#after years of constantly worrying if im being Maliciously Manipulative by accident it's like

[bogkeep]

i think. that if My Trauma™ has taught me anything, is that a lot of the time, what makes something Malicious Manipulation is the context.

like, of course we want to be able to tell when someone is trying to decieve us, and there are plenty of phrases to raise red flags and linguistic tricks designed to rope us along, to be sure... but someone saying the truth in a kind way and someone lying with ill intent can say the exact same thing. the difference is that one does not match up with reality. and yeah, that's scary! that's the whole thing about trust!! every time i see an analysis of someone's behaviour on social media with a framing of that person being SUSPICIOUS and MANIPULATIVE, it honestly really fucks with my head because ANYTHING can be posited as Suspicious and Manipulative. blocked people? didn't reply to every message from strangers? didn't publicly adress a topic or a controversy? took a break from the internet? said literally anything at all??? sounds like normal and healthy social media behaviour to ME, but what do i know! anyone who has the misfortune of finding themself the target of a smear campaign will quickly find that there's Nothing you can say or do that doesn't look Suspicious. if even a genuine effort to rectify a mistake or explain what happened can be seen as MANIPULATING THE MASSES, what chance do you have if you react in a normal, human way to being bullied? or, on the flip side, if you hold on to bad faith and read it in everything, if even generic niceness creeps you out, if there is no way for anyone to prove their innocence or humanity to you - that doesn't seem like a pleasant way to live, either. nor is constantly worrying if anything you say will come off as Malicious or Manipulative.

like, yeah. there's shitty people out there. i don't have any good advice on avoiding them. i trust easy, i often forget people can Just Go On The Internet And Tell Lies - yes i am quite autistic thank you - and my main two defenses are "i don't like the thing you're saying, either because the contents are bad or because the contents don't make any sense" and "the things you're saying and the things you're doing don't match up". those only really work if i trust myself enough, and sometimes that's hard, too.

anyway those are another two cents nobody asked for but you're getting anyway