Anonymous Catholic Twitter Accounts
An unholy guide to the strange world of performative piety…
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I recently wrote a user-guide for those of us who like to tweet in good faith under our own names. It was some of my best work, if I may say so myself.
Nearly every Catholic public figure or journalist has come in contact with a strange phenomenon: a plethora of aggressive bad faith anonymous accounts who all seem connected and all push a very clear and similar agenda with very unclear spelling and punctuation (why *do* they all hate full stops at the end of sentences so very much?)
All of these accounts are happy to troll others and advocate homophobic, misogynistic, and racist world views under the guise of anonymity. To me, this looks like astroturfing; the artificial creation of a network repeating and amplifying talking points to make it appear as though some world views are more popular than they are and to cow those who dare to speak otherwise.
Here’s a run down of the main types of anonymous account…
Anonymous Accounts with Frog/Pepe* Profile Pics
Underage perverts. The worst takes you’ve ever seen. Racist. Misogynistic. Bad faith trolls. Probably fifteen-year-olds in their mother’s basement sitting in cheeto-dust stained pyjamas even though it’s long-past 12 noon on a weekday.
*In the original Twitter thread I called this ‘Keke’ not ‘Pepe’ — sorry for not being totally up to scratch on 4Chan lingo, I guess…
Anonymous Tradwives/Pick Mes
Always a feminine avatar, usually — but not exclusively — from Renaissance art or similar. Seemingly desperate to get married/performative anti-feminism to attract strapping…
