Callout harassment is interesting, mechanically.
Similar to a tabloid or a political smear campaign, it operates by placing the most viscerally upsetting accusations at the forefront, and attempting to hit as many eyeballs with this as possible.
For example the campaign about "death pannels" against health care in the USA, or on Tumblr you might find "donates to AO3" rephrased as "is a known pedophile." You get people to stop thinking and act immediately.
Anyway once you get this in front of enough eyes, some legitimate or well known, but credulous, source will share the big bad headlines and that's when the harassment is settled in. What's interesting with call out campaigns is how there's usually small core group dedicated to spreading harassment. Usually this group is people who have a distaste for the victim over a personal grudge, and are only invested in assuring the victim is injured. They'll have a cloud of contacts that aren't organized explicitly to propagate harassment, but who are for various reasons susceptible to moral panic. This is another reason callout harassment puts exaggerated claims in a headline position. The target audience isn't politically aligned, rather they're anyone who is likely to react in the moment, push forward the harassment to other people, and propagate misinformation because of a belief that they are doing something good.
That's where this is cyclical. Most of the concerned bloggers won't remember the details, might remember the harassment victim, but are unlikely to revisit the topic or reach out directly to keep the mode of harassment in circulation. However, the core group will continue the campaign and every so often it will reach critical mass, break containment from their cloud group and you see a bunch of posts like this blowing up your feed.
What's important to be aware of is that callout harassment doesn't come from people who care about the concerns in the post. The goal is to injure someone, not to act in any meaningful way to prevent harm. So, when you happen to take a look through said harassment documents, what you find in reality is a hodgepodge of specious logic, posts or writing that predate the victim's personal development, posts or writing that are embarrassing but not exactly harmful, or just screen captures edited and taken out of context. However, the mechanics of the harassment campaign are build around guiding how you view information and shutting down your critical mind. By always placing headline statements designed to be as shocking and upsetting as possible, the harassment documentation takes on an impossibly damning emotional condition.
Anyway, you shouldn't need to deconstruct a callout like a novel, but it's all forms of misinformation and frankly this kind of thinking should be how we approach any kind of shocking headline. Because a lot of that sort of thing, it's built to harm people by being shared, and we share it thinking we're helping.
So uh, just say no to callout harassment. It might feel good but if you remind yourself that you're being used and victimized yourself as part of a personal harassment and stalking campaign, that might help to ignore em.
