CYBERSPACE — Sometime this weekend, several of the thousands of people who have been reporting the “Omid” hate and harassment campaign against adult performers on Twitter, finally received a reply acknowledging that the campaign violated Twitter’s own “rules against hateful conduct.”
The social media giant, who unlike Instagram has not responded to XBIZ’s attempts to get a statement about this harmful campaign of hate and prejudice, also quietly suspended the multiple accounts used by “Omid” to taunt adult performers with an obsessive message of hatred against sex workers.
Since November 2018, the “Omid” campaign has taken vocal credit for “taking down” over 300 Instagram accounts belonging to adult performers and companies, regardless of the victims’ efforts to comply with Instagram’s terms of service.
The person or persons behind the “Omid” campaign present themselves as “saviors” of the performers, constantly questioning their life choices, supposedly encouraging them to “leave porn” (there are many mentions of Sasha Grey’s transition out of the industry as exemplary), and conducting an obsessive (and incredibly time-consuming) hatred and harassment routine against sex workers, while masquerading behind an absurd claim of concern for their well-being.
“Porn stars is like napkin, you use and throw away,” one of the “Omid” messages reads, in its characteristic idiomatic imprecision. Other indications seem to point to a cultural origin from the Northern India (Punjab) or Pakistan area, with time spent in the U.K.
Last week, XBIZ revealed that an obsessive anti-porn crusader named Omid Mankoo had been interviewed by Vice U.K. in 2015 and his statements, self-publicized via a book-length manifesto and hours of YouTube ranting, matched the hateful screeds behind Twitter's “Omid."
Before their accounts were taken down this weekend, in a tweet that has since been deleted, Twitter’s “Omid” questioned the implication that Omid Mankoo was the person behind the "Omid" accounts.
For more of XBIZ’s coverage of the “Omid” campaign, click here.
