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.

Comments

Works for privacy too...

[retech]

This method works well to give privacy to an individual as well. If there's enough garbage information out there to effectively make it impossible to figure out truth from fact, then it's easy enough to hide in plain google site.

adria richards

[ganjadude]

You know she is STILL out there spewing hate and racism? I checked her twitter page out after being reminded of who she was a few months back and shes still out there saying the same things that got her in trouble the first time.

Re:adria richards

[hermitdev]

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.

Re:adria richards

[Luckyo]

To be fair, these people make good money going that through very specific crowd on Patreon. It's their business model.

That is why they are called "professional victims".

Re:adria richards

[ganjadude]

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.

agreed. people took it too far, with the death threats and whatnot. but it is really hard to feel bad for her when she makes comments like these https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:adria richards

[ganjadude]

i just got around to reading the article and wow. shes even worse than I recall

Ten months later, I was sitting opposite Adria Richards in a cafe at San Francisco airport. She seemed introverted and delicate, just the way Hank had come across over Google Hangout. She told me about the moment she overheard the comment about the big dongle. “Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?” she asked me.

“You felt fear?” I asked.

“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”

Which was why, she said, even though she’d never before complained about sexual harassment, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took three photos”. She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said. Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third tweet was the [conference’s] code of conduct.”

“You talked about danger,” I said. “What were you imagining might?”

“Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she replied. “So. Yeah.”

'He’s a white male,' Adria said. 'I’m a black Jewish female. He said things that could be inferred as offensive to me' I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been at a tech conference with 2,000 bystanders.

“Sure,” she replied. “And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.”

This woman clearly has not learned a thing in the past 2 years. Which would explain why hank (the guy she got fired) got a job the next day, and she still has no job

Re:adria richards

[Pseudonym]

Can we be clear on one thing? Adria Richards did not get Hank Whoeveritis fired. The faceless Internet mob got them both fired.

This woman clearly has not learned a thing in the past 2 years.

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.

Re:adria richards

[spire3661]

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.

Doesn't matter.

[fyngyrz]

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.

Sexism, Too

[Kunedog]

And no one should forget that she was also caught making at least one dick joke that same week:
http://media.tumblr.com/ed5aea...

I personally don't consider any of the jokes sexist, but they absolutely make her a hypocrite.

Re: Feminism HURTS families

[geminidomino]

It wasn't the men beating their wives, raping them and so on?

That was never as socially acceptable in this country as the dogma would have you believe. Going back to the 17th century (before there even was a "this country"), the colonies were making laws against wife-beating. I can't find the link now, but there are images of newspaper announcements of men being publicly whipped for doing so.

The people, usually men, abusing their children or stepchildren?

Actually, according to "Child Maltreatment 2012" (US Dept. of Health and Human Services - PDF Warning), the numbers pretty strongly indicate that the opposite is true: among biological parents, mothers are about 2x as likely as fathers to be perpetrators of child abuse, and among non-parents, categories that are separated by gender go to females as well. "Partner of Parent (Male)" does beat "Partner of Parent (Female)", though, at 2.3% vs 0.3%, so if you're limiting the population to just children abused by stepfathers, what you said is not exactly false.

Re: Feminism HURTS families

[geminidomino]

It's still going on in both directions. Domestic violence is instigated by both sexes at Similar Rates (PDF warning again. SAVE handout that contains citations). Enforcement, however, is not, thanks to the broken-by-design Deluth Model, sexually biased "primary aggressor policies", and social pressure against men reporting being hit.

Woman-on-Man and Girl-on-Boy violence, though, enjoys a great deal of public acceptance. Usually "played for laughs."

Re: Feminism HURTS families

[geminidomino]

HOW is it fundamentally different? What's the magic element that makes one "not as bad" as the other?

Re: Feminism HURTS families

[geminidomino]

Then what prevents you from reading what I clearly wrote? Just refusing to do so?

The fact that you didn't write the relevant bit, so that I had to ask for more information.

It's not only physical abuse, it's being treated as lesser.

Since you've moved the goalposts from "physical abuse" to "systemically treated as lesser" without providing any examples of the latter, I'm going to limit the context of my response to the former.

In what sense? In the sense that they are unable to make decisions on whether or not to strike someone physically stronger than they are ("primary aggressor" policies), less capable of defending themselves and thus need stronger protection of the law and society (gender-biased "domestic violence" legislation, most DV shelters and social programs being women-only)? In the sense that they're unable to care for their children alone, despite being the ones with decision-making power on the subject?

All of these things show a certain gender-bias, that's true, and they're all the result of false observations like the ones you originally made in your post, and supported or even demanded by those claiming that they counter said "oppression."

And it's about how when a man assaults a woman, the results are usually more severe than vice-versa.

Widespread social response would disagree with you. A man who slaps around a woman is statistically much more likely to be punished in court, pilloried by the media, and basically served up to the metaphorical stake. A woman who permanently disfigures a man is fodder for a bunch of washed up old women on a TV talk show.

In a situation like that, it's really hard to take claims of women being valued "lesser" at face value.

It's about how women are systematically treated as less than men by most societies worldwide

When you aggregate the whole gamut of "most societies worldwide", you get a hell of a skewed picture. Propagating disinformation, myths, and outright lies in the Western world isn't going to do jack to help in those societies where women DO have legitimate complaints of oppression.

In the developed world, where all of these bogus statistics, pseudo-sociological screeds, and PC Thought Police are perpetually bounced around, though, is another matter. When measured on gender-lines, the "privileges" of males is a proper subset of that of females. Calling that "oppression" is a real stretch.

Re: Feminism HURTS families

[geminidomino]

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.