Bug In or Bug Out?
Vern Evans
Scott Stone had just set his morning coffee and a bowl of yogurt on his desk Thursday when the notification popped up. The email came through his business website, where he books wildlife photography and bear viewing tours in Alaska. He assumed it was from a potential client.
Instead, he realized the subject line read “Pos” (short for “piece of shit”) and the message simply said, “Faggot we are goin dox you and your family”.
A bewildered Scott turned to his wife and business partner, Jackie, and asked, “Did you see our email?” When the Stones opened their Instagram page, scottstone_images, they realized they were dealing with a full-scale attack on their small business. The onslaught was courtesy of a social-media mob that, incredibly, didn’t seem to notice or care that “Scott Stone Photography” had been mistakenly tagged in a post condemning a 20-something female influencer named Sam Jones.
As the Stones soon learned, Jones had posted a now-viral video last week to her Instagram account, samstrays_somewhere. The clip showed her scooping up a wombat joey and, giggling, carrying the distressed critter across a road and away from its mother. Offscreen, a man with an Aussie accent eggs her on. Her conduct in the short video (which she has since removed) has been widely picked apart and condemned by everyone from the American hunting and conservation community to Australia’s prime minister. Her subsequent apology and deflection haven’t helped matters.
What has gone largely unscrutinized, however, is the conduct of online commenters who blindly targeted accounts like Stone’s. For one, that mindset tells us a lot about the absence of fact-checking and reason that, all too often, antis use to their advantage.
But it’s also a reminder of the sheer power of anti-hunting cancel culture. Online — where there are seemingly no consequences for making false accusations, threatening violence, or failing to check your sources — anti-hunting campaigns can become so extreme they ruin lives and livelihoods. Such campaigns can spiral out of control, causing real-life damage and anxiety not only to law-abiding hunters (such as the dentist who lost his practice over Cecil the Lion) but to folks who had nothing to do with the original issue.
Collateral Damage
Somehow even photography riles antis up, says Stone. He suspects his business page was deliberately tagged on the Sam Jones attack posts by a troll — one who knew there were plenty of commenters willing to jump on the account-bashing bandwagon.
“We know what we do is not loved by everyone,” says Stone, whose wildlife photography and viewing business helps educate the public about wild bear behavior and conservation. “There are people who like to troll on social media, and they think we’re going to get the bears killed by being there in the first place.”
To be clear: The Stones had nothing to do with the baby wombat incident, and say they have never even been to Australia. (They did note, however, that Montana is a small world and that Jones formerly interned for one of their friends who is a biologist.)
It took the Stones nearly four hours to put out the fire on their social media. They moved as fast as possible, trying to educate commenters before their accounts were reported enough that Meta automatically disabled them. (Luckily this didn’t happen.) Scott and Jackie replied to aggressive, hateful comments and answered direct messages. They tapped their friends in the conservation community to defend them. Eventually Jackie reached the admin of the post where things went sideways (it had been made by a China-based animal shelter), who subsequently updated the post and issued an apology.
Some commenters apologized to the Stones, while others acted like they’d been wronged.
Scott estimates that Instagram helps sell between 97 and 99 percent of the spots on their bear-viewing trips. If Meta, which owns Instagram, had shut down their account for being reported so many times, their business would have absolutely suffered.
“It would have been catastrophic,” says Scott, who was grateful he and Jackie were in service and available to field the comments. “They were reporting our page, so if our page got shut down, we wouldn’t have gotten it back. Meta is worthless. It’s robots and bots, and you would not have been able to talk to a human.”
Scott is speaking from experience. Last year his personal Facebook page was hacked, and his old business page lost 15,000 followers. He tried everything to recover it, even going so far as to write the attorney general of California and place a formal appeal to Meta. The Stones never recovered his account, and had to start their Facebook-based business promotion over from scratch.
“I think the biggest thing to learn is how fast something negative could negatively impact you and your business. We learned a lot about how many great conservationists did have our back. But also, the power of the negative word is scary,” says Scott. “In the blink of an eye, you could literally ruin someone’s life. By the time the damage with social media is done, nobody cares about correcting it. That’s the thing you find out. You look at a lot of people in the media who get their careers destroyed and there’s no rebuilding it. People hang onto negative things. We saw in a short amount of time, even with what our following is, how fast that could’ve went away.”
Other innocent bystanders have endured collateral damage. Another Sam Jones, a creative director at Comedy Central and Paramount according to her Facebook page, was also set upon by online haters. While both women share the same common name and live in America, the resemblance stops there. A bare minimum fact check — checking her profile photo, for instance, or looking at her Facebook wall — would have informed any angry commenter.
“The amount of hate I’m STILL receiving from hundreds of people who, with a little research, would realize I’m not the ‘influencer’ who stole a baby animal, is astounding,” writes Jones in a comment on her original post explaining she is, in fact, a different Sam Jones. “This attack mentality is disgusting. People are telling me to kill myself, they’re calling my company, they’re commenting on my work—this is so dangerous—the woman who did this is 20 years old. They found all her social handles, yet still, I’m being bum rushed. The hate online is idicocrocy [sic].
“Hundreds of strangers flooded my social media—telling me (and my family) to kill ourselves, leaving fake one-star reviews on my business, and raging at a person who is absolutely, unequivocally NOT ME,” Jones wrote in another post on March 12. “And here’s the best part: Even when I hand them the correct person’s profile on a silver platter—like, ‘Hey, dum-dum, you’re looking for her’—they don’t apologize. They just… move on.”
Understanding Anti-Hunting Abroad
While the U.S. has always had its fair share of anti-hunters, the international anti-hunting community reaches a different level in places like England, France, and other Western countries. And nowhere is it more entrenched than Australia, as I learned last year when I visited the state of Victoria for duck season.
I witnessed how far Australian anti-hunters will go to deter hunters from shooting and eating a duck. That included — among other tactics — following and filming children, verbally harassing their parents and elderly hunters, paddling around decoy spreads, and constantly flaring birds that were trying to find refuge.
While many of the Aussie duck hunters I spoke with expressed complex, nuanced opinions about the importance of duck hunting for conservation and culture, they also shared insights into the ways they thought the hunting community could improve. (They cared a lot about public relations, fostering new hunters, and sharing wild game with non-hunters.) Duck hunters like Ramsey Russell and my hunting buddy there, Glenn Falla, have consistently tried to engage in meaningful discussions with anti-hunters in Australia, and been stonewalled. I tried interviewing several myself, with responses that ranged from silence to sarcasm.
In fact, antis in Australia actively film hunters. They hope for us to make mistakes or break the law so they can turn it over to law enforcement and, more importantly, circulate it online to drag down the entire hunting community. So it should be no surprise to any Australian that an Instagrammer who calls herself a hunter and filmed herself doing something thoughtless to a native Australian critter sparked a wildfire.
This whole incident is a reminder that the anti-hunting community isn’t interested in the nuance or subtlety required to understand hunting or conservation.
If an online commenter can’t be bothered to check whether the person whose life they’re threatening even shares the same name as the person they’re trying to harass, they certainly can’t be bothered to learn how hunting supports wildlife conservation. And the complex relationship true hunters have with the critters they pursue? Forget it. Such subtleties are wasted.
Anti-Hunting at Home
A campaign to ban mountain lion and bobcat hunting in Colorado last fall is a good example from here in the U.S. Among many arguments, antis canvassing the public for signatures talked about how their ballot measure would ban hunting of the endangered lynx. That’s a reasonable argument, and one that sounds persuasive to a member of the public. The only trouble is, lynx hunting was already against the law in Colorado. That’s because the population couldn’t sustain a hunt, and that was something hunters already agreed with. But without doing even some basic research, the average voter would never discover such a reality.
Another example is one Jones brought up herself. While she didn’t do herself (or the hunting community) any favors when she attempted to recast her behavior as an attempt to “help” the wombat, she capped things off with a deflection of her own behavior by urging Australians to question their own government’s approach toward native wildlife.
“How about the beloved Kangaroo, the National animal on your coat of arms?” Jones wrote, echoing an argument that anti-hunters in Australia and here in the U.S. have been leveraging for years. “In the last 20 years, approximately 90 million kangaroos and wallabies have been legally slaughtered for commercial purposes and that number is not slowing down. Millions are legally killed each year. Are they not deserved of government protection as native species? If you don’t believe me, take a look around the next time you go to Woolworth’s where you will see kangaroo flesh sold as both pet and human food.”
The reality, of course, ignores the complex management of wild kangaroos. Kangaroos are overpopulated in much of their original range, thanks to colonists and ranchers who remade native habitat to support Australia’s livestock economy. Kangaroos there routinely destroy crops and cause vehicle accidents, much like our native whitetails in overpopulated areas here in the U.S. It would be impossible to grow crops, drive safely, and otherwise coexist in many places across Australia without managing kangaroos.
Meanwhile Jones, who left Australia amid international outrage, death threats, and doxxing, has since overhauled her Instagram account. Her grid now has just 14 photos, all edited in the last few days and closed to comments. These images show hero shots of herself with an axis deer and a whitetail buck, along with selfies and other influencer-style shots.
Read Next: During Australia’s Duck Season ‘Circus’ Anti-Hunting Activists Will Steal Your Birds, Paddle Through Your Decoys, and Film Your Kids
They are clearly distinct from the wild bear photos on Scott Stone’s page, which only includes images of live bears. Although Stone is a licensed taxidermist, he stopped hunting when he picked up a camera in 2017.
“I was born and raised hunting and fishing, and my love of animals came out of that,” says Stone, who now prefers the challenge of capturing photos to filling tags. “A lot of non-hunters don’t understand that.”
Read the full article here