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55,000 Sign Twitter Abuse Petition After Jane Austen Campaigner Threats
AlistairCharlton writes "A petition campaigning for Twitter to improve its measures against online abuse has received more than 55,000 signatures in two days. The petition was set up in support of feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, who faced a torrent of abusive tweets, including threats to rape and kill her, after successfully campaigning for a woman's picture to appear on a banknote; Jane Austen will appear on £10 notes from 2017."
I always find shit like this to be highly suspect. There have been incidents where people who have claimed to be the victims of "threats of violence and rape by evil male internet trolls on the intarwebs" turned out to actually be the ones writing those threats under fake accounts to themselves.
People also need to stop acting like the very few trolls out there who *will say anything to anyone in any situation online where they believe it will upset someone or get them some attention* are somehow representative of actual people's actual thoughts. I'm sure there are a few shitty people out there, but how is it we just stop acknowledging that most of those people saying this shit are just social-rejects who use saying vile shit on the internet to get a response? These same idiots "threatening" the woman this article is about are also likely the same idiots who spend their time hurling slurs around on XBOX Live all evening or posting "atheists should be killed so they can go to the afterlife and see what hell is like and find out how wrong they were" on religion-related articles that Drudge links to from his site.
Taking these people at face value is a lot like taking a toddler at face value and we would do well not to mistake their ridiculous spewings on the internet as actual opinions and thoughts held by actual people (even the hideous ones) in actual life.