Jun 26

Jun 26 Letters on Social Media #6

An image of a man looking at his laptop in annoyance, his hands in mid-air as if to say, “WHY?”

Can people PLEASE abide by the pre-decided posting times?

We collectively agreed upon three posting windows a day so that the chat wouldn’t become overwhelming. Several people have had to leave the group because people are ignoring this simple and reasonable request, leading to those with less flexibility finding a backlog of up to EIGHTY messages. Please be considerate.

Admin

A young woman staring at her laptop screen wearily, her glasses pushed up slightly by her hand on her face.

How’s it going everyone!

You probably haven’t noticed that I’ve made all my social media private or protected, but I just wanted to explain why in case you did.

So basically I’m in one of those local lockdown support groups, and this guy posted about needing help, especially because he’s living alone and is very lonely, so since a few other people replied and said they were happy to listen or chat, I did too because it seemed a nice thing to do.

Right away, I got a message, and I felt bad for him so I replied (just small talk) even though it was super obvious that he’s not someone I’d be friends with in real life — like, in his profile pic he’s wearing a Stereophonics T-shirt and is blatantly over ten years older than me.

After just one day of him sending messages and me replying in a very nothing way, he started to get upset at me when I didn’t immediately reply, which was weird, and he started making comments like “all women let me down - I shouldn’t have expected you to be any different” and so on. Creepy, right?

So I found his Facebook page was completely open, and it was full of racism, and I googled him and saw there was literally ten years of him posting about the same stuff (“I’m so lonely”, “woman treat me so badly”).

I didn’t know how to reply after seeing all that, so I just left it, thinking I might work it out after a few hours.

I opened up Facebook later that day and omg. He had posted a huge rant about me in the support group - he’d seen pictures of me and my boyfriend on my Insta and it made him go apoplectic. He called me a slut, said I’d been leading him on, used horrible slurs, and even accused me of being a gold-digger! He tagged the mods, saying I was taking advantage of him and should be banned from the group!

Fortunately, no one had replied, but my heart was pounding in shock, anger and confusion. I took screenshots of our Facebook chats and added them underneath, and I turned off notifications.

Long story short, the mods sympathised with me but didn’t remove him from the group because they were worried about his mental health if they rejected him, even though they said he doesn’t even live in the area covered by the support group, and he’s actually living with four other people! I’ve blocked him, obv.

Anyway, he seems worryingly like an incel and I’m slightly scared and looking into getting a German shepherd or something even though I have ZERO experience of dogs and don’t think you can even adopt animals yet. I’ve managed to fit a door viewer thing though, in case he starts staking out the area covered by the group. *shudder*

Hope this explains things!

Zara xxx

A young woman is outside, and looks at her phone which she holds in both hands.

Sooooooo

did people ever decide whether we should or shouldn’t have posted the black squares, even without any hashtags at all? Was that ever resolved? Do I need to delete it? Kx