Stop Using 'Social Justice' as License to Bully People

(SPOT.ph) How did we end up in the era of the death threat? Lately, it seems as if the ending of every tiny disagreement is someone having their life threatened. Negative review of a Taylor Swift concert? Death threat. Call BTS fans 15-year-old girls? Death threat. Dionysus misinterpreted as Jesus in the Olympic ceremony? Death threat.

In 1990, Godwin’s Law was coined: "As an online discussion grows longer," author Mike Godwin said, "the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches." This originally applied to the equivalent of message boards in the pre-World Wide Web days. But it feels it’s due for an update: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a death threat approaches. How is it that despite the evolution of our collective morality throughout the years—abolishing slavery, ending segregation, rejecting colonialism—death threats have found their way into our popular discourse?

'We will hurt you more'

This is thanks, I believe, to the recurring nightmare of the digital world—infinite escalation. If we feel wronged, we will not just get even. We will hurt you more than you hurt us.

An example: A transwoman is called "Sir." She responds allegedly by detaining the culprit, who acquiesces—presumably out of fear for his job. The issue goes viral, and transphobes come out of the woods: Commenters misgendering for sport; JK Rowling acolytes insisting the trans movement is anti-feminist; self-proclaimed progressives making offensive equivalences for misgendering like "people call me Boss all the time even if I’m not a real boss." It is ugly—all of it.

The crazy thing is: Somehow, every person in that chain of harm-doing feels they are an agent of justice. If one asks them, it is likely they will all say they were responding to a kind of abuse—a straight person abusing a transwoman, and then a richer person abusing a server.

"May pinaghuhugutan ‘yan," we say when someone is inexplicably mean or bigoted. In everyday life, it’s not rare to hear someone call another person fat or ugly or poor—and we excuse it by saying "may pinaghuhugutan." Perhaps someone we know owes us money, or is a useless groupmate, or an abusive boss—but for some reason, we deride them not by addressing their bad behavior, but by finding the most hurtful language to insult them.

Left unchecked, this kind of unseemly hugot can lead to the realm of bigotry—which has particularly victimized the LGBTQ+ community in recent days. We also witnessed how the prejudice against transwomen led so many people to make a snap judgment against Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer assigned female at birth, whose opponent made controversial remarks against her. The escalation radicalizes our dispositions. Remember that not long ago, seeing a drag queen sing a religious song resulted in people sending death threats. "May pinaghuhugutan" culture is a poisonous one, which says we will tolerate you for being different—but if you mess up, we’ll tell you what we really think about your kind.

On Twitter, petty discussions routinely escalate—whether it’s about BGC (elitista ka!), the word Filipinx (pekeng pinoy ka!), or tinola (hindi lang marunong magluto nanay mo!). In the PBA, we’ve seen the ugliest kinds of trash talk due to perceived "dirty play"—from slurs about people with down syndrome to players making the monkey gesture at African-Americans—which is then amplified by the most toxic members of their fandoms.

The scary thing is: If we deem ourselves offended enough, we now have so many weapons to choose from. On top of Holocaust invocations, we have racism, sexism, classism, several other genres of bigotry, and of course—the old, reliable death threat. And each person harmed by those words is then possessed with the notion that they, in turn, can be racist, sexist, or classist as a form of vengeance.

It doesn’t help that Filipinos are excellent at finding the most hurtful and inappropriate things to say about a person. Did they catch your bad behavior on tape? Well, you better not be overweight ("mataba!"), too effeminate ("bakla!"), too manly ("tomboy!"), closeted ("bibigay na yan!"), poor ("patay gutom!"), ugly ("tanginang mukha yan!"), dark (*insert slur here*), or… Chinese like Alice Guo ("chekwa!"). Because the Filipino internet will find what hurts most and make it go viral.

Punching up, not punching down?

So, can one say that we are in a better place in terms of bullying? In 2013, the country passed the Anti-Bullying Law—with the State finally acknowledging that there is no place for bullying in school, or even in society. But it still happens—the bullies just have to be very clear that they are responding to some kind of grave abuse. Then they are punching up, not punching down. This is the kind of moral loophole that bullies use these days—and it is ultimately harmful to the causes they co-opt. Many mental health experts say that trauma is not an excuse to treat people poorly. The same goes, I think, for being offended.

I am not saying people should stop pointing out harmful behavior. People have a right to seek justice. But they should not have a right to escalate things infinitely. Transgenders have a right to correct a person for misgendering, but no one deserves to detain and embarrass a waiter for it. People have a right to call out a person for stripping a server of their dignity, but no one has a right to dehumanize the trans community at large—not even JK Rowling. Filipino citizens should demand justice if Alice Guo is proven guilty of all that she’s been accused of, but no one should get a free pass to use racial slurs against everyone who looks like Alice Guo. These extreme reactions help create a society where the most extremist language can exist.

This is not an appeal to change everyone around us. We are all prone to infinite escalation—and we have all felt the desire to harm those doing harm to us. This mentality is inevitable, especially in a developing country that pits its people against each other, while the rich get richer. Sometimes, a little mean-spiritedness feels like the only way of hitting back at those who sunk our country into poverty and calamity.

But we can learn to live with tiny disagreements.

No one wants to live in a world of infinite escalation. And people have prescribed ways to save ourselves—both from engaging in ugly discourse with strangers, and from finding out that a nice tita you have always loved actually hates trans people—and never being able to delete that from your memory.

One thing I’ve been trying to do is favor personal interactions over online ones. It allows us to meet people as whole beings, who believe things both beautiful and ugly—instead of just the morass of political opinions that we become on Facebook. It’s delightful to hear about a baptism, a trip abroad, or moving to a new job—especially when I haven’t seen them post about it. There is serenity in the opinion-column-turned-meme: We should all know less about each other.

Another solution is one I discovered in marriage: Accepting that you and your friends don’t have to agree about everything. People used to be so good at this. I still remember my parents and their friends talking about who they would vote for in 1992—and it wasn’t as destructive as the conversations that happened in 2022. Somewhere along the way, we lost that tolerance. Of course, we can’t deny that politicians also fell victim to infinite escalation—which is why they say extreme things, praise the Nazis, and what have you. But it certainly sounds liberating to do it today—to keep people in our lives, and to continue laughing and crying with them, even if they say Filipino and you say Filipinx.

Some others are opting out of social media—as seen in the trend of Gen Zs using "dumb" phones instead of smart phones. And it honestly gives me hope, because it is the young people proclaiming how curious and interesting life can still be, even when we’re not bombarded with infinite TikToks and Reels.

Regardless of what we end up doing, there is something to be said about self-control—learning to tame the parts of ourselves that thirst for disproportionate justice. There are a number of practical ways to avoid infinite escalation, like going offline or being more IRL. But the best way is to learn to be kinder to one another.

We all know the devil on our shoulders exists—it is the devil of death threats and racial slurs disguised as justice. But on the other shoulder must exist an angel who stands for justice, but also kindness; who keeps us patient, but nevertheless strong. Or as the terminally online might say: Inside us are two wolves in a battle—one of them is the kind wolf, and the other wolf is vengeful, racist, and transphobic. The winner, my friends, will be the wolf that we feed.