Toxic people on social media: A theory

This might boil down to perception managment. People on forum boards on how to deal with toxic people routinely describe to which lengths these individuals go to manage their public perception. Yet many victims of abuse and mistreatment often share nothing or very little with their surroundings out of shame, fear, a sense of discretion and sometimes feeling that it would be morally wrong to tell uninvolved parties.
The process referred to as “recruiting flying monkeys” often seems to be running to everyone who will listen and telling them their version of events. A few of these will take matters into their own hands, sometimes without any direct instructions from the tp, although more active recruiting methods can be applied. Gaslighting has a similar component, in that it is often perception management directly to the wronged party. It is interesting that perpetrators continue to do so even if the victim is 100% certain on the events.
While perception management is a basic survival strategy for people with highly difficult personalities, it seems to go deeper than a means to an end. Sometimes even life choices like career path and family planning are based around it. Many continue to keep up a lie even if there is clear counterevidence and lying doesn’t get any result. I get the impression that to them, public perception is not only more important than truth, it is their truth.

Yet I doubt that it is as easy as:
Toxic person = perception management via social media = always wrong
What if it’s two toxic people? Will a toxic person who just happens to be in the right by chance not turn to social media? Are there legitimate cases where someone sees no other chance to get justice but through publicity? Callouts to public figures aside, are there cases between private figures where this is ever justified?

I’d also add, this may be less accurate in repeated cases (where the repetition isn’t itself indicative of toxicity, which can be hard to judge without multiple incidents).

Some people find themselves up against an in-person whisper network of great reach, and don’t have access to one themselves. So what they’re putting on social media may actually be 1/10 of what the other person in passing around in backchannels.

Someone who has had experience of a prior conflict where the other person went public in a big way and it worked out for them, or whose job exposes them to repeated attacks (see: female-presenting people in tech) are inevitably going to learn at least the rudiments of reputation management without trying, and many of them do in fact try. They may be going on the attack because they’ve concluded that keeping quiet will hurt them.

Or because they are just so bloody sick of this particular BS that the fifth person to try it catches the full wrecking ball.

Because it’s true that the person who is trying to be quiet, sensible, fair, and reasonable and who is self-doubting and not willing to go on the attack is quite likely to be the person with the most right on their side, but that’s maybe partly because that’s a common trauma response, and not necessarily helpful to them. To make things more difficult I don’t know any completely reliable way to distinguish normal reasonableness from the behaviour of someone who has been thoroughly gaslighted (gaslit?) without reference to objective data from outside. Sometimes you can see them minimizing behaviour that is appalling, in much the same way that the perpetrator does but reversed, and sometimes you really can’t.

I think a useful thing to look for may be whether someone’s use of social media emphasizes “this is what I did/what happened” or “this is what they’re like”. Are they detailed? Do they pull receipts in a measured sort of way, including those where their own behaviour wasn’t ideal? Are they mainly focussed on retrieving their own reputation or wrecking the other person’s?

Often, but not always. Innocent people who are victims of smear campaigns sometimes make the mistake of trying to defend themselves online. It rarely ends well.

I know a few never-my-fault types who have a weird way of communicating and pushing their propaganda through memes (commemecation?):
“You know your friends are fake when…”.
“Jealousy is a disease.”
“Authentic people forgive.”
“When you know the real story, but you keep your mouth shut anyway.”

I think there are a few exceptions to this especially when it comes to racism and BLM, and taking public video is a legitimate form of defense. A lot of the people recording and posting Facebook and going to the media are not the ones causing the issue. Amy Cooper who placed false calls to the police on video against a black member of the Audubon society in Central Park come to mind. It’s pretty clear from the lawsuits, videos and 911 calls that Amy’s racist and she’s the problem.

I have to strongly disagree with this Specific hypothesis. After my siblings and I cut contact with our father in response to multiple, separate incidents of (towards me) emotional abuse and (towards siblings (violence), my extended family continued to pressure us to reach out to him, to make amends, etc., because he had been lying to them and claiming that he never did anything wrong and we never told him why we were mad and he had no idea how to fix things.

I had a recording of the last voicemail he had sent me in which he viciously insulted my then girlfriend and called her a whore *literally because I slept in on a Saturday morning and didn’t answer his unexpected calls*. I posted the transcript on Facebook, tagged family, and captioned it “please stop asking us to reach out to him, we told him he needs to stop doing stuff like this for us to have a relationship”.

The larger spirit of the hypothesis may be valid, since he definitely made the initial, extended social campaign, but our family very much had a theme of “we don’t talk about drama except behind closed doors”, so no one was ever going to post on social media.