Slashdot Mirror
Bounties vs. Extreme Internet Harassment
squiggleslash writes Brianna Wu, a game studio owner in Boston, found herself the target of numerous anonymous death threats last month, apparently the escalation of a campaign that started when she spoke up for women in gaming, and that intensified during the GamerGate train wreck. Rather than hide, she's offering an $11,000+ cash reward for anyone who helps put her attacker in jail, and she's reporting — albeit at a time many see GamerGate being in its death throes — that it's already having an effect. Wu is also setting up a legal fund to go after those promoting more extreme libels against her and others, with screenshots of a forged tweet purporting to be written by her still circulating around the Internet.
1. Why do we seriously need threats prison time to get people to knock off threating to rape and murder people, or threats of lawsuits to have people not forge the kind of libelous "evidence" that drives such hatred in the first place?"
2. What happens to those without the resources? I'm guessing most of those who suffer this kind of extreme harassment aren't rich enough to own game studios.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I recommend you read through this woman's tweets... She is extremely abrasive, histrionic and goes out of her way to get attention. On Slashdot she would be modded troll or flamebait constantly. She would consider that targeted harassment. She uses a few instances of actual threats plus a lot of people calling her an idiot for saying moronic things to say she gets nonstop threats. I am not a twitter person; I went to it solely to research this whole hoopla and neither her nor any of her sycophants would be able to handle Slashdot discourse.
She says these threats are targeting her for this or that reason (outspoken woman blah blah) but it is because she has made a spectacle out of herself. This has been brought up time and again but is labeled as "victim blaming". She wants to make it about "being a woman on the Internet" (that gets media attention) but anyone well versed in the ways of the Internet try to tell her it's just about being an idiot on the Internet. Unfortunately anybody that makes a spectacle out of themselves will attract people sending death threats. Those people are doing it for attention too so they will latch on to whoever will make it the loudest. No amount of stroking her ego will change that fact.