Who is @Sciencing_Bi?
Weird occurrences on social media.
There’s an advocacy person called BethAnn McLaughlin who founded MeTooSTEM.
MeTooSTEM has accomplished much since it was founded in 2018 to fight sexual harassment in academic science. Since November alone, according to the group’s accounting, it has engaged with more than 750 individuals requesting assistance, filed hundreds of open-records requests about harassment cases and made dozens of complaints to funding agencies regarding researchers’ conduct.
The group has visited some 20 campuses to discuss federal laws governing gender-based discrimination and sexual misconduct in education, put on webinars and awarded $12,000 to advocates for women in science. Its founder BethAnn McLaughlin, also received the Disobedience Award from Massachusetts Institute of Techonolgy’s Media Lab last year, alongside Me Too movement found Tarana Burke and consultant and activist Sherry Marts.
But there have been complaints and criticisms. The Inside Higher Ed piece goes into some of them.
That sounds sad; tell us more about Sciencing_Bi.
For several years, academics and activists around the country interacted with the Twitter account @Sciencing_Bi, which was supposedly run by an LGBTQ Native American Anthropology professor at Arizona State University. They reacted with tributes and grief when a controversial former professor and anti-sexual harassment #metoo crusader named BethAnn McLaughlin announced on Twitter that @Sciencing_Bi had died of COVID-19, blaming the university where @Sciencing_Bi supposedly worked for making people teach on campus during the pandemic.
But there were some snags, one of them being that ASU said what? No professors have died here. Professors at ASU said what???? Why weren’t we told? Professors in Anthropology at ASU asked around and found all their colleagues not dead.
However, what unfolded next is a complex and bizarre tale of accusations and confusion, as academics and others on social media are now accusing McLaughlin herself of possibly being @Sciencing_Bi and masquerading as a fake Native American professor online, ASU is saying it can’t come up with a death of any professor from COVID-19 recently, and Twitter has suspended both the accounts of McLaughlin and the now mysterious @Sciencing_Bi (as of the early morning hours of August 3).
People who had been friendly with @Sciencing_Bi (Twitter friendly) were upset about the tragic news and are now upset in a different way.
“Sad to report @Sciencing_Bi died from COVID this evening,” McLaughlin wrote on July 31, 2020. “She was a fierce protector of people. She let me take my shoulders away from my ears knowing she was meaner and more loving than everyone else. No one has ever had my back like that. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” In a eulogy on Twitter, she spun an elaborate narrative, saying that @Sciencing_Bi wanted them to get matching tattoos in an indigenous language and texted her daily. “Please read her timeline. She was forced by her university to teach in person until April,” McLaughlin tweeted. “Campus closed and she was in the hospital a week later. Be mad about COVID but be more mad that BIPOC community is most vulnerable and underrepresented on campus. We are killing them.”
@Sciencing_Bi wrote about her supposed battle with COVID-19 in dramatic terms. “ASU kept teachers, staff and students on campus until April. That’s well after we knew this was a killer disease. Many got covid. Including me,” read a May 23 tweet by @Sciencing_Bi, whose name on Twitter was given as only “Alepo” next to a rainbow flag.
It’s just weird.
It reminds me of Wally Smith all those years ago.
It’s all in the name.
Commenter A? That’s me.
Commenter B? That’s me too.
I was also going to get matching tattoos with my girlfriend from Canada in a language she understands.
*sigh* I can already hear the MRAs and anti-feminists use this to discredit the whole #MeToo movement…
Padding the woke portfolio.
What really reminds me of the Wally Smith “Tom Johnson” affair is the hoax going over-the-top and people buying it hook, line, and sinker.
I just re-read some of the posts and comments on the Wally Smith “Tom Johnson” “Hammill” affair and hoo-boy – I’d forgotten a lot of the craziness. Like Josh Rosenau lecturing me from a great height for declaring my suspicions about “Hammill” and then vanishing without trace when my suspicions were confirmed.
Do you have any links on that? I don’t remember it, and Wally Smith is too common a name for Googling if you don’t remember what you’re looking for.
iknklast, the Tom Johnson affair was part of the atheist Accommodationism Wars (circa 2010).
Jerry Coyne wrote a detailed summary of the Tom Johnson affair here (July 2010). Incidentally, when Coyne wrote that, the story was still evolving, and you can see that some people knew who the sock-puppeteer was, but they were waiting for due process to reveal the name (Wally Smith).
The TJ incident was in a larger context of 1) Jerry Coyne’s concept of “accommodationism” (which was a controversy in itself, and I agree with Coyne’s position), which was then 2) distorted by other people based on what they imagined the word meant by how the word looks (which dismayed me).
I would be happy to explain more, but I’ve reached the limit of what I can organize in a comment. My one link here is the one best link I can think of.
Remember the Gay Girl in Damascus who was supposedly reporting from the frontline of the Arab Spring? Turned out to be a blogger called Tom MacMaster living in Edinburgh. When you read the posts of the Gay Girl in light of this you could see how little local knowledge of Damascus she showed – eg she wouldn’t give the names of streets that she and heroic pals were supposedly demonstrating in. The whole hoax had appealed to a certain section of the left who wanted a feminist, peaceful, inclusive Islam.
It was particularly horrible when there were actual heroic demonstrators who faced torture and death.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2002854/A-Gay-Girl-Damascus-Tom-MacMaster-40-blogger-Amina-Arraf.html
Thanks, Dave. I remember the event now. I found it strange even before he confessed, because I have attended a number of “conservation events”, and find that the atheists tend to be highly respectful of religious moderates and in fact, it is more likely, from my observation, that mockery goes the other way, as many of the people at those events believe it is only through religion (moderate religion) that conservation can occur.
The fun thing about Walter Smith is that after he was exposed as having created a whole fake blog with a host of fake commenters so that he could do things like call me a “useless putrid twat” as one commenter and then rebuke that comment as the fake blogger – after he was exposed as that, and had to change labs because the lab he was in at the time was run by a woman and she was not amused (I had a long conversation with her on the phone) – after all that, and after pretending to repent and promise never to do it again, he came back under a different name and fooled a whole slew of people who should have been able to see through his disguise. I found his new persona increasingly fishy, and did some digging, and hey presto sure enough that’s our Wally.
This is the post where I exposed him.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/hammill-the-prodigal/
Damn, if only I’d seen Ophelia’s comment @10 before I went traipsing through the archives, because @10 captures the key things I’d forgotten about that whole saga: (1) that in addition to being a liar and a fraud, Wally Smith was a vile misogynist; and (2) that it is an instance where “internet shaming” was entirely warranted.
It was actually sort of amazing that a number of different bloggers, including at least three of whom he had attacked viciously (OB, Coyne, PZ), agreed not to out Wally. Wally’s defenders insisted that he was just a kid, he’d learned his lesson, why ruin his life, the internet will pile on unmercilessly, etc. etc. And when granted that reprieve (though not necessarily for those reasons), what did the chastened, learned-his-lesson Wally do with his “second chance”? The same old shit.
There’s quite a bit of me on that thread saying with considerable vehemence that I didn’t agree not to expose him out of any kind of sympathy for him, given the venomous lies he’d told about a whole bunch of people – including Leslie Rissler, the head of the lab he was in at the time, which is the main reason she would not let him stay in her lab. (I’d forgotten that part until I read more comments just now.) I don’t remember why I did agree.
Also – I looked him up yesterday and he did get a job in his field, so the worries about that were wasted energy.
OB — I think in one of the comments at Coyne’s blog (yes, Jerry, I’m calling it a blog), you suggested that it wasn’t worth the vitriol that would be directed your way for “outing” Wally, even if he did deserve it. I’m paraphrasing, obviously.
Another interesting thing about the whole saga is the lack of grace from so many of the accommodationists. Mooney at least gave a partial mea culpa. But Kazez tried to hedge about how the story could still be true. Rosenau, at least as far as the threads I read, never apologized for being so aggressively wrong.
And I keep coming back to that “putrid twat” comment. Even putting aside the sexism, why was the “you must be nice and polite at all times, because you get more flies with honey” brigade so eager to defend such an aggressively nasty piece of work?
That sounds plausible.
And yes. That thread revived my memory of how fixedly all those people looked in the other direction when Wally was exposed. Rosenau most certainly never apologized; neither did Kazez; neither did Stangroom; neither did Mooney that I know of – and his article titled something like “How Horrible Ophelia Benson Is” is still out there.
What a rabbit hole. I don’t recall if I was reading WEIT or Pharyngula at the time (sadly, I wasn’t reading B&W), but I have no memory of this blowup, and only vague memories of Josh Rosenau.
Gah, some really nasty people there.
I corrected the name for you. Jason Rosenhouse is the other fella.
Ah, thanks. Maybe I should just go with JR.
I always had to stop & think which was which back in the day.