When a bunch of women in New York found out they had all gone on dates with the same guy, at first it was a hilarious taste of drama and gossip. As the story spread, it turned into something different, and more harmful.

If you’re here, you probably already know about West Elm Caleb. The story is pretty simple on the face of it. One woman made a video about going on a date with a tall man with a mustache who worked at West Elm. Another woman saw that video, and realized she was going on dates with the exact same guy. As those videos circulated, many other New York women said that they too had either matched with him on a dating app, or gone on a date or two with him, and a pattern began to emerge.

The behaviors that this man exhibited as a romantic interest are not particularly flattering. Women said that he would send over-the-top romantic messages before even meeting them, making some of these people feel manipulated by him after he later would stop messaging them entirely. At least one woman said she received an unsolicited dick pic from him. The funniest detail is that he sent every woman the same exact Spotify playlist.

Caleb is a person who did specific things to specific people, people who had a right to take issue with his behavior. But what happens on the internet is that specificity gets flattened out of the conversation extremely quickly. Shortly after the videos about these women’s bad dates were posted, other people, in different parts of the country who had never met Caleb and didn’t know anything about him, offered their commentary on the subject. Just as it had happened for Couch Guy or this trans woman doing a house renovation, the onlookers fired up their abilities as internet sleuths, and before long Caleb’s full name and LinkedIn had been posted. Random people who had nothing to do with the story whatsoever began posting about Caleb sightings or asking if they should go confront (harass) him.

As one of the original West Elm Caleb TikTokers would later say, as people started following along from the sidelines, this man stopped being a specific man who had done specific things, and became “a metaphor in the cultural zeitgeist.”

These are people who were spurred by a desire to hold someone accountable, but without stopping to think why he needed to be held accountable to them, a group of people who he will never meet. Instead of just being one shitty guy, he became content, a stand in for every single shitty guy that’s ever been on a dating app. It’s also not really clear what Caleb would even be held accountable for. The acts described by the women who had dated him described a person who wasn’t particularly nice and was even a shitty dater, but who was seemingly not committing crimes or abusively wielding his power in some way. It’s useful to talk about the harsh realities of dating in your 20s, when people can be very cruel, but as far as we know, Caleb became an internet villain simply for being what these people considered to be a bad date.

“Some people are making videos like, who’s the West Elm Caleb of Los Angeles, who’s the West Elm Caleb here or there,” one of the women who actually went on a date with Caleb said. 

She further clarified that she only made a video about him to confirm to her own audience that the mystery guy she had mentioned in previous videos was in fact, the man who had been going viral on the platform independently of her.

“Like, I purposefully never shared a photo, I never said where this man who I was going on a date with, where he worked, or his name, or any of this private information, because I thought it would be gross to put on the internet,” she said. “I find it so gross that brands are capitalizing on this… or just the fact that so many people on my TikTok care about it. Why are so many people invested in this across the country and want to see the downfall of this man?”

Sharing stories about this man did seem to be a satisfying moment of catharsis for a lot of people on TikTok, especially the women that he had actually dated. And if the content is good and exhibiting viral potential, it becomes harder and harder not to engage with it. You have to do another TikTok, you have a funny tweet, and now here comes the VICE blog. It’s self-propelling content, and it feels good to participate in it because so many women have met men who act similarly. It’s like an inverted version of Alex from Target, only Alex is cute and goes on Ellen and Caleb sucks and has to delete his social media because so many people he never met hate him now.

But it is worth asking—do we need to blow up this one specific instance into one of national importance? Is it at all appropriate for Hellman’s Mayonnaise to tweet about the private life of a guy who works for a company that makes overpriced couches?

Or for this incident to be used as advertising in the city that he lives in?

Not every moment of harm is something that needs to go viral or that you need to have an opinion about or need to publicly weigh in on. West Elm Caleb does not need to be a household name or elevated to national importance. Gossip can keep women safe from both abuse and more mundane forms of pain, but it can also cause harm in itself. West Elm Caleb may indeed be a fuckboy, but his fuckery was not so spectacular or noteworthy as to deserve widespread ridicule and doxing. On the internet, a person can become a symbol without them even knowing it, which makes it all the more important to remember that there’s a real human being on the other side of that #content.

Turning Red, the latest film from Disney-owned animation studio Pixar, isn’t one of its more ponderous, philosophical films. It’s a sunny coming-of-age story set in the modern day—technically, it takes place 20 years ago, but this seems mainly like a device allowing the film to address contemporary concerns without being totally up to the minute—starring a precocious 13-year-old who only wants to know how to be a good daughter to her mother. Why this movie has made so many people so angry is a question for which there’s no obvious answer.

Children’s media has become a political battleground, one where the so-called “culture war” is fought. Turning Red has become just the latest film to find itself being shot at from multiple rhetorical fronts, even though the film itself is—in a good way—pretty banal. Like many Disney and Pixar films, Turning Red depicts a child with a tumultuous relationship with her parents; in this case, having strong emotions will turn her into a giant red panda. What’s a boy-band-obsessed 13-year-old to do?

Unusually, as culture war things go, each of the types of criticism that have been lobbed at the movie feel discrete from each other—unlike, say, the question of sexuality in Luca, or the issues that came up around Encanto after New York Times columnist Ross Douthat expressed his weird beef with the movie about a child’s relationship with her grandmother not featuring a heterosexual romance. In those cases, the criticism occurred in response to the content of the film, or at least because it piggybacked on a personal problem the author was having. The criticisms of Turning Red feel both more impassioned and scattershot, as if they don’t have much to do with the actual movie.

If you’re a big animation nerd, you may have already seen complaints about Turning Red’s art style. Dubbed the “CalArts style” by Ren and Stimpy creator and accused pedophile John Kricfalusi, criticisms of it have more to do with the kind of person who draws in it rather than the art itself. (Why else would you associate it with a college, rather than the hallmarks of the style itself?) The specifics of the style that stand out most to detractors are “bean mouths”— so called because the characters’ mouths, when they smile open mouthed, look like curvy little beans—as well as an exaggerated sense of characters stretching and then snapping into position as they’re animated.

This doesn’t seem like a very salient criticism, though; the movie is animated the way Pixar movies—and 3D animations generally—are these days. It’s fair not to like it if you don’t, but there’s nothing generally unusual about the art style of Turning Red.

Cinemablend came under fire for its review of Turning Red, which didn’t criticize the art style but rather the content of the film itself. The reviewer, who has since apologized and unpublished the review, stated that the film was unrelatable to him because of its supposedly narrow focus.

“I recognized the humor in the film, but connected with none of it. By rooting ‘Turning Red’ very specifically in the Asian community of Toronto, the film legitimately feels like it was made for [director] Domee Shi’s friends and immediate family members,” the review read. “Which is fine—but also, a tad limiting in its scope.”

The critic was relentlessly criticized for this criticism, mostly because it was weird—the movie is very broad and relatable, if anything to a fault. As a person who does fall kinda, sorta into the demographic to which this film is most relatable—my mother is an immigrant from India and I am ever her overachieving daughter—what struck me in watching it was that although I felt very specifically referenced by the film, the issues that main character Mei faces seemed pretty broad. Have you ever wanted to live up to your parents’ expectations and struggled to do so? Congratulations, there’s definitely something in this movie for you. 

As the week has moved on, yet another strain of criticism has cropped up in Google and Rotten Tomatoes user reviews—this is again based on the content of the film, but takes a different direction. Turning Red is broadly about puberty, specifically a young girl’s experience of it. In the film, there’s a reference to her period, as well as a general acknowledgement that teenage girls going through puberty start experiencing sexual attraction  and have strong emotions. Those aspects of the movie—the harmless references to puberty and the basic facts that adolescents develop crushes and disobey their parents—have made some user reviewers proclaim that the film is simply inappropriate for children, entirely.

If you haven’t seen Turning Red, you might expect this movie to be close to Up or Soul or Inside Out in terms of its scope and scale. It isn’t. It's a well-told and in some scenes beautifully-animated coming-of-age story, but it doesn’t have quite the depth of those movies. There’s nothing about it that’s very different from them, though, or that makes it difficult to understand or relate to, unless you find the idea that main character Mei Lee has a Chinese Canadian background or is a young girl who’s awakening to her own sexuality inherently offensive. The bread and butter of Turning Red is that of so many Disney and Pixar films before it—forming close friendships, believing in yourself, and creating an identity that’s separate from your parents. In fact, the plot of this film is very similar to the Disney film Brave, about a princess from the Scottish highlands who doesn’t want to be ladylike and is cursed by a witch to become a bear until she repairs her relationship with her mother.

Turning Red is totally innocuous, which makes the critical response to it, much of it fueled by outrage and anger, all the more perplexing. There is very little to actually be enraged about by Turning Red. It’s an hour and 47 minutes of children’s entertainment. But it’s the product of a studio owned by Disney—a corporation embroiled in a culture war of its own—and touching on themes specific to young women and non-white people. It’s not a shock that specific audiences are just determined to find something truly objectionable about the film; it’s just surprising that they’re so angry when there’s so little to be angry about or to object to, and when the movie has gone so far out of its way to be sure of that. 

At the very least, the now-redacted Cinemablend review was upfront about what makes Turning Red so alienating to a certain kind of audience: It’s about a 13-year-old non-white girl, and too many people still consider it easier to relate to a talking car than to someone who does not look like them. But watching the film reveals a much simpler truth: Children have big, scary emotions, are afraid of hurting the people close to them, and want to feel their parents’ love.

Social media is a video game. You can win at it, and you can definitely lose at it. It’s being played all the time. Sometimes, the game is playing you. This week, the losers were the development team of The Sims 4. 

Last week, that team announced that the new Sims expansion it had been working on, My Wedding Stories, would not be published in Russia, citing “federal laws.” Most interpreted this as being about Russia’s law against “gay propaganda,” which makes it illegal to show any content that encourages “non-traditional sexual relationships” to people under 18. The Sims 4—which is not available for sale in seven countries because of its LGBT content—is already marked as 18+ in Russia because it allows for same-sex relationships. My Wedding Stories, though, took things a step further. It features a lesbian couple prominently on its cover art, and this couple is also the focal point of its marketing campaign:

This week, The Sims’s publisher, Electronic Arts, reversed course on the decision, saying not only that it would release the expansion in Russia, but also that it would not change or alter the queer content of the pack or its art. In this announcement, the company noted the “outpouring of feelings from our community” as part of why it reversed course. (This kind of language is a common euphemism in games—discussion of “passionate communities” is a polite way to refer to widespread harassment against the developers of a video game.)

LGBT Russian players were, on hearing of the initial decision, immediately hurt, and then angry. They felt discriminated against not just by their government, but also by a company that was complying with an unjust law. Because the initial statement from EA didn’t reference any specific law or content that would have prevented My Wedding Stories from coming to Russia, what followed was widespread speculation. In the absence of official word from EA, people came up with their own ideas about who was to blame, and why, and for what.

There is, in theory, a clear villain here: A Russian government that passed an ambiguous homophobic law it enforces erratically. EA’s since-reversed decision to not publish My Wedding Stories in Russia—and the lack of messaging, for whatever reason, about what specifically led EA or its legal team to that conclusion—set up a scenario where a mind-warping collection of other entities could take the blame. Perhaps EA was the villain, and was against LGBT Simmers in Russia, or Russia generally; perhaps this wasn’t about LGBT rights at all, and was just a marketing tactic to score points from The Sims’s liberal Western audience; perhaps something else entirely was going on. In the absence of hard facts, a vacuum where conspiracies could grow took shape.

Sorting the truth from fiction in this conflict became nearly impossible the more the movement grew, and especially once the conflict started playing out on social media under the #weddingsforrussia hashtag. (All popular hashtags initially denote people with a shared interest and are then co-opted by people with wildly diverging ones.) This made what was already a contentious conversation spiral down into outright harassment, especially towards the developers of The Sims 4. When EA announced that My Wedding Stories would be coming to Russia, it also added a reminder to the community to “keep your words kind.”  

That this whole debacle ended with EA publishing My Wedding Stories in Russia shouldn’t distract anyone from this: A law designed to make it difficult to publish material celebrating gay life in Russia did so, and in the process turned a community against itself. Who won? The people behind homophobic laws designed to turn friends into enemies, and people with the same ideals against one another.

Jovan Jović, who runs the popular Sims fansite Sims Community, told Waypoint that as soon as he heard the news, he was shocked by EA’s decision. Jović is a gay man who lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and felt personally affected by the ban even if he’s not in the same country as Russian players. He shares these players’ skepticism that the initial decision not to release the expansion in Russia was actually about LGBT rights or content.

“I don't live in Russia. Still, we share the same Cyrilic script,” Jović said. “Our stories are very much similar in terms of discrimination from straight people who we're surrounded by. We still cannot get legally married by the state—let alone the church that blames us for every earthquake, fire, and now the pandemic.”

Jović told Waypoint that he has been stopped in Bosnia and Herzegovina by police who asked about his sexuality and mocked him for being gay, and then continued to follow him in their patrol car. He said that conditions for LGBT people in Eastern Europe in general are harsh, with intense discrimination from the heterosexual majority.

“My first ever Pride parade was in Belgrade, Serbia in September 2021,” Jović said. “Unlike with Pride parades that you usually see reported in the media across the globe, the Pride parade in Serbia is very different. People here not only fight for the right to marry—they fight for the right to be recognized by the state so they can visit their loved one in the hospital.”

While LGBT people in the U.S. and most of the rest of the Western world have rights enshrined by law, including the right to marry, members of the LGBT community in the States also perceive those rights as hard-won, and fragile. Although gay men and women can marry, there is still an intense backlash against portrayals of queer life in the States, including proposed bills that would ban LGBT books from school libraries. In Florida, one proposed bill seeks to prohibit teachers from talking about LGBT issues with students. 

LGBT people in the U.S. have long used non-compliance with homophobic laws as a form of activism, which is a freedom that Tanya Lokot, a researcher on internet freedom in Eastern Europe and related topics, told Waypoint that LGBT people in Russia do not have. Lokot said that non-compliance with homophobic laws can be dangerous for them. 

“It's really about whether you have enough status to be out.”

“That's the kind of work that gets you arrested or fined or exiled,” Lokot said. She said that in Russia, being out is still incredibly precarious. 

“Large Russian cities are very cosmopolitan, and there are tons of publicly out gay people. There are gay nightclubs in Moscow, a lot of celebrities are out,” she continued. “So it's really about whether you have enough status to be out, because that's a protection.”

To Russian players, EA’s stance of not releasing the pack in Russia to “stand by their values” was pointless; it felt like an additional insult on top of the grievous injuries caused by continued discrimination. Putin wasn’t going to bend on the law over a video game; the only point EA could make by not releasing it with an 18+ label was about its own righteousness, and the only people who would be affected by that were Russian gamers unwilling to pirate the expansion.

A representative from the Sphere Foundation, a charitable foundation for LGBT people in Russia, told Waypoint that to the queer community there, EA’s initial decision to not release My Wedding Stories felt as if EA was complying with a law that already negatively impacts their lives.

“By seemingly complying with the discriminatory Russian legislature, EA was becoming complicit in legitimizing homophobia in the country. By depriving the Russian people of the pack altogether, it is almost as if the company was punishing the people for having a homophobic government,” they said. “It is a stretch, of course, but such is the public sentiment. Because it is not like we don’t fight against that law as a community, we do. There is actually a big gap nowadays between the public attitude toward LGBT+, which is becoming increasingly accepting, and the government’s turn toward ‘traditional values,’ but the power of the latter seems at times too overwhelming.”

It’s difficult for people in the U.S. to understand the specific law on “gay propaganda” that exists in Russia and how it is implemented—one of the purposes, it seems clear, of the law’s lack of clarity. Western companies tend to interpret the law cautiously, and have been affected by it in the past. Last year, for example, Netflix was investigated by the Russian government over an anonymous complaint regarding “gay propaganda” on the platform. In 2016, Blizzard declined to release an Overwatch comic where one of the characters in the game spends Christmas with her girlfriend. A book about sexual health written by an Australian journalist was published in Russia without two pages related to trans people, following advice from the author’s legal council.

“By depriving the Russian people of the pack altogether, it is almost as if the company was punishing the people for having a homophobic government.”

An independent game developer, who asked to remain anonymous because he has signed an NDA, told Waypoint that sometimes, during the localization process, LGBT characters or themes get flagged as problematic by translators. In his case, a publisher who funded a Russian localization got cold feet when they heard about the law against “gay propaganda,” specifically regarding a character who was non-binary and trans.

“If I recall correctly, I think [the translator] did surface a couple of things, like, ‘Oh, this will be a little touchy for the Russian market,’” the developer said. “They won't come out and say, like, ‘You must change this or we will ban this in Russia,’ but what they want is sort of, like, they'll give you their concerns, and then they want you to talk them into why they shouldn't be concerned.”

“They asked, like, ‘Does the character talk about who they like, date, or talk about sex at all?’” the developer said. “And in our case, no, the character was non-binary, but their dating life was not part of the story. So they seemed more relaxed when they heard that there wouldn't be any clear romance.”

The solution ended up being that the publisher commissioned a “clean version” of the Russian localization that removed swear words and one or two references to queerness in the text of the game. Still, laws regarding LGBT content in other markets, like Saudi Arabia and China, have prevented the release of this game in those countries entirely, even though the publisher had commissioned Arabic and Chinese localizations.

“I would definitely say there's a chilling effect around releasing in the market,” he said.

For some U.S. companies, including the developers of The Sims 4, navigating Russia’s law about “gay propaganda” has a relatively painless solution: In order to comply with the law, you add an “18+” label to your content. It still marginalizes the content, though, by marking it as only appropriate for adults, a move that Human Rights Watch says is harmful to the LGBT youth in Russia, even if it allows companies to distribute in Russia. 

Adding to the confusion is that even those who comply with the law can still be penalized under it. In 2021, LGBT film festival Side By Side had its website blacklisted by the government, despite complying with laws regarding “gay propaganda” and placing an “18+” marker on every page. The film festival was also targeted by anti-gay politicians in 2013, even though they were complying with the law and the festival was only open to people 18 and over. This law was also a contributing factor in Russians complaining about an ad for a grocery store that featured a real-life lesbian couple and their family. Eventually the store took the ad down and apologized, and the family was harassed so badly that they left the country. 

This ambiguity—around whether or not the law will be enforced, and how much compliance is enough compliance—is part of the chilling effect of homophobic laws in general. It also makes it difficult to navigate for foreign corporations who don’t know the legal ramifications if they are found to be in violation of it.

Everyone in the Sims community agrees that part of the issue was the vagueness of EA’s initial statement, which framed the choice to not release My Wedding Stories in Russia as an act of political activism. (Waypoint reached out to EA for further clarification on why and how it came to this decision but it declined to comment.)

In the absence of new information from EA, Russian players got angry. Before long, a hashtag was started, and players used the tag “#weddingsforrussia” to voice their opinions. Major Sims influencers added their voices to the pile by saying they would not make pre-release content about My Wedding Stories until EA addressed the community.

The issue with any decentralized internet movement, though, is how easily it can be hijacked. What started as LGBT people in Russia trying to talk about their experiences soon became a soup of sometimes contradictory, but often very hostile, stances on what EA should do.

The Sims 4 is somewhat unusual in that it has some of the developers on the team take audience-facing positions on social media. These developers, known as SimGurus online, make themselves available to players to talk about the game and answer questions. Unfortunately, in situations like these, the SimGurus instead receive the players’ unfiltered frustrations. When you’re on the receiving end of that—especially if those people are all using the same hashtag—it feels like a harassment campaign. 

What started as LGBT people in Russia trying to talk about their experiences soon became a soup of sometimes contradictory, but often very hostile, stances.

Some Simmers who used the hashtag were simply LGBT Russians who felt unfairly excluded by EA and its stated goal of being inclusive. Other Simmers were non-LGBT Russians who had no particular stake in whether or not My Wedding Stories would have a queer couple or queer content in it—these people just wanted the game they felt that they were owed. There was also definitely another, more amorphous group of people (many with fresh accounts) using the hashtag as a rallying cry to harass those with dissenting opinions, even as it was utterly unclear what the orthodoxy from which they were tolerating no deviation actually was. The people in the third group—who mysteriously managed to drive heavy engagement despite following and being followed by virtually no one—eventually became the most visible. Several people told me that their tweets disagreeing with the #weddingsforrussia campaign were replied to en masse by very angry people within minutes of their posting.

This behavior is not unique or unusual; it’s just how the internet works now as an engine for communication. Most dedicated communities on Twitter know how to get their tweets surfaced to larger and larger audiences. You need engagement—likes, retweets and replies— and it doesn’t actually matter if people agree with you or not, or if they even understand what it is you’re fighting for. Stan twitter, Gamergate, and #weddingsforrussia all have this in common. This is how you play the game of social media, and it is a tried and true method for winning it, and having whatever side you’ve aligned yourself with be the only one that matters. Once you understand how the game is played, it’s just a matter of weaponizing it.

Lokot gave an example from her research on Russia’s Internet Research Agency’s activity on Twitter and its effect on the 2016 election.

“It actually turned out that a lot of these accounts pretended to be Black Lives Matter activists, or in that community. If they're actually even doing that, there's really no limit to what all of these various networks of automated accounts or pretend accounts can do,” she said. “I think the probability that a really popular hashtag might be hijacked by whatever rogue actor is pretty high.”

The general lack of clarity on social media has made EA’s eventual choice to release My Wedding Stories in Russia without any changes to the queer content all the more confusing for LGBT people in the region. It’s a win that somehow still feels like a loss.

“I am happy about the result, don't get me wrong,” Jović said. “However, the entire ban being lifted and the fact that we've been proven right that there is no need for censorship only draws more questions. Why was there a ban in the first place?”

If there are winners, that often also means that there are losers. In the game of social media, winning doesn’t always mean attacking a specific target, but it doesn’t hurt. In this case, it wasn’t the parent company EA—which is ultimately responsible for business choices it makes of where they sell its product—that bore the brunt of the criticism. It certainly wasn’t the Russian government. In the end, the ones who were affected most by there being no good options to choose from and no obvious way to do the right thing were the developers who made The Sims 4—the game that the players in the #weddingsforrussia hashtag say they love.