writers behaving badly

This is, I hope, my final followup to earlier pieces on reactions to Jason Sanford’s post identifying hate-speech and similar posts in a specific forum of Baen’s Bar, Politics, and the subsequent DisCon action in removing Baen’s leader, Toni Weisskopf, as an Editor Guest of Honor. I want to address a specific phenomenon, which is writers punching people who displease them via their readers, which has been directed at Jason Sanford.

When a writer publicly calls someone out, they need to be aware of all of the implications, including the fact that the more popular the writer, the more devastating the results can be, not due to any intrinsic quality of the writer, but the number of fans. The more fans, the more likely it is that the group will contain people who, emboldened by the idea of pleasing a favorite writer, can — and will — go to lengths that go far beyond the norms of civil, and sometimes legal, behavior.