I have written about the dog post before, twice now, a decade apart, in 2014, right in the middle of it, and again in 2024, looking back after ten years. I am writing about it again now because I have been asked to give a guest lecture on Digital Media and Society at one of the local universities. It felt like the right time to actually break it down. Deconstruct it so to speak. Looking back from a distance now, I can see there’s a pattern to how these things happen. It’s not random. A mob doesn’t just happen by chance. It builds up in steps, and once you have seen those steps once, you start noticing them everywhere. Not just in my case, but in every online pile-on you see now, whether it’s about religion, politics, or even someone’s ambuyat recipe.
It was never really about the dogs. Nobody was actually upset about them. They were upset about what they decided the post meant, and that’s a different thing. I said I love dogs and they love me, which was just a way I coped with a real fear I had. Within hours, people had turned this into me saying I keep dogs as pets, which I never said. Then it became something about my faith, which I also never said.
The spark is almost never the actual words you wrote. It’s the meaning other people add on top, and that spreads faster than the truth ever can. By the time a post reaches its fiftieth share, nobody is reacting to what you actually wrote anymore. They are reacting to what the ninth person said you wrote.
They weren’t arguing, they were performing. The first comments are usually just testing the water, someone checking if it’s safe to attack. Once one or two harsh comments get likes, everything changes fast. What happens after that isn’t really a discussion. It’s a show. People are not trying to convince you of anything. They are writing for the crowd watching, trying to say the harshest or cleverest thing, because that’s what gets attention. This is why saying sorry rarely helps. I apologised publicly and sincerely, and it didn’t slow anything down, because the crowd was never really looking for an apology. They were looking for a stage.
Then it stopped being about the post. At some point in every mob, it stops being about what you said and starts being about you as a person. In my case, someone made a collage, old photos of me and my family, put together and shared around. It was no longer about dogs at all. It felt like they wanted me to know I was now a target, not just for one opinion, but as a whole person. This is the step that turns an online argument into something that follows you home. It’s done on purpose, and it’s the part I still find hardest to accept, especially since we are supposed to be known as a courteous people.
The authorities wanted a name, not the truth. This part took me years to properly understand. When the noise reached them, they did not ask who had been hurt. They asked who could be held responsible for the disturbance, and I was the easy answer, because my name was attached to the post. A mob doesn’t just die down on its own online. Sometimes it manages to pull the attention of institutions completely away from where the real harm started. That, more than the comments themselves, is what stayed with me the longest.
For everyone else it ended. For me it didn’t. The comments eventually stop. The mob moves on to its next target within days, that’s just how attention works now. But it doesn’t stop for the person who was in the middle of it. My son came home one day and told me a “worshipper” at the mosque had asked him if I was still Muslim. That alone tells you the mob’s timeline and the target’s timeline are two very different things. Everyone else gets to move on. You do not, not fully, not for a long time.
I am not writing this to bring up old wounds again. I have made peace with most of it. I am writing it because understanding the shape of the thing, the spark, the performance, the moment it turns personal, the institution looking for someone to blame, the long tail after everyone else has forgotten, makes it a little less frightening the next time you see it happening to someone else. And these days, it happens to someone else almost every week.
