Hi, new person in this conversation. I hope you don’t mind if I drop my two cents here.

Cherry Picking is the practice of choosing evidence that supports your argument while ignoring evidence against it. It is also almost always intentional, or a result of ignorance, and the term carries negative connotations. Cherry picking is an accusation of bad faith arguing, and people will interpret it that way regardless of your intent.

For ones own experiences, which are inherently anecdotal, the ancedotal fallacy might be more applicable. But it’s only a fallacy if that narrow view is used to make a broad claim. I don’t think pointing out the existence of a certain kind of conversation is very broad, and in the context of this thread just a few instances can have a large effect.

I would even go so far as to argue that you are commiting an argument from ancedote when you dismiss the claim that harrassment exists with only your ancedotal evidence of not having seen it yourself. They brought sources, and you dismissed their experience as not good enough with no supporting evidence. If you really want to dismiss the notion that their evidence is significant, you could try seeing how many people interacted with those posts compared to average interactions for those communities, or checking how often you visit those communities to put your own experiences in context. Anything but dismissing them and refusing to engage with the intent of the message.

It’s true that everyone is susceptible to confirmation bias and dozens of other faults of logic, and it’s also true that recognizing those faults is important for improving, but being so aggressive in the specifics of data validation can be alienating and will likely miss the intended message.

Just my two cents, dismiss as you please. I do hope this ends up being useful to someone though.