I wasn't even awake at the time I was asleep while the whole thing was going down. However, whenever a troll got banned, the "YandereDev bans people for posting his face" narrative grew stronger. My moderators banned anyone who was spamming or posting troll images, which is exactly what moderators are supposed to do. Obviously, if someone enters an online community purely for the purpose of spamming, anyone would say that it makes sense to ban them right away. People didn't decide to "speedrun" my server because I did something bad, or because I deserved it it was a completely spontaneous phenomenon that started because one dude created a false narrative that was entertaining enough to catch on. People even did "ban speedruns" on the US Army Discord. If someone had started a rumor that "Toby Fox hates cats and will ban you from his server if you post cats," people would have been spamming in his Discord server, instead. People blindly believe whatever they hear online, and jump onto bandwagons at a moment's notice. Little kids will do literally anything - no matter how stupid - if they think it will get them attention (likes, retweets, views). Remember the Tide Pod challenge? Kids actually put laundry detergent into their mouths - not because it's fun to have soap in your mouth, but because it was a fad. So, why would a bunch of people want to deliberately get banned? Well, if you make something sound fun and funny, tens of thousands of little kids will start doing it without a second thought. Sounds stupid, right? Getting banned from a server is a bad thing it indicates that your behavior is unacceptable. The idea was to "speedrun" getting banned and compete for the fastest "time." The reason why this became popular is because it wasn't framed as harassment it was framed as a fun game. Once a narrative had been created that "YandereDev is super sensitive about these old pictures of him and gets super mad at you and bans you if you post his face," a lot of people flocked to my Discord server purely to spam pictures of my face and get banned. I know this because he messaged me to apologize for the shitstorm he started, and said so himself. The reason why he did this in the first place was because - in his own words - he was "thirsty for Internet clout". However, even though it wasn't true, it was an entertaining concept, so that is the narrative that people chose to spread.
After getting banned, this person went to Twitter and said, "YandereDev banned me for posting this picture of his face!" I wasn't the one who banned him, and he wasn't banned because he posted my face. Predictably, a moderator quickly banned them - not because of the picture they were posting, but for the fact that they were spamming. The image they decided to spam was an unflattering photograph of my face. In the early morning of January 20th, 2020, while I was asleep in bed, someone entered my Discord server for the sole purpose of spamming to see how quickly they would get banned. So, how did that happen? Well.let's start at the beginning. The answer is that massive amounts of misinformation spread completely unchecked, and literally millions of people were tricked into believing false narratives and untrue accusations. Why? What went wrong? What happened that made 2020 so much different from previous years?