Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Business of Online Reputation Spin
The Guardian has a long, thought-provoking piece (it's an excerpt from an upcoming book) on the way that online PR works, when individuals or organizations pay online spin doctors to change the way they're perceived online. Embarrassing photos, ill-considered social media posts, even quips that have ended up geting the speaker into hot water, can all be crowded out, even if not actually expunged, by injecting lots of innocuous information, photos, and other bits of information. That crowding out seems to be the reputation managers' prime tactic. Besides a brush of his own with identity theft (or at least unwanted borrowing), the author spoke at length with both Adria Richards and "Hank"; both of whom ended up losing their jobs in the aftermath of what became known as Donglegate, after Richards tweeted about jokes that she overheard Hank and another developer share at PyCon 2013.
Yeah, the interview doesn't exactly paint her in any better of a light than people already hold her in. In her own words she basically states she's racist and sexist with a possible religious bias:
“Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him.
(emphasis mine). The way that's phrased, to me, states that she was not offended, but chose to manufacture offense via the photo & tweets, and that resulted in real world damage to peoples lives. Not just to the two men, but their families, as well.
While I do think that a lot of the stuff that was done and said to her after this incident are despicable, it doesn't make her any less of a hurtful, spiteful, vindictive, hypocritical, hateful excuse of a human being. Additionally, her comment about Downs Syndrome is just...disturbing.
Wikipedia carries a great deal of bad and misleading information, as well as attacks and cover-ups. The editing (by which I mean arbitrary, supervision-free, largely random and often outright wrong top-down meddling with content) is nothing short of terrible. What keeps Wikipedia going is the users. What keeps setting it back is the meddling from above. Nothing has ever managed to keep misinformation out of it -- in either direction. That said, Wikipedia has long since mutated from its optimum form -- actually open -- into a pseudo-intellectual grandstand for its operators, replete with locked pages carrying their opinions to the masses.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Can we be clear on one thing? Adria Richards did not get Hank Whoeveritis fired. The faceless Internet mob got them both fired.
I don't know if she correctly remembers what she felt in the moment. However, the incident will, for her, always be associated with actual rape and death threats. Why the hell wouldn't the overwhelming memory from the whole incident be "unsafe"?
What she has learned in the past two years is that the faceless Internet mob will do its best to make every stereotype (about how women and people with lots of melanin get treated in the tech industry) a reality. Whether or not her actions were justified in the moment is irrelevant; the subsequent shitstorm proved her right.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
However, domestic violence is not random violence, victims of domestic violence are overwhelmingly female. The sexes are NOT equal in physical strength, the average male has 1.5X the upper body strength of a similar sized female and twice the strength of grip in their hands, it's almost always the unarmed female who ends up in hospital when push turns to shove.
That's using a very carefully crafted definition of "victim," and even if it wasn't, you're still wrong. Even removing cases of bi-directional violence, female instigators are at near-parity to male.
She also inferred that if he got up and attacked her, the mostly white male crowd would have done nothing to protect her. She still honestly believes what she FELT was a legitimate reason to ruin a person's life. She said directly that she knew exactly what she was doing when she took the picture, she goes on to say that because he had the temerity to complain about what she did, he is responsible for the trolls that go after her. She is a very sick person.
Good-bye