I have been writing about donkeys – on this blog and elsewhere – for more than a decade. My writings have simply celebrated donkeys and shared the joy that these animals brought me in those last years in which I worked at the end of my career – teaching geography at Elians international school in Costa Blanca – leading to the first years of my retirement. I set up my donkey project while I was still working, ready to continue it into my retirement, and I am now 72 years old happily living with these four donkeys, Rubí and Matilde, and their two offspring Morris and Aitana.
Equusasinus.net and the blog that preceded it – the Brother Lapin’s Pilgrimage blog – have always been simply intended in the original sense of the ‘web log’ genre, as an online diary, shared with whatever audience found it worth reading. It never sought a wide audience. My other writings – where I have submitted articles on other subjects to editors of more widely-read journalistic blogs – have fulfilled any remaining need of mine for an audience – and this blog presents merely my own musings, mainly written to get my thoughts in order! A way of holding off senility a little while longer, perhaps?
Last year – in the same spirit, of just sharing my life with donkeys – I joined with other donkey keepers on the Mastodon app (which, for those unfamiliar with it, is like Twitter but with a much smaller user base.) So it was lighthearted and humorous, as exchanges between donkey keepers generally are, and often ironic! It was great to converse with others in USA and France and Germany.
In the autumn of 2022, while posting photos of donkeys and exchanging diet and welfare advice, this group adopted the hashtag #donkeyoftheday (begun in 2021 by Nathalie, a commercial donkey farmer in France) or the hashtag #DonkeysofMastodon already in use by some donkey people in the USA and Germany; but at the end of November 2022, Prof. Christina Dunbar-Hester appeared in our midst: a Californian media studies academic, using the account @inquiline@union.place (N.b. she removed her name in late July 2023 when the controversies mentioned here led to her replacing her username with “alt dot media dot studies”.)
She originally reached out to our small existing group of donkey posters with a post showing a photo of a donkey foal and text saying, “By popular demand! #Asstodon #DIY #BeTheAlgorithm.” Then she put up another post saying, “There are at least six people on here who should be using the hashtag #Asstodon” and by flagging these posts up to the various donkey keepers, encouraging us to use the hashtag.
There was initially some confusion as to who used it first, but when I suggested it was a donkey keeper in Oklahoma on 28th November, Dunbar-Hester was very quick to tell everyone the hashtag was her invention. Fair enough, and who cares? But Dunbar-Hester was very clear about it being her who ‘invented’ the #Asstodon hashtag and wrote various posts reminding everyone about that fact. There is still a post on her timeline publicly castigating me for wrongly attributing it to the Oklahoma donkey keeper, @jotokla.
The incident shows how important it was for Dunbar-Hester to have the #Asstodon hashtag attributed to her, and that is central here, because she was using the donkey group as a ‘media studies experiment’ but without making her intentions open. Did we want to be used as a media studies experiment? We were never asked.
To begin with, some assumed that Dunbar-Hester was just another donkey keeper or since she didn’t actually say as much, an enthusiast or appreciator of our content. I did not go looking at her Mastodon user profile when she first appeared: I was not really interested in her. One of her very first posts showed a picture labeled by her in the ALT text “A fuzzy dark brown donkey, probably not a full adult?” So that told me immediately she had no history of dealing with donkeys, as it was obviously a picture of a foal just a few weeks old, and nobody with any knowledge of donkeys would use the phrase “probably not a full adult?” in referring to that picture.
The hashtag was generally thought to be a good one #Asstodon being a fun conflation of donkey (i.e. ass in English) + Mastodon (and it worked well alongside other groups using hashtags like #Mosstodon – for pictures of moss (yes really!) – and similar word play. There was perhaps a misunderstanding or cultural gap because it took a while before those of us in Europe caught up with the double-entendre: when we write or speak the word ass in British English we are referring to a donkey: e.g. “Don’t make an ass of yourself.” connotes a donkey, and is not the same as “Don’t make an arse of yourself,” which connotes the human rear-end.
By the time we caught up with the fact that #Asstodon was actually a more risque hashtag than we imagined, and it might invite pornography into the gaze of people expecting to see donkey pictures, it was too late and it had been adopted by everyone and soon became popular. Part of its popularity among Americans was of course that they immediately expected to see something else when friends told them to click on the hashtag, and they were pleasantly surprised to find harmless pictures of donkeys.
EARLY 2023 PROBLEMS EMERGE: ACADEMIC MANIPULATION & PORNOGRAPHY
It was some time later that it became evident that Dunbar-Hester had used this group for her own purposes as a ‘media studies’ experiment, and after two months she began flagging up her academic role and intent. On 13th January 2023 in a post titled “Virality, asstodon, Fedi (safe)” Dunbar-Hester wrote “Hey, if anyone is looking for an academic project re virality on here, you’re welcome to look at the propogation of #asstodon (as far as I’m concerned, others would need to opt in too…” she goes on to explain how she adopted a hashtag #asstodon posted by another academic and created a joke around it, saying ”& it’s taken off with help +”
Now there’s nothing terribly wrong with any of that, ethically, but it struck some of us as a bit mean for Dunbar-Hester to have been encouraging us back in November to use this hashtag for our group, then letting it be known that from her point of view – and professionally – it was all an experiment in ‘virality’.
It was then – as we exchanged private messages on the subject – that some people simply unfollowed Dunbar-Hester and at least one donkey keeper blocked her in disgust. This, the original source of the objection by some of us, eventually leading to a disagreement between myself and Dunbar-Hester in July when I finally decided to voice concerns that had long been exchanged privately by several people in the group. That disagreement with Dunbar-Hester was brief, and from my point of view when voicing my concerns, not acrimonious. It was a firm but civilly expressed objection.
The second problem we experienced was the inevitable arrival of pornograqphy on the hashtag #Asstodon. Bearing in mind that we have an unusually large number of quite sensitive people viewing our pictures of donkeys, many of them older or vulnerable people, who simply find the donkeys a comfortable and safe subject, when pornography began to appear (and it was sometimes very horrible) some people saw it and others did not, due to the federated nature of Mastodon, and some ‘instances’ blocking that type of thing while others did not. So for example, I would see a pornographic post in my #Asstodon feed and write to the poster asking them to kindly remove the hashtag because it would offend people who expected to see donkeys. 90% of the time – to be fair – these people either removed the hashtag immediately but were too embarrassed to write back to me, or they did write back and apologise after taking it down. Some people never saw any pornography because they were on different Mastodon ‘instances’ and sometimes I didn’t see it, and other readers of #Asstodon posts would tell me it happened to them, and I’d investigate and try to get it taken down.
Professor Dunbar-Hester complained about this – and we can see it in her own #Donkeygate posts, publicly scolding me for trying to ‘control’ the hashtag she’d invented – and destroying the ‘creative virality’ (whatever that means!) of the experiment she had set up, at our expense! She publicly mocked me for ‘bullying’ the pornographers who failed to take down their filthy images, and she said this was unacceptable behaviour and that I was exercising controlling tendencies out of keeping with her project; of course, again reminding everyone the hashtag was her ‘invention’. Again she did not have the self-awareness to see a contradiction in these two positions(!)
Dunbar-Hester wrote a series of posts with the hashtag #Donkeygate which, apart from the arrogance in which ‘Watergate’ is invoked to flag up the idea of a ‘scandal’, shows very little self-awareness, because everything she has posted about me – and accused me of – is very precisely projecting her own actions!
The evidence of Dunbar-Hester organising a pile-on is there in her posts with this hashtag! With the intention of getting me banned from Mastodon, she used academics, political organisers and people with too much time on their hands – nosy Parkers who were nothing to do with the original difference of opinion – to report, bully and hound me in various places on the internet. The evidence on her own posts is incontrovertible.
Moderators of my original account @equusasinus@mastodon.world informed me of the removal of just two posts. I explained that I was under a mass attack, a pile on, or apparently some people use the term ‘dogpiling’? I showed the moderators the evidence in Dunbar-Hester’s posts telling people to mass report me. The moderators were sceptical and unwilling to spend time on the matter, so I moved my account straight away, taking my several hundred followers. Another member of the donkey keepers group told me to move it to her instance, @eu.mastodon.green because they used the subs to plant trees. I thought that was a good idea so I moved there (foolishly telling my friend on a public post that it looked like a great idea (planting trees). Within minutes, having paid for the subscription with my credit card, the admins got in touch and said we’re closing down your account and you’ll have to move somewhere else.
I moved to @mastodon.social and I explained the situation, giving the admins screenshots of the organised bullying from Dunbar-Hester’s posts. They were very helpful and said they would monitor attempts to block me and inform me if I posted anything they thought merited removal. They took down one of my posts that was a reply to a friend of Dunbar-Hester in which I said “Are you another friend of D-H trying to shut me down?” Apart from that, I simply got on with posting donkey pictures as normal.
Meanwhile, Dunbar-Hester had turned the entire #Donkeygate industry into a huge self-promotion among her media studies academic friends in California. Ordinary posters of donkey pictures on Mastodon, a community of people uninterested in the meta-language of politicised media use, were being treated as pawns in a mad linguistic game. What – in heaven’s name – does any of the following language of Dunbar-Hester actually mean?
Now, a linguistics theorist like Chomsky will tell you that the following sentence is grammatically correct: “This dog looks a bit lamb.” On the other hand, it is entirely meaningless. Thus, Dunbar-Hester’s tortured prose means nothing whatsoever to one who simply wants to post occasional pictures of donkeys on social media, without any intention of getting drawn into a culture war!
As I began… I have been writing about donkeys – on this blog and elsewhere – for more than a decade. But back in the late 1970s I had the pleasure of having three plays performed in London fringe theatre venues. All were written in the absurdist style, with Waiting for Godot and other masterpieces being a formative influence. So – as a comedian – the irony is not lost on me. An ass in California has taken donkey keepers on a long and pointlessly absurd ride across her preferred topic of social media ‘virality’. We just wanted to talk about donkeys. It begs the question, which is more sad?
Smiley face; clown face; party poppers! And back to our original intention… posting pictures and inane comment about donkeys. What a weird place is the Internet!
