This story is amazing. Yoel, honey, come sit over here with us at the "bitter old T&S people who have been fucked over by being Cassandra" table, my stories are not *quite* as bad as yours but I left LJ 17 years ago and still have to have anti-swat arrangements with local cops

That moment when you realize you've become the face of T&S enforcement to millions of people of varying levels of stability is utterly *terrifying*. I cannot begin to convey to people who have never had it happen how terrifying.

It's 20 years after the worst of it that I got at LJ and I still have garbage following me around. I will give 6A a small bit of credit: when they hired in-house counsel it at least stopped being my problem to chase down the worst of it.

But what Yoel says in that interview makes me sad, because the worst of his shit started in fucking *2020*. There is no excuse for a site in 2020 not knowing that you absolutely cannot put names on major T&S decisions like fact-checking Trump.

I switched our T&S team over to using persistent pseudonyms when all the shit started happening to me and it was the best fucking managerial decision I ever made. We burned pseuds all the time when someone's "looked totally boring, blew up" case exploded.

Transparency in T&S is a fabulous goal and we as an industry should be working towards it whenever possible. Transparency absolutely needs to take a backseat to agent safety. You *cannot* put people's real names on this shit. Period.

People ask me all the time what advice I'd give people just starting out in T&S and my painful life lessons basically boil down to a) don't and b) use a professional name that is as gender-neutral, generic, and Google-proof as you possibly can

If I could go back to 2002 me and have a word with her I would tell her to do all her professional work as Sam Smith for the rest of her life, because it would have been a lot fucking easier

There's a reason the director's guild has "Alan Smithee"! I strongly urge every site that has a T&S team to create their very own version and attribute any potentially controversial actions to them! Because Alan Smithee doesn't have to worry about his personal safety.

Because I just referenced this story to someone else, I pull it out of my history and repeat it here. This is how this job forces you to think.

I often go entire years now without someone threatening to rape and murder me on the internet, but the number on the counter for "last time someone tried to have me murdered by armed agents of the state" is often depressingly low.

By which I mean: no, Yoel was not overreacting to the shit Elon pulled when he and his husband decided to sell their house and move, and I really hope, for his safety, that they bought the new one through a shell company.