted people she found, to ask them for info and context. most of this happened with her help.

i already figured these claims weren't what they were being made out to be, because shirin has similarly made up shit about me and they never provided any proof to any of this. but what me and lyn ended up finding was... so much dumber than we imagined it'd be.

let's go back to that original claim from shirin. "[weirdwyrd] went into extreme detail about their kinks to the barely legal admin of the dariacord server, which made them extremely uncomfortable". you know that's something we could track down, right?

after some digging, we found out that this involved an artist called 2manycolours. i believe they were in fact the admin of the Discord server in question that weirdwyrd initially got banned from, and they had turned 18 a short while before weirdwyrd contacted them. several people were pointing to- and giving us a screenshot of weirdwyrd's DM history with 2manycolours as proof of the sexual harassment. so what did weirdwyrd tell them that was so uncomfortable?

no. that's it. literally. that's everything.

weirdwyrd even VC'ed with me, lyn, and the rest of the staff, and streamed their entire message history with 2manycolours to us. this was the only thing they ever said about kinks. they mentioned owning pets in a petplay scenario to someone who, i guess, did not want to hear about that.

but you know what'd be even more damning? what if we asked 2manycolours directly how they felt about the situation?

so not even the one person everyone kept pointing to, the 'victim' in this situation, thinks any sexual harassment has occurred here.

but those claims of "talking about kinks in spaces with minors"? what about that? well... it's effectively just the same thing. lyn went in those servers, and found an introduction post about them where they mentioned having kinks.

that is LITERALLY all we could find. LITERALLY nothing else came up. not even any deleted messages with people responding to them weirdly, as far as i'm aware. nothing.

we've now minimized the initial claim of "sexual harassment against people including minors" down to "directly talked about kinks in a server with minors in it" and again, down to "casually mentioned petplay/being a kinkster in an introduction post in a server that had some minors in it". this was misconstrued by several people into sexual harassment/grooming. their stubbornness in trying to hold people accountable for their treatment of them was then characterized as harassment.

shirin making it a point to refer to 2manycolours as "barely legal" to make the accusations sound more grave, combined with the fact that weirdwyrd mentioned "owning pets" in a server with minors in it — not even actually talking about this to anyone, beyond just mentioning it's an interest of theirs! — has resulted in people spreading the falsehood that they are literally a pedophile.

you know, there's something that happens in situations like these which i'd like to give a name. it's a phenomenon. you see it happening with almost every transfem and/or autistic person who gets ostracized over bullshit like this; everyone starts thinking they are evil, so they stop caring as much about pretending to be good, and so actual harmful behavior starts to happen as a result which everyone then points to as "ha! see? i told you this person was harmful!".

weirdwyrd didn't take this whole situation very well. they came up with a plan to create an alt account under a different name to try and reconnect with all of the people who wronged them. several people including myself told them this was an awful idea that would just make them get even more hate because it'd be seen as stalking, but at that point, i guess they just didn't care anymore. what would they have to lose, anyways? i tried giving them support but they were beyond listening to that in how stubborn they were in obsessing over these folks, so even i had to stop interacting with them at some point.

what they started doing to these artists obviously isn't okay. but this wouldn't have happened if people just treated them with dignity before. these people took a highly neurodivergent individual, and they exploited them for clout by putting them in a situation that exacerbated their obsessive tendencies and social ineptitude, all to reduce them to nothing but an example of what not to be. if they had been given actual tools to unlearn this behavior, nobody would have exploited it. instead they ended up with false accusations they can never fully recover from, leading them to display even more behavior that these people can file under "harassment", and the cycle of extracting value from them continues even after they've been pushed out of the scene so thoroughly.

they took an autistic person, and they made up allegations of sexual harassment against them because they thought their behavior was annoying.

fuck, dude, i'd be less upset if they were at least honest and admitted that they thought weirdwyrd was annoying as fuck, instead of resorting to misconstruing every mishap they made into an overarching allegation of fucking sexual harassment against minors. not every single online incident needs to be turned into a cudgel or an issue of social justice that you can position yourself on the right side on. sometimes you can just find people annoying.

none of this was necessary.

the reason i'm so motivated to talk about situations like these is because i want everyone to recognize the harm that these sort of dynamics cause. i want the takeaway here to be that you should always look into things a little deeper. these appeared to be pretty clear-cut accusations, with lots of people corroborating the same surface-level story, and then when we looked into it we found out it was all bullshit! critical thinking may not always reward popularity or success in these situations, but you should still do it. i don't care how many times 14 y/os on Twitter are going to call my efforts to uplift the community a "pedofest"; the truth is a million times more important to me than that.

people need to do better. and it shouldn't take some random gay furry on a social media platform none of these assholes use to bring these issues to light. which is why i hope other people will learn from this, so that in the future, it won't just be me warning others of this type of behavior all on my own.