How to love the freedom of leaderless fandom, and fight the flipside of organized abuse

by Patch O'Furr

 

Do you know the story where several blind people try to describe an elephant by only touching small parts of it? Nobody can say what the whole animal is.

That happens when furry subculture talks about itself, and protests outside stereotypes by falling into its own… The Geek Social Fallacies.

Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge is power. If you don’t like the media, Be The Media. That’s the mission at Dogpatch Press, but the subculture keeps stubborn blind spots. Many stories are too inside for professionals to investigate, but hobbyists lack the resources, especially when they need action that people don’t want to take. Then they stay overlooked, underreported, and suppressed. Nobody is immune to the psychology of denying uncomfortable knowledge. This is how you get too much shallow drama between individuals, but too little intensive research. You may say the solution is showing more of the positive; but that’s not seeing the whole elephant.

The more we know, the more it empowers people to do better.

The view through rose-colored glasses

Consider everything that furries say to the media about themselves in interviews and PR.

Nobody owns any single property they all love. No corporation controls what’s marketed to them. Uncritical, open-source fandom lets you connect across social barriers to make a magical zone of free expression and collaboration. How happy and fun it is to see a bunch of colorful cartoon characters making art together. All it takes is a little passion, and maybe making a fursona with no other conditions to join.

That’s the individual experience of interest-driven connection, like the trees in the forest. Then there’s the forest, where despite why you’re there, weak gatekeeping lets anything crawl in. This isn’t moral judgement on people; it’s analysis of structure. The problem is it’s nobody’s job to do better.

Recent revival of a very old topic.

Old-school fan values worked on small scale

Fandom events are traditionally low budget, volunteer affairs. Fans and volunteers aren’t there for a career, and that doesn’t make strong security. That goes for any group run by people who are accountable to nobody but their own friends and collaborators.

Peer-to-peer connection is simultaneously colorful and intimate, but flat and disorienting. It’s hard to truly know people when you only see their fursonas, or you even see their nudes before their real names or groups they’re in. Anyone can compartmentalize with different accounts for different faces while looking like someone you trust. That’s an easy way to get taken advantage of by people with power over you, even just the power to ghost you after it’s too late to tell them “no”. You have to assume trust based on actually pretty weak ties, if it boils down to nothing more than liking the same kind of art. Trust is nice to get, until it turns toxic with friends favoring friends they shouldn’t.

That’s the natural downside of the old-school fan values, but things were more personal when groups were smaller scale. They would put up with a few jerks because it was harder to kick them out and sustain groups. Now add decades of growth, and much bigger scale of members who don’t know each other. (Dunbar’s Number names a finite limit on how many relationships your brain can handle.) Put the problem on steroids with internet platforms we don’t own. It’s not YOU, it’s MATH.

The math of escalating abuse

Rapid and unplanned growth of furry subculture has many unforeseeable effects. Straining the limits of conventions is one covered on Soatok’s furry cybersecurity blog: Furries Are Losing the Battle Against Scale. Convention attendance is doubling every few years and “the furry community is growing at a break-neck exponential speed.”

Security suffers without top-down management at impersonal scale, especially when the more we depend on net platforms, the more problems we have by policy. Social media is built to shift liability for moderation from owners to users. It’s their business model to be unaccountable! The point is to eliminate the cost of the editor/gatekeeper/mod layer by automating the labor and letting volunteers and peers fill in.

Peer moderation may feel like personal control, but meanwhile, bad actors can game the system with off-site advantage. Moderators may respond to simple individual incidents on-site, but can’t even see complex cross-platform abuse. That’s how responses can be weak, scattered, inconsistent, and lack resources for scale, no matter how much their hearts are in it.

If you can’t see abuse, it festers. Think of church scandals where abuser priests were shifted around from church to church. We have that too, but there’s no orders from the top. It’s from being nobody’s job. A long-time creep can use a newly minted fursona to jump from group to group, when it’s easy to change accounts and delete evidence, but an uphill battle to track them or get consequences. Different process, same outcome.

When you can only see a small part of the elephant…

The problem is over our heads and filling someone else’s pocket

Of course bad people are anywhere on the internet, but we’re not talking about a few bad apples ruining the barrel alone. Organized bad apples make groups for each other. That includes hate groups, scammers, cults, and any predators on the weak, naive or isolated. They do it for sex, money, or power. They seek each other because cybercrime benefits from accomplices, enablers and opportunities. You can’t see inside if it’s conditional on doing dirty deeds to join — like incriminating yourself for gang initiation.

Any subculture can be a good cover, because it makes bigger fish in a little pond. They take advantage of access, and it’s nothing new; it’s like the punk scene fending off hate groups who found it a fertile place for recruiting. It happens to marginalized people the same as abuse in churches, schools, and Boy Scouts. Nobody’s immune. Queer and minority people can and do collaborate with those who exploit them. Take it for granted that “insiders don’t betray each other” is a fallacy. NO EXCEPTIONS.

There are no non-participants online. Even if you want to stay apart, you’re a data asset. The point is capitalism; platform owners want to grow traffic of any kind, and lose money if they take liability. It’s basic business to treat traffic as a value-neutral number. Then when under-equipped peers have to moderate each other, corporations generate harm like a factory spills pollution. This isn’t just an organic human problem; it’s industrial smog from unregulated products.

Oceans of digital ink are spilled on how companies keep saying they will do better, but they don’t. (See: algorithmic radicalization, content farming, Elsagate, Dead Internet Theory…) They seem to not even control their own systems, and don’t care as long as their profit goes up while the public pays the cost of responding to organized abuse.

Huge scale since furries used to be the 1% most nerdy on MUCKs and Usenet.

New forms of organized abuse

Pollution makes mutation. Corporate social media has been tearing society apart and reforming it in strange new ways, while impossibly niche groups form and enable each other for behavior never seen before. Technology makes new ways to hide it and ride the rising scale.

Some of these behaviors find a unique cover behind furries, even if they are basically human problems, because of opportunity to meet and be open to each other. That includes sex crimes that didn’t even have common words until recently, like sextortion and zoosadism with their own dark underworlds.

Don’t make the mistake of dismissing abusers as a negligible fringe. It’s not about quantity; it’s about influence, opportunity and extremity. Consider when abuser priests are hidden, and just a few can have hundreds of victims who get lifetimes of harm. It just takes one enabler in the right place, especially if everything comes down to friend-to-friend influence.

See: the sextortion cult called Furry Valley. It uses systematic, multi-level-marketing tactics to grow, with constant recruiting and pressure to meet quotas. Minors are preyed on for nudes, money, or personal info for doxing and manipulation. Deserters are punished. When Dogpatch Press aired evidence in 2018, the cult was festering with nobody looking, and tried threats and harassment to throw off notice. It still has no formal media notice, and is left to hobbyists to warn each other individually without higher consequences in 2025.

The shallowness of online information and clout dynamics.

Take off the rosy glasses and you can see chronic situations of turning a blind eye:

  • When people can’t do enough, and get fatigue.
  • When people can’t trust others, because they don’t care and give superficial lip-service while doing the opposite in private.
  • When people know it’s worse to speak than say nothing, because clout dynamics let abusive people backlash, spread misinformation and gain more power from attention.

Clout dynamics suppress whistleblowing. Popular people benefit from scale of followers, manipulate algorithms and keep their bubbles impervious. It isn’t simply “bad people on the net”; it’s complicated with platforming, people turning a blind eye, and friends in high places who coddle repeat offenses that aren’t recognized as patterns.

There’s a list of popular excuses and deflections when abuse is exposed. “I was hacked” or “I joined that group to help catch bad guys”, claiming guilt by association, or most common, “that’s drama/callout/cancel culture.” The worst abusers are skilled at playing victim, with crocodile tears and DARVO tactics to weaponize trust against whistleblowing. That’s my friend, he would never do that!

When everything is based on peer relationships, it comes down to one simple line. Do friends hold friends accountable? Do you keep petty priority on fun with friends, or bigger care about other people they harm? When bad info emerges about someone close to you, and it will cost you to act, do you act or suppress it?

Cancel culture doesn’t exist, broken platforms do.

Suppression starts with cliched, pre-emptive complaints about cancel culture. It raises denial towards criticism inside. It’s often paired with deflection about oppression outside, while appealing to the Geek Social Fallacies for unity.

This makes abuse worse, because harm from inside is the most personal kind. The worst abusers are people you know and trust, who don’t deserve blind unity! This isn’t simply saying don’t trust anyone; it’s enabled by bad systems with growing scale, separation of social bubbles, and eroding limits. Although it’s a broad and deep problem, we can also name specific names and crimes inside that have been suppressed.

Dogpatch Press was never intended to report about true crime, but now there are deep investigations like the Fur And Loathing podcast, made in partnership with pro media. It identified responsibility by an insider for the Midwest Furfest chemical attack, the most harmful mass attack on furries. Now, look at how the terrorism was widely treated as an “accident” by fandom rumor (see: OLD, FAKE NEWS), despite that theory being discredited from the start! The rumor came with rose colored glasses about how insiders treat each other, after the media didn’t help (except they did.)

The Fur and Loathing podcast was researched reporting for public service, not kneejerk callout – something that only works on people who are already nobodies. As a friend said “cancel culture was 100% effective at ruining the life of Central Park Karen, and 0% effective at keeping Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court.”

Saying that cancel culture doesn’t exist is saying to look at the forest, not the trees. See the whole elephant. It isn’t culture, it’s byproduct. Shallow, petty drama goes with dependence on limited bubbles and unaccountability between them, by policy.

The concept of mob behavior (its own discussion you can read elsewhere) is a superficial symptom of the way platforms boost outrage about individuals without patterns. It isn’t effective when someone’s power is off-platform, and it raises power at the owner level. If you have been attacked with lies and rumors on one of these platforms, half the problem is relying on and contributing to the platforms.

There’s also a nastier kind of mobbing you don’t see: friends shielding friends with whisper networks to discredit criticism. This relies on the pre-emptive dismissal of “cancel culture”. With clout dynamics, the risk of saying the emperor has no clothes is to be harassed and frozen out. Suppression culture.

If there aren’t gatekeepers, often the only solution is with friends telling other friends to beware. In the mainstream, #metoo was a movement because women abused by powerful men would be sued for speaking. They had to organize in private because of the backlash. Organize.

Some ways to fight organized abuse.

Do you want a cult, or a healthy culture? It’s not enough to speak alone, or air info for clout suppression on broken platforms. It needs methods of organized support. Here’s some:

  • Stop using Xitter.

There’s a Dogpatch Press news account keeping a legacy placeholder there, but ongoing contributions to Elon’s nazi site are moved to Bluesky. Try reducing reliance on any online platform.

  • Build well-rounded offline community.

Real life face to face events are glue for online stuff, especially when they’re more regular than once a year leisure vacations. Making them well-rounded means having more than a limited bubble where you’re afraid to get left out or to kick anyone out. People become radicalized in isolation, but cliques can be no better, so don’t make fandom your only social life. Have multiple kinds and cross them over. Make it conditional enough that chronic bad actors will have a hard time meeting in real life.

  • Avoid golden age nostalgia bullshit. 

Everyone could use good history, but not the kind about returning to a golden age. Nuisances love it because that’s when they got away with more. Old-school fandom put up with jerks inside when it was harder to kick them out and sustain small-scale groups. That let things fester and it was ALWAYS a problem. If it was solved by tolerance, it wouldn’t have stayed, it would have solved itself when fandom was small. The opposite happened. Conversely, don’t fall for knee-jerk comparisons to Burned Furs and ancient bad media to suppress current criticism!

  • Draw lines and stick to them.

Coddlers enable chronic nuisances to keep coming back. Acting like a doormat lets serial offenders take advantage of negligence. Organizers need to give consequences — which, for hobby groups, amounts to a child’s time-out and “pick a lane”. It’s not really hard to kick someone out, and if someone can’t, they are the problem!

  • Don’t be nice to jerks, be kind to your group.

Nice and Kind are different things. Toxic positivity is nice. Removing toxic people who harm others is kind. Nice people think they can fix members who join toxic groups, who beg niceness and gaslight everyone that they’ve been alienated and forced to have “nowhere else”. That’s an absurd lie. They are ALL voluntary joiners and you CAN NOT FIX THEM. They don’t leave until they want to, and you hurt other people by giving these malingerers extra leeway to try and coax them out. Take a year to coax one out and dozens more go in. Giving chance after chance is slowly murdering your group. (Think twice about it.)

  • Organize pro-actively. 

It’s not enough to give consequences to bad actors. Go farther and work on breaking up their groups. For example, the Free Fur All “fashcon” was a pro-fascist event that collapsed. They were exiled by getting them kicked out of their original hotel — that was antifascist action behind the scenes. When they were stuck with each other in a suburban wedding venue, they turned on each other and proved why they weren’t welcome elsewhere. Seek out resources that apply method to such effort.

  • Hold weak organizers accountable.

Remember, the problem isn’t just bad people. It’s platforms they use for peer enabling cliques, and weak moderation conditions they create. You don’t own the platforms, but can work to break up toxic groups as well as demanding better standards from ones you’re in if they’re infested by corrupt or doormat organizers. When a subculture is based on leaderless peers, it all comes down to drawing a line instead of turning a blind eye for friends. Friends hold friends accountable because they care about others, and if an organizer doesn’t do that, get their corrupt influence out! If they hold a death grip on their groups or events, do not make leisure fun time your priority over the bigger picture. Deplatform, demolish, decontaminate, rebuild.

  • Support intensive research and reporting.

Inadequate information enables the clout dynamics of shallow personal conflict. Tracing patterns is always better than exposing people. It can take teamwork when hobbyists aren’t well equipped to do it alone. This includes collaboration with outside professionals. Yes, support good media, and it’s easy to vet them for suitability… Unlike most furries, professionals work histories are as public as can be! Knee-jerk complaint about the media is part of the problem; media-literate, well-rounded information production is the solution.

Dedicated to Mark Willet, Ronald Braun, Carlton Hurdle Jr., Sotalo and all negligents with priorities apart from having a safe community.

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