Slashdot Mirror
How To End Online Harassment
Presto Vivace sends this excerpt from an article at the Kernel, titled 'With Gamergate, it's not enough to ignore the trolls.'
Gendered bigotry against women is widely considered to be "in bounds" by Internet commenters (whether they openly acknowledge it or not), and subsequently a demographic that comprises half of the total human population has to worry about receiving rape threats, death threats, and the harassment of angry mobs simply for expressing their opinions. This needs to stop, and while it's impossible to prevent all forms of harassment from occurring online, we can start by creating a culture that shames individuals who cross the bounds of decency.
We can start by stating the obvious: It is never appropriate to use slurs, metaphors, graphic negative imagery, or any other kind of language that plays on someone's gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. Not only is such language inappropriate regardless of one's passion on a given subject, but any valid arguments that existed independently of such rhetoric should have been initially presented without it. Once a poster crosses this line, they should lose all credibility.
Similarly, it is never acceptable to dox, harass, post nude pictures, or in any other way violate someone's privacy due to disagreement with their opinions. While most people would probably agree with this in theory, far too many are willing to access and distribute this humiliating (and often illegal) content. Instead of simply viewing stories of doxing, slut-shaming, and other forms of online intimidation as an unfortunate by-product of the digital age, we should boycott all sites that publish these materials.
We can start by stating the obvious: It is never appropriate to use slurs, metaphors, graphic negative imagery, or any other kind of language that plays on someone's gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. Not only is such language inappropriate regardless of one's passion on a given subject, but any valid arguments that existed independently of such rhetoric should have been initially presented without it. Once a poster crosses this line, they should lose all credibility.
Similarly, it is never acceptable to dox, harass, post nude pictures, or in any other way violate someone's privacy due to disagreement with their opinions. While most people would probably agree with this in theory, far too many are willing to access and distribute this humiliating (and often illegal) content. Instead of simply viewing stories of doxing, slut-shaming, and other forms of online intimidation as an unfortunate by-product of the digital age, we should boycott all sites that publish these materials.
Any particular reason religion is in that list of protected attributes? The others are innate characteristics while religion, regardless of how deeply held or deathly serious the consequences of deviating, is an opinion.
If we do that, there will be very, very little left of the internet, or any other medium.
I don't think so. People who have something worthwhile to say are usually intelligent and experienced enough to know that being abusive is counterproductive; so, if we got rid of all the abusers and the sites that thrive on them, what is left is actually the 1% or so that is worht spending time and money on - the part that was the actual, original purpose of the internet.
Yup, straight white males -- the oprressed minority.
Not.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Death Threats are unacceptable. I'm glad we're seeing journalists express their outrage exactly the same way they did when Jack Thompson received death threats and when Death Threats were made against the family of the Penny Arcade writers...
Oh wait, there was no outrage over these, if anything there was an atmosphere of "well, they deserved it". Of course, to condemn these would require news websites to accept some culpability for the drumming up the anger that lead to the abuse they received.
The hypocrisy and self serving nature of the journalists is probably best summed up by the "gamers are dead" articles. The basic argument presented by a disturbingly large number of them is basically "How dare you be sexist and comment on someone's sexual history you virgin man-children!" and the writers are completely unable to see the irony in doing that.
Lastly, a call for diversity is fine but you've need to accept that diversity is more than just LGBT and women. It's the rich and poor, old and young, the conservative and liberal, the religious and the atheist, The North American and the European (or any combination of continents). Gaming sites have readers from all these backgrounds. Maybe, just maybe there are lots of people don't like being lectured to by relatively well off 20-30 year old ultra liberal Americans? Maybe, when people disagree with political opinions presented on the website, the best response isn't name calling, shaming and banning. You belittle, censor, insult and claim superiority then wonder why there's a build up of hatred on the other side.
The premise seems to be that we're supposed to vocally engage and shame internet commenters who harass others. But most people will not do so. This doesn't mean we think it's ok, it means we've learned that online harassers cannot be shamed and will simply harass us in turn if we don't ignore them. Ignoring them is the only option.
This space intentionally left blank
Meh, I call bullshit on that.
Men are definitely *feeling* harassed for being men during this "debate", and isn't that what's most important, how you feel?
Mcvos the people criticising gamergate are rich white males screaming "house ni**er" at women, getting black men fired from their jobs, and sending people syringes, knives, and dead animals in the mail. Gamergate on the other hand is composed of tens of thousands (at minimum) of people from around the world, disproportionately women and https://i.imgur.com/BgY7IyD.pn...>minorities, who raised over $100,000 for charity... $70,000 of that for feminists to fund female game developers. Feminists which had been viciously attacked and had their attempts to help women shut down and blackballed by a racist transphobic domestic abuser and her mostly rich white male groupies.
P.s. the word "reactionary" is meaningless. Literally everything ever was a reaction to something else, it's a buzzword that sounds scary.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
It's certainly what they like to claim, yet they're mainly concerned with the massive corruption surrounding a little indie game that's free and not making anyone any money, while they're ignoring the very large scale corruption surrounding major publishers demanding positive reviews in exchange for money and review copies (Shadows of Mordor anyone?). I have addressed this with GamerGaters before, and they defended it, stating that Shadows of Mordor is objectively good, while Depression Quest is objectively bad. And that apparently makes one type of corruption okay, and the other type a really serious problem.
First off the Shadows of Mordor story was uncovered by gamergate. That's how woefully uninformed or just plain wrong you are about this, you're literally trying to condemn gamergate for not caring about the story that gamergate uncovered and reported on. Second your entire demand here boils down to "why isn't gamergate doing what journalists are supposed to be doing for them!". That's a self answering question.
And yet it's the women that keep getting attacked. Who even knows the names of the men involved? GamerGaters keep harping on about Zoe Quinn, despite her being supposedly irrelevant to what their cause is really supposed to be about.
There have been multiple statistical analyses plainly proving that the "attack" and "harassment" narratives are provably false. You can literally cut out every single mention of Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Feminist Frequency, and hell even Feminism itself and the metrics barely change.
And yet GamerGate started with attacks on women, and any woman that speaks up about GamerGate gets doxed (see Felicia Day), whereas men don't (Chris Kluwe, for example).
A domestic abuse victim posting about his abuse is not an "attack on women". Furthermore if you actually give a damn about women who speak up and get doxed for it how about the somewhere around 30 people (primarily women and minorities) that anti-gghave not only doxed and sent death/rape threats to but also gotten fired from their jobs, had their utilities turned off, income halted by fraudulent reports, bank accounts hacked, and even gotten syringes, knives, and dead animals in the mail?
If you care so much why don't you go after the people actually behind this, like the GNAA and somethingawful trolls that have repeatedly been proven to be false-flagging the hashtag and paying up to $20 per tweet to do it? People Zoe Quinn herself has been caught retweeting offers for false-flag tweets from?Hell literally just the other day yet another anti-gamergate user was caught posting doxx on 8chan and then trying to blame gamergate for it.
You're sending a very clear message here: You don't actually care about women at all, you only care about women that agree with you.
That is not exactly my experience with the ones I've tried to argue with. Every single one started with these exact same arguments, and every single one came up mostly with irrelevant arguments, ended up talking about Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian were killing their hobby, and when they ran out of arguments, slipped up with a dose of homophobic and misogynist slurs (which at least one of them then tried to cover up).
I haven't seen
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
And every man or women, who wants equality between black and white people, between Jews, Germans, Muslims and Christians, and recognized that this still requires work, is a nationalsozialist.
Above statement contains as much truth as yours.
I think I strained a muscle rolling my eyes at this.
"Yeah, that's right. She fell down the stairs, your honor." "My kids are just really clumsy, that's why they are in the hospital all the time."
That shit may work in court, but I'm not a court, and I can see quite clearly what's been going on here.
You have it wrong, this is not about legitimizing harassment of women. It's about a propaganda war which attempts to perpetuate and inflate stereotypes of the oppressed women and abusive man. A similar propaganda war has been going on attempting to propagate racial tensions, and another war for Religious tensions. I won't distract further than the mention of the latter two, but if you are truly interested there is plenty of information to find on those as well. For now, lets stick with the misogyny.
First, there is real discrimination and real pricks that truly believe they are better than women. Those people are an extreme minority, but they do exist. In order to increase tensions, those extremes are portrayed as the normal. Small examples are inflated and portrayed like "everyone does it", and fake issues get repeated until people start to believe them. You hint at one of the latter, but completely miss the mark for "why?" the fake issue is not corrected.
As an example, we are told by media that women can't get IT jobs because "misogyny". The reality is that there are countless reasons other than misogyny that women don't want to work in many IT jobs. Journalists won't talk about those other reasons, and people over time start to believe that the only reason for a lack of women in IT is discrimination. Instead of the obvious, such as demand for insanely long work hours and tedious work for little reward. Lack of career progression, since the management side of IT is a completely different degree and skill set (some people get promoted up without, but we are talking "normals" not exceptions here). Work/Personal life balance is always shifted to "work" if you want to progress in IT. And lets not forget that if you want to start a family the woman must sacrifice work life, the man has no womb so can't do that work (which is another item often portrayed as misogyny even though there is an obvious physical requirement involved).
In reality, there are trolls. They do so for various reasons, but one of the known is a desire for attention. Given that known, it should be obvious to anyone looking that all kinds of people get trolled. They are a minority, and are best dealt with by simply ignoring them when they show up. Free speech is too important to pass laws requiring identity all the time. The trade off is not worth it, and the majority would suffer. You think trolls have targets today, imagine when they can see that QQ4322 is "Rebecca Smith", because that's what identity requirements will do.
Another interesting fact is that many Trolls are bought and paid for by various people claiming to be on your side. Snowden's leaks showed that the US and UK have numerous departments using paid people who's job is FUD at all costs. It has also been leaked that certain corporations pay for trolling. Funny that of all the reports of evil trolling I have not yet seen anyone demand the identity of the paid trolls from companies and governments that are known to use them. Cui bono from that little fact is fun, especially considering that most media has the same few masters.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.