"Still, this should be mundane. People say a wrong thing on the Internet. It happens.
The trouble is, young "progressives" at the moment are falling all over themselves to be part of an expulsion — to root out and help exile some secret predator hiding in plain sight.
So if you have a target whose life you want to ruin for funsies, all you need to do is dig through their history for some circumstantial evidence, concoct a vaguely related story that makes them sound horrible, and circulate it in a callout post.
The problem, then, is not that someone pulled a story about Styx out of their ass. The problem is that Kiwi Farms is a well-oiled machine for producing hundreds of such stories, and the one about Styx is now listed on a Tumblr somewhere under a heading like "animal abuse", calling me a "known literal animal abuser". Because someone can't read Wikipedia."
Sounds like someone found these stories, misinterpreted them (wilfully or not) to sound like abuse, then got tumblr all riled up to harass them. I suppose the initiator wasn't necessarily from that space, but it certainly seems like tumblr/progressives are taking part in the harassment.
(I'm saying "allegedly" here because, honestly, I haven't had the time to dig into fact-checking the story. I don't believe the author is lying, however.)
The whole “someone can’t read Wikipedia” excuse is exactly the same as what trolls themselves say.
[edit] sounds like kiwifarms is a 4chan-type trolling/alt-right site and simply got tumblr to also attack these poor folks by making up stories about them being animal abusers.