Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
1/ Over the past few weeks I've been thinking more about "public persona" - how careful should I be with it? How filtered? When the bestiality tweet went viral, literally thousands of people assumed I'm a dog fucker instead of realizing I'm a researcher who asks weird questions.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
2/this is a bit scary, cause the thing I have to be afraid of isn't truth, it's weaponized narratives carried by people who don't like me and don't care about my actual opinions. The question then becomes, how much should I filter my speech to avoid handing weapons to the enemy?
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
3/And of course I'm not discounting the practical use of self censorship to avoid stuff like having five thousand people call you a dog fucker, but it does go against a lot of what I value. I want to be uncensored, I want to be as vulnerable as possible as publicly as possible.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
4/I want to be a shameless human who freely offers up the weapons other people can use to throw at me, because that's their choice and not mine. My choice is just to demonstrate the lack of self judgement that I generally feel, and by implication lack of judgement for all
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
5/those people and beliefs around me too (I'm still working on astrology pls give that one time). I feel generally capable of being eviscerated, so I want to allow myself to be eviscerated. It's just the internet doing what the internet does.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
6/so while I can't promise i won't self censor a little, I'm always pushing towards less self censorship.
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Floidberg
@floidberg
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Remember, the negative reaction is a function of how Twitter is constructed, not thousands of people's genuine evaluation of you as a person. They might feel like weapons, but ultimately these were people's opinions about something you didn't say.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@floidberg
Right, but this sort of "opinions about you for something you didn't say" has gotten people disinvited from conferences, shows suspended, or just generally cancelled.
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happy ex mouse
@atl4shugged
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
and
@QiaochuYuan
This encapsulates a deeply underrated sentiment that I could never put into words and Im excited because I feel like shame is a big part of the world's unnecessary unhappiness and we all need practice saying stuff like this because this is the fight
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