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.
Dear Internet,
We, the women of the Internet, hereby demand to be treated with respect and dignity. We refuse to be talked down to, insulted, or otherwise degraded while on-line. Furthermore we demand that you finally acknowledge that we do in fact understand technology and the internet as well as any...
Why are you laughing?!?! STOP LAUGHING! That's it, I'm suing someone! Give me your name... got it... Seemore... Butts... Got it, We'll be seeing you in court... Mr.... hey!!! Get back here.
" albeit at a time many see GamerGate being in its death throes"
Who's saying that?
Oh that's right... people like Brianna Wu who claims she's winning because she's uh... gotta sue people who are no longer bothering her.
It's NOT in its death throes, the media has to prop up that story to claim victory after many corporations pulled funding from gaming mags and sites that attacked gamers for being misogynists.
This entire PR campaign has been nothing but pomp and circumstance to promote a meme and it FAILED.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/m...
The NYPD has a similar program of bounties that is reasonably well known. Given that various Crime Stoppers programs have been going on since 1975, I expect they're reasonably effective.
That happened, in this case. Someone doxxed her, then someone used the dox as part of a death threat against her.
She's also had multiple death threats through a variety of means.
Not just that, but it was only like 5 months ago that someone made threatening statements on YouTube, then shocker, tried to shoot up a sorority house. Then shot whoever was on the street when he couldn't get in. Or the rest of the history of gendered violence against women.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Damn my spotlight is fading out. Lets get the media machine going so I can get back in the limelight.
Really I don't know which bothers me more, that the press forms these phalanxes to shove alternate realities down our throats in a way that would have George Orwell blanching or that people line up and lap it up.
Do you seriously think if anyone didn't want the death threats and publicity that comes with them, they would go around DARING people on the internet to make threats against them ?
It's about time that teenage shitheads, and those who should have grown out of being teenage shitheads by now, realise that older engineers didn't create the internet just so they could to get their kicks by being antisocial shitheads towards everyone around them.
Oh, there's a way to put an end to these death-threat "pranks". Have the cops arrest and prosecute whoever makes them.
A death-threat is not a "prank". People who have gotten death threats have actually wound up dead, and you never know if the person on the other end is crazy, so you have to treat all of them as real.
I'm not going to lose sleep over a few trolls doing some jail time or getting hit with hefty fines. Or parents paying hefty fines on behalf of their idiot teens.
I'm perfectly happy for sites like this to retain the IP address of anyone who posts as Anonymous, in case law enforcement shows up at their door with a warrant to investigate a death threat or similar lunacy.
It's not even about that one guy. This is a (repeated) tactic to slander other people who legitimately disagree with her, and distract from the Gamergate scandal.
If Nathan Grayson, Patricia Hernandez, et al were Republicans, Gamergate would be handled exactly like the journalism scandal that it is. The corrupt writers would lose their jobs, their employers would acknowledge the seriousness of the situation and at least attempt to convince us that that it wouldn't happen again, and the rest of their ilk would be watched like a hawk for evidence of similar transgressions for a long, long time.
But no. Because the perpetrators were extreme leftists, they're afraid that the scandal might give folks like Fox News and Limbaugh political ammo*, so there was a complete media blackout, the likes of which I've never seen before (not a SINGLE article detailing the corruption, on ANY tech/gaming site, for a week). Another part of the blackout was blanket censorship in user forums/comments, up to and including reddit and--no bullshit--4chan. IMO this censorship of users merely discussing the scandal is still the most oppressive (and damning) anti-GG measure of all.
And then when the blackout didn't work, they colluded in a synchronized shotgun blast of articles to slander their core audience and intimidate any dissenters among them. The long-running smear campaign that began with the "Gamers are Dead" articles continues to this day, and the popularity of Gamergate is the long-running response to it. Every criticism and call for integrity is met with completely irrelevant accusations of misogyny and right-wing motivations. Gamers are (rightly) astonished and appalled to see corruption defended so vigorously (and uniformly).
And now that the smear campaign isn't working either, anonymous threats are used as an excuse to again slander the movement (this time as terrorists) and completely ignore the corruption. So of course as the smear campaign ramped up, the popularity of Gamergate ramped up accordingly--it's averaged over 50K tweets per day for a while now. And the gaming press, having addressed almost none of its ethics issues (to say nothing of its contempt for the gaming community), regularly feigns disbelief that Gamergate hasn't "burned out" yet in one-sided opinion pieces that, if anything, more than prove the need for the movement.
The crazy thing is that Gamergate itself is largely leftist. I am right-wing on many issues, but I've been impressed by (and learned something from) the integrity of the vast majority of left-leaning individuals in Gamergate. They just want journalism they can trust. They want the bad eggs removed, even if the bad eggs share many of their political stances. They understand that circling the wagons to protect "the cause" and "do good work" is likely to result in far more harm to the cause in the long run.
The mainstream media has now taken notice, and is just as happy as the tech press to pretend the journalistic lapses and cover up never happened, and to slander Gamergate as right-wing misogynist terrorists, all to support the invented narrative. It's an all too familiar story to those of us who've seen the mainstream media portray DVD ripping as grand theft auto, net neutrality as communism, or Jack Thompson as a defender of morality. But in this case, unbelievably, even here on Slashdot there hasn't been a Gamergate article yet that doesn't go out of its way to frame the whole issue in terms of misogyny and harrassment (much less an article that's pro- or even neutral). Is Slashdot politically motivated to misrepresent this issue? The question is moot, because most of those articles got 500-1200 replies each, so the Gawker-style clickbaiting is motivation enough. As far as we know, Slashdot's editors are kicking themselves for not praising Jack Thompson years ago as a hero activist.
* not an invalid fear, but you have to cross that bridge when you come to it. If you try to pre-emptively murder the truth then you
The threats were not serious. Going "OMG they have my ADDRESS!!! I have to move out!!!" She reported it to the police (the right thing to do) but temporarily moving was HER decision, not a police recommendation.
People who make threats on the Internet do so because they're scared punks who hide behind anonymity. Would they actually go and DO something physical? Of course not - that would risk the very anonymity that allows them to act like punks in the first place.
I get it - you let a bunch of anonymous freaks get to you. But doesn't there come a time when you should stop feeding them by showing how seriously you take them? The perps are laughing themselves silly at this point, because that's what trolls do - get an emotional (as opposed to rational) reaction. Anyone connected with IT knows you DFTT - unless you're trolling them back :-)
Time was when everyone's name and address were public - we had this thing called a "phone book". For those of you too young to remember, go watch the original Terminator, where "Ahh-nold" gets the list of Sarah Connors from a phone book. Who cares is some coward has your address? Really?
And before some punk says "So why don't you post your address online for all the cyber-bullies?" - already did that in another user's journal discussion on gamergate.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
FBI and DHS are investigating and have CONFIRMED that two of the women claiming to have RECEIVED death threats... SENT THEM TO THEMSELVES.
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/859/945/263.jpg
Past example: http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/womens-rights-activist-charged-with-rape-threat-hoax-on-face
Nice slippery slope there.
I think creating stricter enforcement of death threats is fine. Guess what? it's already a crime in meat space.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sure. That's a fine use of our collective resources, destroying the lives of kids saying stupid things online.
Of course you aren't going to "lose sleep" over the imposition of a police state. You erroneously think it won't be used against you. That's the fallacy of every one of history's most notorious regimes.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This would be funny...
If it weren't so fucking tragic.
It's almost as if there's an intersection of misogyny and a culture of violence or something.
What the fuck do I know I'm just some beta, well, strike that omega sounds cooler, some omega as fuck mangina white knight or whatever.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Those are the types of pranks 4chan does. They don't actually kill people.
Except for the guy who posted on 4chan a couple days ago about killing his girlfriend. The girlfriend's kid came home from school and found her body.
#DeleteChrome
This is feeding the trolls.
You receive death threats, you tell the police and let them do their thing.
XDInd
Gotcha... You would rather live in a Soviet or Iranian style police state where even the smallest bit of mindless nonsense is treated like a threat against the state.
Now hoooooold on thar, pardner! I'm more or less with you in this debate, but your hyperbole is old and tired. There's a very big difference between death threats against a private citizen, and seditious speech. And let's face it, a death threat is kiddie grade terrorism. There's nothing defensible about it in these circumstances whatsoever. It is a form of assault, and it should be investigated and prosecuted. We could argue about what constitutes a threat (I'm not going to, but we could) but if you think it's okay to tell people that you're going to kill them, then you really are part of the problem. Words do have consequences, you are responsible for what comes out of your face, act accordingly. Obviously, the same goes for any other kind of expression. You're only responsible for other people's mental state as a result of your words if, in short, you are trolling. If your goal is simply to hurt them, that's not actually legal. It's a form of assault, and the law recognizes that in certain clear-cut cases.
Death threats are the children's version of terrorism. Only abject cowards engage in such pathetic behavior in an attempt to change others' actions, however they might feel about them. They might be justified if used to prevent violence. Not in this case.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
People who have gotten death threats have actually wound up dead
And many many many more have gotten killed without death threats. And many many many more have not had anything bad happen to them after getting death threats.
No one has any problem with investigating credible death threats. Random Internet death threats have just proven not to be credible. There is simply not enough resources to investigate them all. Simply a sad fact of life.
You think you are smart but you're really an idiot. The slippery slope is a valid argument because that's THAT THE WAY THAT US LAW WORKS. The whole thing is a slippery slope that goes back 1000 years. "The law" isn't just the statutes. It's also every court case that's ever been applied to them.
And prosecutors just love to stretch the law.
There was an article about that right here on Slashdot TODAY. So it's not even like you can claim ignorance because this isn't some legal blog.
Not everything online is directly equivalent to it's physical counterpart.
You are trying to ignore this very real distinction.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Wu is trying to draw a link between Gamergate and the tragedy in Port Orchard - https://twitter.com/Spacekatga...
Irregardless of the fact that: Gamergate discussion is actively prohibited on 4chan, the murderer has no connection to Gamergate, and no death threats were involved.
Please stop giving this woman a platform. She's obviously in it for the advertising and attention. Screenshots of her game have been plastered all over news articles for weeks now. She's self-reporting that she no longer receives threats so that can't be the excuse anymore.
> you never know if the person on the other end is crazy
If anyone is sending death threats, even as a supposed "prank," I'm confident that they are indeed crazy.
"Even if caught, the prepubescent boys trolling her aren't going to end up in jail over this."
most of them(probably none) aren't prepubescent boys. As a rule, they have better things to do.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How much of a loser do you have to be to make death threats over anything remotely linked to video games?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Well, that's the thing. The people who make these pranks are using anonymizing services, so there doesn't seem to be an easy way to stop them without affecting anonymous communication on the internet in general, and they are a subculture with obsessive interests and a general disregard for proprietary, so there doesn't seem to be any way of shaming them into stopping either. I think we are stuck with them.
By posting pictures of her house, and threatening specific acts of violence, some of these jerks may have crossed the credibility line.
Quick - lock up anyone who can use Google Street View.
The more this goes on, the less credibility the complainants have. It's understandable that a young soccer mom whose only knowledge of the Internet is facebook and twitter might get upset over anonymous threats via twitter, but not a 50-something who works in the industry. If Wu was that upset about anonymous threats by internet trolls who "OMG HAD A PICTURE OF THEIR HOME HAZ 2 MOVE", the $11,000 would probably better be spent on talking with a therapist. At a certain point, it's just not healthy to keep dwelling on what turned out to be threats totally lacking in credibility.
The passage of a bit of time should have allowed Wu to gain a more balanced perspective on things, rather than taking action that will just feed the trolls. "Oh look, we're offering rewards, with different amounts for every level achieved." Note to Wu - life is not a game. Stop treating it as such if you ever want to be taken seriously again.
The more I hear and see of this mess, and the deeper I dig, the less sympathy I have for ANY of the parties involved.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Wouldn't it be funny if the pro-GG side found the person sending the threats and collected on the $11k? A few months ago when GG was still housed on /v/ the reaction to people posting hateful/abrasive stuff on twatter was always called out and the poster berated for being an idiot. The pro-GG side doesn't stand for harassment on either side; the ones harassing people are on the extremes or are trolls looking to make trouble.
Food for thought: The major camps in GG can be summed up like this:
1. Trolls who make the death threats or are trying to inflame the issue (both sides).
2. People genuinely concerned with ethics in games Journalism (TotalBiscuit).
3. "Games Journalism" Media/central anti figures (Quinn, Wu, etc, anti), attempting to either silence group 2's dissent or gain fame by playing up their victimization. The "'"I'm being forced out of my home by death threats' on her way to the airport to fly to a conference filled with thousands of people she doesn't know" type and the "gamers are dead" type.
4. Those reacting to group 3's name-calling/bully-tactics (Boogie). The "average Joe/Jane" gamer who doesn't like being called a misogynist or a hateful person for just playing games.
5. Those supporting group 3 because of the harassment from group 1 (pro), who seem to be seeing a social issue (innocent woman being attacked by evil men) and want to fight against that. Views group 2/4 as slut-shaming victim-blaming patriarchy and has no intention of changing that view.
I also found it rather ironic when Sarkeesian went on Colbert and talked about how too many women portrayed in video games were damsels in distress and asked why more women couldn't solve their own problems.
Sorry, I don't pay much attention to names of murderers, kind of like feeding trolls. Most of the shit the kid spouted was about hating everyone. He hated other men for having girls and he hated girls for being with other men. As for the MRA and PUA shit, he was part of a site about PUA hate, and not once did he mention anything relating to MRAs, which aren't about picking up women anyways. I'm betting him killing people had more to do with mental illness, for which his parents tried to treat him, than with misogyny. Or are you going to go on like Sarkeesian and say that the latest string of shootings happened because of "toxic masculinity" as well?
The troll is only given power by those that respond. Don't like the trolls? Then don't feed them. It really is that simple. What we really have here is professional trolls going on a rampage and the inevitable and foreseeable backlash occuring.
This includes the original SJWs, as well as the initial media outlets that "rushed to their defense", and all the rest that have just exploited the circus afterwards.
A lot of "gamer gate" is just paying customers pissed off that the industry mouthpieces decided to insult them all.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
destroying the lives of kids saying stupid things online.
Me? I'd call it a valuable life lesson.
The moment you target someone else, personally and by name, and threaten to kill them... that's a very clear and very obvious line. There's nothing slippery about it. Protection against threats like that is not a police state. It's called civilization. I don't care if the cesspools of the internet have been getting away with it up until now just because it didn't catch the public's eye. Enough's enough. This shit has got to stop, and frankly, it appears that the only way to make it stop is if people have a reasonable fear that there might be real-world consequences - that's something few people like to admit. Their rights stop right at the line where they start trying to ruin other people's lives.
It's pretty damn easy to pontificate about slippery slopes or a police state when you're not the one getting personally addressed death threats. Or aren't a women, who, coincidentally, happen to be a bit physically smaller and weaker on average than men and therefore are more vulnerable to physical assaults.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It's really sad how every major publication leaves out half the story and instead tries to paint the gaming community as the source of the problem.
It's really sad how some cowardly gamers won't acknowledge that the death threats are the problem, and that their only source is some other cowardly gamers — the people who made the death threats. See, nothing here justifies those death threats.
Also, I really doubt the gaming community as a whole would condone any threats of violence against these women.
That's what you are doing right now when you assert that the "source of the problem" isn't the source of the problem, that is, the problem. The people making the death threats are the problem. No amount of dishonesty in games journalism (wank wank, stroke stroke, flonk.flonk.flonk) justifies death threats. Let me repeat that, no amount. It doesn't matter if someone tells you that Halo has the most imaginative level design ever or that GTAV never crashes or that some boring little indie game that barely rates a yawn is really ground-breaking and imaginative, you don't make death threats unless you are basically six years old, have no idea what you're on about, and very poorly parented besides.
When you make excuses for people harassing people and making death threats, you are part of the problem. No amount of hand-waving can possibly change that. You're helping to enable bad behavior. Why would you want to associate yourself with that?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'd start looking at Charliemopps (1157495) if I were you--just check some of Charlie's responses on this thread and see if you agree.
He seems to not think that making death threats is serious business.
I'm pretty sure it was Anonymous Coward. That guy says all sorts of crazy shit. Way to deflect attention away from yourself, but I'm on to you.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Threaten me in a credible way and I will respond
If your definition of "credible" extends to some douchebag on an internet forum, you've got bigger problems then people saying nasty things to you on teh webz.
In this case they were credible. They included her home address.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
On occasion, some people that use 4chan do indeed pull pranks and troll others, but they are a small fraction of it's userbase.
This would be like saying that people that drive cars pull pranks, even though most of the people driving cars don't pull any kind of pranks.
XDInd
Someone did the same thing, except on Facebook, not too long ago. Does that mean that people who use facebook are killers?
XDInd
No one has any problem with investigating credible death threats. Random Internet death threats have just proven not to be credible. There is simply not enough resources to investigate them all. Simply a sad fact of life.
All kinds of people responding to this very story right here apparently have a problem with investigating credible death threats, which this very story is about. Some of those people are arbitrarily and without evidence claiming that death threats (which for some reason they designate as "random") over the Internet are not credible.
I'm not sure why anyone would consider a death threat against a controversial and apparently rather abrasive public figure "random" rather than, say, "motivated". If someone threatened me or you it would be "random", because we're just not very special or interesting (well, I'm not, anyway). But a public figure near the centre of the amazingly childish fit of anger known as "gamergate"? That's not random. It's motivated.
It's easy to dismiss credible, motivated threats when they are not against you. Stupid people lack the imagination to understand how unsettling it can be to get direct, specific threats against themselves that include details of where they live.
To declare an entire class of threats non-credible because of the medium used to deliver them is not reasonable. It's like the cops say, "Well, this note is written in crayon, so even though it says they're going to kill you it's not credible! Who ever took a note written in crayon seriously!" Ridiculous.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Including her home address does not make it credible.
I am not trying to make this into a pissing contest, but there are lots of people who have a lot to lose by having their personal information exposed and anonymity removed. Like, anyone who has had an unpopular opinion and is realistic about how their corporate HR department would react to bad PR.
Then they've traded their freedom, life, and right to their own opinion for a set of lies and a paycheck. It's gotten so bad that people self-censor themselves, same as the media did in the run-up to Gulf War 1, and this is seen as normal because too many people are sheeple, so anyone who stands out looks like a nail, and HR is the hammer.
This (technology giving others more tools to delve into our lives) is an evolving situation and if we're not careful it's going to get worse. Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it?" Has it well and truly become "HR *might* disagree with you, so screw your principles and shut your pie-hole or you're on your own?"
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.