YouTube star Mikayla Raines dies by suicide at 29, husband blames online abuse

From my cursory glance, yes, they are

The real hollowness is found in the people who have nothing in their lives so they embrace hate and hound those trying to make the world a better place.

So.....wait. I've never heard of her, but you're saying there was an entire subreddit deddicated to making up lies about her, saying she did horrible shit, KNOWING what they said was a lie? Because if I'm reading this right, that's pretty fucked up.

If there was an organized harassment campaign against her I wonder if there is any legal culpability for those involved.

My wife told me about this last night, supposedly the majority of the abuse came from OTHER FUCKONG RESCUERS!!!!

I agree and I hope we all remember that mindset the next time we read about activists blocking a slaughterhouse.

These guys probably saw the Tiger King documentary and decided to armchair warrior to virtue signal how much more pro-animal rights their non-involvement and passivity was than her.

Be online and you will get harassed, it is the way.

Meat eaters can't stand animal rights activists

They are filled with hate, because they are deeply insecure, deeply afraid, and the current political and social climate tells them that this is not only an acceptable way to deal with those feelings, but encourages them to deal with those feelings in this manner.

Because it works.

kiwifarms has been doing this en masse for over a decade and others predated that.

It is gauche to link to it considering this is the umpteenth fucking person murdered by angry and hateful bastards. But Patrick Klepek, someone who has been targeted by these orgs for over a decade, wrote about this in the context of the emulator developer Near being murdered by kiwi farms et al a few years back https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-i-learned-from-near-an-emulation-legend-and-real-person/

He talked about it more on the Waypoint (now Remap) podcast, but it is very much an open secret that these hate campaigns are ongoing with the explicit goal of murdering their target (it is not fucking suicide if you were tormented until you picked up the gun). And how even fellow victims who usually will advocate for this kind of stuff are wary of raising their voices because they or their partner are semi regularly approached, in person, by these bastards.

My hope, as always, is that this will be the last time. That this will lead to focused efforts by those with platforms to speak out. The reality is that the mid tier "creators" will probably say something and give the trite "If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call the national suicide prevention lifeline". Or, well, these days "the national slip and slide prevention lifeline" because gotta stay fucking monetized. And then they'll remain silent. All while the biggies choose to stay fucking silent out of concerns of losing people in their audience who are part of those hate campaigns.

To be clear, I do not fault the people who are under attack and wary of reminding those murderers they exist. I specifically linked to Patrick's post because he and the (now Remap) crew did an amazing job of explaining exactly what goes into this and how painful it is and why they are genuinely afraid to speak up.

I do very much fault the ludwigs and charlies of the world who will mention this for clicks and then never care again. And if the truly massive outlets were to speak out against this kind of harassment and reach out to the victims? Suddenly youtube and twitch and reddit and the like would care and start moderating this shit rather than laughing that kotaku in action and the like are so popular and only occasionally link to where the REAL hate and doxxing happens.

Why the hell would anyone feel any need to harass someone like this?

For one, there's good money in it.

Black Cube's tactics have resulted in a number of international controversies. In Canada, the firm was criticized by an Ontario Court for an attempt that aimed to discredit a judge by trying to get him to make antisemitic comments in secretly recorded meetings. In Romania, two of its employees were convicted of criminal charges involving harassment and hacking. The firm also drew condemnation for covertly surveilling and assisting efforts to discredit women accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual violence and the investigative journalists researching whether those accusations were credible. Their tactics also involve attempts to goad individuals into making anti-semitic or otherwise damaging remarks.

See, I have no idea what to do with this idea that fits within the bounds of good ethics but I’m certain that there’s something deeply wrong with our species that gets worse the more isolated we can be without dying off. The further back you go the more likely being shunned for being an absolute piece of trash would lead to your death but now the most broken people can still proliferate and cause problems for everyone else without even really needing to leave their homes. I can think of a million better things to do than obssess over and relentlessly bully someone.

I’m glad that we’ve hit a certain point where more and more people are choosing to have higher standards, and maybe that will help, but holy fuck this is gunna take a while to sort out.

Some nasty people just see someone who appears vulnerable/has mental health issues and use that as an excuse to attack someone. there's this really fucked up site called Kiwifarms that's been around for over a decade that was specifically made for trying to harass and bully people to death for being "weird", trans, or neurodivergent. it could also be they were jealous of her popularity

Humans not humanity.

God gave us dominion over all creatures read the Bible!

There are children dying in the streets here, why don't you do anything about them?

The foxes bread for fur here are not capable of living in the wild, "rescuing" and releasing them is the real animal abuse.

I think fox fur is fancy, fuck you lady!

Just some examples I can think of off the top of my head. People can get pretty polarized when it comes to killing, or not killing animals.

I would also like to know what the criticism was, but at the same time, I also feel like the internet can be shit sometimes whether there was reason to criticise or not.

Pretty sad story.

It was reddit. Reddit is dead center of this.

Edit: its amazing how being correctly identifying reddit as the culprit is downvoted on lemmy when its clear most of us are here because reddit sucks a skunks ass.

The internet mirrors humanity.

Reddit needs to be held accountable for the snark subs

Jesus, every single post is made by the same person.

If only. The fact is there are also plenty of animal rights organizations that think they could have done a better job and/or that she was doing it wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if there were people who saw SaveAFox as another Tiger King.

That advice is basically, don't work in your chosen vocation. Running animal rehabilitation is not free, you need some sort of source of funding.

You think you're doing the right thing
You think you're doing the right thing
You think you're doing the right thing
You think you're doing the right thing
You think you're doing the right thing
You think you're doing the right thing
But they just won't listen.

How can you blame someone for doing what should be universally understood as a positive and still having nonstop trolling? Quitting YouTube wasn't going to stop the harassment. Quitting YouTube wasn't going to make her unsee the harassment. Quitting YouTube wasn't going to promote advocacy for the animals. But you think it's her fault for putting herself in a place that is both a primary media location and collection point for a bunch of toxic people?

She got harassed and bullied by people she knew IRL. They would've slandered her even if she wasn't on youtube.

Blaming the victim eh?

Relevant:

Particularly if you're a good person and you tend to internalize what others say about you. Lots of Internet Famous people are sociopaths who thrive on people trying to tear them down.

It really feels like the human race is determined to destroy itself.

I don't know her at all - is that BPD diagnosis something confirmed, thet she shared and all?

I have terribly mixed feelings about people with BPD.

On one side, lots of empathy: they often feel miserable and (not always, but) very often their BPD is the result of trauma or abuse.

On the other, and having lived it for a decade and a half: they can make the lives of people in their surroundings an absolute abominable horror-movie type of nightmare.

It's actually treatable but not all people with BPD seek treatment, it's a tough one.

Wait what? People harass people online because they've got BPD? Like they specifically target people who are suffering from BPD? Why??

Fucking gross.

I couldn't bear to watch her husbands video, but I saw several comments on reddit that her "friends" were spewing this shit too.

While they have admirable goals and do important work, a lot of animal rights people are fucking nuts.

This has been an established pattern for decades...

I don't understand why anyone would be mad that someone was saving foxes from becoming pelts.

Unless you're the piece of shit profiting from the suffering and death of those animals, in which case, your opinion is null and void, nobody should be against the idea IMO.

It's incredible to me that anyone would carry such vitriol against such a noble cause.

May she rest in peace.

Lemmy people are weird. Can you link/show me this person?

Idk why. If it was the same person, the information is relevant to the discussion.

I'm happy to know that they were proud of what they were doing. I hope it was a light in their life.

It's terrible that anyone would hold any hate for someone trying to do the kind of work she was doing.

Yes, that was her channel.

Hers was SaveAFox

There's no sense in this but we all would be wise to be supportive of friends and help them step back from social media.

This is a death caused by tech companies' steadfast refusal to properly moderate their platforms. Humans are social primates and we will always have a strong reaction to our social environment.

I don’t really know any details about how stuff worked beyond just saving foxes, but my random guess would be people calling it woke and attacking that, there are many people who think things involved with helping the environment and things related to that is bad. It seems like anything considered remotely “woke” is attacked because of rhetoric coming from the right wing.

It seems to be related to fur and there are people who dislike the idea of losing access to animal products like fur coats and leather goods, that is likely related.

Mainly the same criticism of famous social media influencers who are not qualified or experts in the thing they are doing. Being passionate about something doesnt make everything you do the right thing. All that said, I don't agree that should cause hate, but criticism or opposing opinions were fair in this situation when it comes down to animal welfare.

Not the ending any reasonable person would want I would hope.

That still sounds like victim blaming to me? Yes, there are a ton of shit people in the world, but I feel like rather than "she shouldn't have taken up that career", we should instead be fighting back against the idea that people are allowed to be this shitty:

• What's up with these people that they give out so much abuse?
• Did YouTube and other sites do anything to protect her?
• What else can we do to protect vulnerable people from abuse while letting them do their job?
• What support did she get? Could she have had more?
• How can we prevent this from happening to the next content creator?

I don't know the answer to these, but just saying 'she shouldn't have started in the first place' feels like a massive cop out to me.

Shut the fuck up, this is absolutely victim blaming. "Maybe she should've just wallowed in her depression quietly instead of trying to show others what it's like to help and advocate for helpless wild animals."

That's your takeaway from an article about an animal rescuers death? Wow.

“Press F to pay respects” if you don’t know the meme.