Adverse Reading Regime: A Third Mode of Epistemic Injustice from a Closed Case of Coordinated Cross-Platform Harassment (2024–2026)

Records do not become evidence simply because they are true, numerous, or painfully preserved. Evidence does not become public truth simply because it exists. This paper draws on a closed case of coordinated cross-platform harassment (2024–2026), preserved as an open-access archive comprising a fifty-chapter case report, a fifty-one-event timeline, two hundred and seventeen source files, five attacker corpora totalling roughly 5,700 archived posts, and a forensic analyzer running syntax-first counts across those corpora. From this archive the paper develops three theoretical contributions. First, it identifies a third mode of epistemic injustice beyond Miranda Fricker's testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, here named adverse reading regime: a condition in which speech is heard, vocabulary is available, and credibility is not in deficit, yet the speech is read in the opposite direction of its content. Self-protective behaviour is read as attack; documentation is read as offence; an essay critiquing witch-hunts is read as evidence of witch-hunt complicity. Adverse reading is interpretive inversion, distinct from credibility deficit and from vocabulary absence. Second, the paper extends Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star's account of classification embedded in infrastructure to adversarial classification weaponization: hostile actors strategically exploit pre-loaded classificatory clauses to convert a target's defensive conduct into platform-actionable harm. The case exhibits this mechanism in detail: members of the harasser network read the platform's Terms of Service, located the clause prohibiting "harassment in response to other harassment," and constructed an undeletable bookmark substrate on the target's works knowing the platform would later read that substrate as a hostile environment under the same clause. Third, the paper bundles the work of Kate Manne, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant on the discipline of women's persistent claims-making, and identifies the temporal face of adverse reading regime: folk-wisdom proverb forms function as projected-forward adverse reading, pre-discounting future utterances without requiring listeners to engage with their content. Once "you reap what you sow" is deployed, the target's continuing speech reads as failure to learn the lesson, regardless of whether the alleged sowing occurred. Adverse reading regime thus has both a spatial face (past speech read in reverse) and a temporal face (future speech pre-discounted before utterance). Spatial inversion answers how documentation became the offence; temporal projection answers why persistence became evidence of disproportion. The case names both faces and demonstrates their joint operation.