Journalists and pundits who write about Bernie Sanders or his policies have learned to be very careful. At this point, it's pretty much a given that almost anything critical of Bernie Sanders or his supporters will lead to backlash, and perhaps even personal attacks.

It is definitely a real thing that happens. But how common it is, how unique it is to Sanders supporters, and how much of a problem it is for Sanders's campaign, his supporters, or American democracy — these are all open questions. They're questions that deserve to be discussed in the open.

Because this is the internet, however, that is not what has happened. Instead, they're all collapsed into the pejorative term "Bernie Bro" —first used, as far as anyone can tell, by the Atlantic's Robinson Meyer in October — which has become popular in recent weeks both among Sanders's critics and (defensively and sarcastically) among his supporters themselves.

The result is a debate among online progressives that manages to update the bitterest moments in the 2008 Democratic primary for the Gamergate era. It is not a good look for anyone.

What are "Bernie Bros"? And where did this term come from?

Like a lot of fights among people who are used to agreeing with each other, it can often seem like Sanders and Clinton supporters don't have the same thing in mind when they argue about "Bernie Bros." And it can sometimes seem as if the two sides aren't so much talking past each other as engaging in selective listening.

The term "Bernie Bro" gets used to refer to separate ideas in the presidential campaign.

One is that Bernie Sanders's supporters are literally mostly composed of dudes (or, as sometimes expressed, mainly young white dudes who fancy themselves class warriors).

This has some literal truth: Polls have found that Democratic men are more likely to support Sanders than Democratic women are, and the Iowa caucus entrance polls showed Sanders winning among male caucus-goers while Clinton won female ones. But the real divide between Sanders and Clinton isn't gender, but generation.

The second idea is that it is a critique of Sanders's appeal to voters, which has both a mild and a sharp side.

Some look at these demographic breakdowns and say that Sanders supporters aren't representative of the diversity of the Democratic base. Others say that many Sanders supporters are motivated, whether they realize it or not, by sexist bias against Clinton. This second critique was expressed perhaps best by a viral "ALL CAPS" critique (worth reading in full) of the "Bernie Bro" phenomenon by Pajiba's Courtney Enlow.

And, of course, because there are actually women who do support Sanders, the term has come full circle; Sanders supporters sometimes use the term "Bernie Bro" ironically to mock the idea that there aren't women in their ranks.

I'm BernieBro mansplainer bc I say HRC's ardent support for welfare destruction undermines notion she's a feminist. https://t.co/9CgjIAnwah — Daniel Denvir (@DanielDenvir) November 6, 2015

@DanielDenvir smdh man, it's only feminism if poor moms have to bootstraps their way to the top — Elizabeth Bruenig (@ebruenig) November 6, 2015

But while such responses from Sanders supporters are often straw men, they're right that the critique is off base.

What people really mean when they talk about "Bernie Bros"

Often, though, when supporters of Clinton or critics of Sanders complain about "Bernie Bros," they're not actually talking about Sanders supporters as a whole. They're talking about a specific subset of Sanders supporters who are particularly active on social media (especially Twitter) and can be particularly aggressive in defending their candidate.

Complaints about the behavior of Sanders supporters on Twitter are by no means new. Here's how Roderick Morrow, who started the joke hashtag #BernieSoBlack, put it to me in August:

there's all these people who, I don't know, they're just sitting around searching his name on Twitter or something, they just come and get in your mentions and start harassing you, they start saying the same things over and over to you.

There are names for these tactics, many of which are associated with the ongoing online-movement-cum-dumpster-fire known as Gamergate. There's "sea lioning" — trawling tweets from people they don't actually know to start demanding answers and debate. There's "mansplaining" — being condescendingly pedantic to people who may very well know what you're telling them. There's "dogpiling" — a disproportionate (and sometimes coordinated) group response to an individual comment. And, of course, there are actual threats.

Tiger Beatdown's Sady Doyle articulated it this way:

I am now the subject of blog posts labeling me "the most extreme opponent of the Bernie Army" (yes, it’s an army now) and various gross-out pictures of pig testicles. There have been, I’d estimate, a little over 100 messages on Twitter today alone – give or take a paltry few interactions about things I actually wrote at some point.

This — the trope of the mansplain-y, harass-y Sanders supporter who gets all up in the mentions of anyone insufficiently praiseful — is the definition of "Bernie Bro" that journalists tend to use when writing about the phenomenon.

How this leads to the two sides talking past each other

You can see where these varying definitions can lead to some uncharitable interpretations. When someone complains of harassment from "Bernie Bros," Sanders supporters start feeling like they're all being lumped in with these harassers and have been dubbed sexists.

On the other hand, when Sanders supporters celebrated winning young women in the Iowa caucuses by mocking the idea of the "Bernie Bro," Sanders critics saw it as a distraction from the real harassment issue, with many calling this tactic outright derailing.

It's important to understand this clearly: "Derailing" refers to avoiding responsibility for hurting someone else, by trying to change the subject or claiming that the "real" problem is something else. It is itself one of the obstructionist behaviors associated with the "Bernie Bro" stereotype. (This, too, became a flashpoint during the Gamergate controversy, that the "real" issue was ethics in gaming journalism and not the coordinated harassment of individuals.)

This is the definition of "Bernie Bro" that tends to be the most serious, and that often gets drowned out by sillier ones: Some Sanders supporters are using the same tactics of obstructionism and harassment that women and people of color have to put up with on the internet all the time. And as progressives, they are supposed to be better than that.

My focus on Bernie is because of convos like this. He's the one being hailed as a revolutionary who I must support. https://t.co/o4NU62MpOT — Elon James White (@elonjames) February 2, 2016

Are "Bernie Bros" actually any worse than the rest of the internet? Does that matter?

Perhaps the reason this stings so much for Sanders critics is because of the broader context: The internet can be a terrible place. It is, almost without fail, an especially terrible place for women and people of color.

This is both an indictment of the "Bernie Bros" and a defense of them. While white men have definitely experienced pushback from Sanders supporters, the people who have gotten the worst of it are women and people of color.

On the other hand, this does not necessarily distinguish Sanders supporters from any other group of humans on the internet. And this is the objection that Sanders supporters often make.

It's not just that they object to the term "Bernie Bros" to describe something a lot of people on the internet do on behalf of their preferred cause. It's that they feel bad online behavior is ubiquitous, and it's unfair for the media to pay specific attention to bad online behavior when it comes from ostensible Sanders supporters (or, more to the point, when it's targeting ostensible Sanders critics).

Unfortunately, there just isn't any evidence that can settle the question, once and for all, of whether Sanders fans are really more obnoxious online than fans of other candidates. That means that the question of "is it really that much worse?" becomes yet another way in which the two sides talk past each other.

Clinton supporters have not been harassing me the way Sanders supporters have. I won't be gaslit. Bye now/ https://t.co/b4ZTkslwLT — Imani Gandy (@AngryBlackLady) February 3, 2016

To Sanders supporters, because there's no way to be sure they're that much worse than any other group, calling attention to "Bernie Bros" is an invitation to confirmation bias. When someone is attacked for saying something feminist on the internet, she can just write it off as the internet being terrible; when she's attacked for saying something supportive of Hillary Clinton from a feminist perspective, it must inevitably be the fault of the Bernie Bros. And indeed, Sanders supporters have sometimes taken flak for harassment that has actually come from run-of-the-mill sexist trolls.

But it's not exactly reassuring to someone complaining about harassment to be met with a chorus of, "But we're no worse than anybody else!" In fact, that sure sounds like derailing. So does the demand to show evidence of harassment or sexism — which can be especially disconcerting when someone tweets something offhandedly to vent to her followers, only to be challenged by a bunch of "sea lions" she doesn't know.

These are dynamics that people of color and women complain about frequently on social media. There is a reason these tactics have names. And often, women and (especially) people of color feel that their complaints are only being selectively heard by white progressives — they're more than happy to defend against attacks from right-wing racists, but when members of their own ideological tribe are implicated, allies are suddenly scarce.

What happens on the internet stays on the internet. Or does it?

The "Bernie Bro" meme, and the phenomenon that gave rise to the name, are products of the internet. They are extensively documented and discussed on the internet. This raises an important question: Is this a real or significant thing? Or is it just getting attention because some high-profile people in media have gotten trolled and are upset about it?

Some Sanders supporters have openly suggested that this stereotype is so absurd it couldn't possibly be real. Glenn Greenwald even said that "Bernie Bro" might be a term made up by Clinton to disparage the cause Sanders is trying to advance.

This Week in Blackness CEO Elon James was not pleased with this take:

How can he put my personal experience which I documented via my Twitter feed to rest? That's called bullshit. https://t.co/51OFSeg0Y0 — Elon James White (@elonjames) February 2, 2016

To a certain extent — especially as it's been discussed in political media — this reflects the generation gap between Sanders and Clinton supporters. Older people are both less likely to love Bernie Sanders and more likely to write tsk-tsking columns about how rude people are on the internet.

But Twitter isn't actually just for political and media professionals, and nor is the "Bernie Bro" phenomenon. (Again, #BernieSoBlack happened in August.) The dismissal of "Bernie Bro" behavior as "just a handful of people on the internet" can tip into a materialist tautology: It does not matter because it is on the internet.

This idea, that too many people are clueless about the weight of online harassment, was articulated well by Amanda Hess in her award-winning piece on online harassment in which she called 911 about a specific and vivid threat:

Two hours later, a Palm Springs police officer lumbered up the steps to my hotel room, paused on the outdoor threshold, and began questioning me in a steady clip. I wheeled through the relevant background information: I am a journalist; I live in Los Angeles; sometimes, people don’t like what I write about women, relationships, or sexuality; this was not the first time that someone had responded to my work by threatening to rape and kill me. The cop anchored his hands on his belt, looked me in the eye, and said, "What is Twitter?"

It might be true that handful of people on the internet dubbed "Bernie Bros" are totally disassociated from the Sanders campaign and the movement it's inspired. Then again, it might not. Before Bernie Sanders was the leader in the New Hampshire polls, he was the president of Reddit. Enthusiasm from a certain streak of online progressives fueled the early stages of his campaign. (And Sanders supporters can be obnoxious in similar ways in person: An Iowa State student told Time magazine that Sanders supporters will "talk at me for hours.")

Reddit has, not coincidentally, been the site of a lot of arguments over harassment, sexism and racism, and free speech. "Reddit bros" were a thing before "Bernie Bros" were. It would not be that surprising that many of Sanders's online supporters act like redditors — that's who they are.

But to people who've been targeted or harassed by Sanders supporters, this is yet another question that misses the point. To them, the problem is not actually, "Does the Bernie Sanders campaign have an attitude problem?" It's, "People are being harassed. How can this be stopped?"

From that view, treating the phenomenon differently because it happens on the internet isn't just callous, it's also dangerous. Online harassment is real. It is no less of a problem because it happens online. "Is this just an Internet thing?" can seem like a probing question about the nature of the Sanders movement to some — to others, it's a denial of their very real experiences.

The Sanders campaign recognizes "Bernie Bros" are a problem, whether it is responsible or not

The reason that all of these "but is this really a problem" questions can be seen as derailing is that they're serving as proxies for a debate over the real question: To what extent are Sanders supporters responsible for policing the behavior of their peers?

The Sanders campaign apparently believes that it is obligated to rein in its supporters, as BuzzFeed's Evan McMorris-Santoro reported in January:

Online, aides are pushing their digital community to police itself and keep the Bros quiet. And some volunteer members of Sanders’s digital army are scrambling into action, reporting offenders and moderating bro-y posts.

Predictably, this has then been used for point scoring by Clinton supporters: as proof that despite the dismissal from certain Clinton critics, the "Bernie Bro" phenomenon is for real. That's silly. The Sanders campaign doesn't need to feel morally culpable for the phenomenon to say things like this — it just needed to realize that this could become a liability for the campaign (not least by turning off the political press), and therefore it's something the campaign should either fix or look like it's fixing.

if you support @berniesanders, please follow the senator's lead and be respectful when people disagree with you. — mike casca (@cascamike) January 26, 2016

Of course, this gets back to the question of how much of the harassment attributed to "Bernie Bros" is actually political in origin, and how much is run-of-the-mill trolling. There may not be a definitive answer, but it seems reasonable to say that, yes, some supporters of Bernie Sanders are harassing his critics because they feel that's an appropriate way to show their support. So are other Sanders supporters responsible for educating (or, if you like, policing) their peers? Are they their Bernie Bro-ther's keepers?

This is another split in online social norms. But it's not a generational one: It's a split between the free-speech-centric culture of Reddit and the "social justice"-centric culture of, say, Tumblr and certain realms of Twitter.

It's a problem for Sanders because he identifies explicitly as progressive

In the social justice framework that many of the people complaining about "Bernie Bros" operate in, being an anti-racist or anti-sexist ally carries pretty heavy obligations. You are expected to do the work of educating your peers when they say objectionable things, rather than expecting members of the affected group to do it. Implicit in that is the idea that you are, in fact, responsible for the things someone who agrees with you says.

This is not a norm that makes sense on freewheeling, free-speech-centric forums where you may not even see the obnoxious behavior in question. This is another issue that causes people to disagree about the scope of "Bernie Bro" obstructionism: A lot of Sanders supporters don't necessarily see it because they're not the targets. That certainly makes it impossible for them to do the work of allyship.

Sometimes there's a fine line between, "This is not a problem I can fix" and, "This is not my problem." And the core complaint that the term "Bernie Bro" signifies is that progressives are all too good at dismissing sexism and racism by their fellow progressives as "not my problem."

That's why I left the progressive movement. I'm an independent. An outsider. It's all very Sanders-esque. https://t.co/0C2FoqbHxR — Imani Gandy (@AngryBlackLady) February 3, 2016

Progressives aren't immune from implicit bias just because they're progressive. And no one seriously believes they are. But to many of the "Bernie Bro" critics, the reaction of Sanders supporters to any allegations that their peers are engaging in obnoxious, harassing behavior is all too reminiscent of the crap they have to put up with. And the defense, "It's no worse than anywhere else!" is particularly stinging when coming from people who are supposed, ideologically, to do better.