SXSW Reinstates Panels On Harassment, Adds All-Day Harassment Summit (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, the South by Southwest Festival announced that it had canceled a pair of panels about online harassment after receiving threats involving them. The cancellation generated a massive outcry, including threats from media organizations to withdraw their support for the festival. Now, SXSW has announced that they're reinstating the panels as part of an all-day summit dedicated to talking about online harassment. They said, "By canceling two sessions we sent an unintended message that SXSW not only tolerates online harassment but condones it, and for that we are truly sorry. The resulting feedback from the individuals involved and the community-at-large resonated loud and clear. While we made the decision in the interest of safety for all of our attendees, canceling sessions was not an appropriate response." They've scheduled more than two dozen speakers for the event, and they plan to stream it live online. "Online harassment is a serious matter and we stand firmly against hate speech and cyber-bullying. It is a menace that has often resulted in real world violence; the spread of discrimination; increased mental health issues and self-inflicted physical harm."

Comments

Re:SXSW are pussies

[Escogido]

Oh lookie, a person talking about harassment panels calls SXSW "pussies". That is, uses a colloquial term for a female genitalia to describe something bad.

The irony is so strong in this one, I can't even.

Re:Let me follow the logic

[AmiMoJo]

GanerGate argues that "professional victims" harass themselves with fake threats to gain attention. Using that logic we can conclude that GamerGate is probably behind all threats made against GamerGate, since it profits from the drama.

More seriously, in my experience when people start accusing others of dishonest behaviour based on some dubious circumstantial evidence, it's because that's how they think and how they themselves act. The fact that we have IRC logs of GanerGate channels where people discuss doing this pretty much confirms it.