'I Got Death Threats For Writing a Bad Review of Aquaman' (huffingtonpost.com)

The Huffington Post recently published a post by one of the 300 members of the Broadcast Film Critics Association -- and a contributing writer to Variety: I saw "Aquaman" on a brisk Monday morning in December. Though I appreciated that star Jason Momoa didn't take himself too seriously while playing an underwater superhero, the glut of CGI effects distracted me from the story. Which was hollow and nonsensical anyway. As with every movie I watch -- up to four a week, hundreds a year -- I expressed my opinion in print and online for Us Weekly, as well as my own site, MaraMovies.com. The review was also linked on Rotten Tomatoes, where I'm a Top Critic.

Since I had a lot of films on my busy holiday schedule, I quickly moved on. Hundreds of men who read my review did not.... [Example comment: "I will kill your mom, dad and friends Bcoz I want [you] to regret for what u did. I have your address and details about your family members."] I reported the messages to Instagram and was rebuffed because, per the automated response, the vitriol didn't "violate community guidelines." Didn't matter. They found me on Facebook and Twitter, too.... Nearly 2,000 people "liked" a post in which some guy made a collage of my face and a few negative reviews.... I wasn't scared by the threats as I much as I was disheartened. One guy summed it up when he messaged me: "How many of us are you going to block? There are thousands of us."
Ironically, the review wasn't all negative. It called Aquaman "the first live-action D.C. Comics movie in which a superhero actually appears to be having fun. Batman, Superman, the Suicide Squad, even our beloved Wonder Woman tend to behave as if they just lost their 401(k) savings during the apocalypse." Yet rifing on the critic's last name, one commenter still wrote "hope another Holocaust happens."

Instead of "thousands" of angry fans, it could just be hundreds who are using multiple accounts. But there's a larger issue. "I worry that reading volumes of hate mail is starting to get in my head and cause me to consider the potential angry male ramifications while I'm writing my reviews, thereby compromising my integrity."

Comments

Never pay attention to internet hate

[SuperKendall]

"I worry that reading volumes of hate mail is starting to get in my head and cause me to consider the potential angry male ramifications while I'm writing my reviews, thereby compromising my integrity."

So then, why are you reading it?

It's usually apparent in the first few words what is going on. Just stop reading and move on. It's not even worth the effort of writing up a rebuttal, unless maybe you use the effort for a writing exercise or just for the lols.

But if you do read it, just remember that death threats on the internet are absurdly hollow. No-one wants to actually get up from a chair and do anything about anything (in that regard, possibly people with standing desks should be taken slightly more seriously - they will definitely let you know if they have a standing desk).

If you have more of your public info known maybe take steps to give the local police a heads-up about possible swatting attempts, but that's as far as you need to think about it.

The internet has seen people issuing all manner of death threats or creepy vibes since the dawn of time. Taking any of it even a tiny bit seriously makes zero sense. Just think of them as a write-only form of fan and happily keep doing what you do. There a special irony these days in people that hate follow you, in that they are inherently increasing your internet "attention metric" which makes you numerically more important than you would be otherwise!

Not at all...

[SuperKendall]

(1) It's her fault for feeling bad.>

No - I'm saying it's in her ability to not feel bad about it. Big distinction, which I'm sure will elude you but I think the smarter among us will grok it.

(2) She should be thankful for the attention.

The term "thankful" is incorrect. However as long as anyone is able to shrug off negative comments, in fact there is a net positive - especially for someone writing for publication, what the "corporate machine" as it were sees is a LOT of comments on something you wrote. Score!

See what a lot of people don't seem to understand here is that the saddest thing on the internet is to write something, which no-one pays any attention to. Hate or Love are signs that you have moved someone, which is valuable either way - because you have changed the universe in same way, at least a little bit.

(3) Her level of fame is undeserved.

I'm not sure how you get there from where I was, her level of fame simply IS. How anyone could state a particular level of fame is "undeserved" makes zero sense to me, as it is what they have and "deserved" does not enter in the equation.

Going back to specifics, I think her review was probably about right (not having seen the movie yet it's hard to be sure, but it sounds right from what I've heard).

Generically, I'm just giving everyone advice on how to live, so as to lead a happy and productive life that elevates humanity as a whole instead of being lowered by a small fragment of it. Going back to that Love/Hate thing, both are energy and all energy can provide fuel for your own creative efforts. Nuclear material is powerfully destructive, but energy from a nuclear plant can power a million greenhouses of the finest flowers...

Re:Welcome

[Jharish]

Thank you for adding some intelligence, I used to love reading comments in Slashdot but now it makes me wonder what happened to humanity.

The biggest impact social media seems to have had on humans is the idea that if someone disagrees with you, it's because they are obviously stupid and desire your ridicule and vitriol. There no longer seems to be intelligent debate or even discussions on the likes of FB or Twitter in the same way you had it in the old days of Usenet and other public internet forums.

I'm saddened that the average person is more like Donald Trump than any sort of intelligent, thinking being while on the internet and its taking its toll on the smart people who remember what it was like to have a discussion with other smart people.

Would rather drink in a bar with bouncers

[rbrander]

I recently caught an article by Max Read about how much of the Internet is "fake" in the sense that the readership is actually bots defrauding those paying for the ads:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer...

I bring up this topic because it strikes me that the people paying for all these sites may soon demand to know how many verifiable human beings are actually in the audience.

5 years ago, much less 20, you wouldn't have caught me saying that a lot of the web should be not locked behind paywalls exactly, but require proof-of-individual-humanity at least. And that would in practice lead to "proof" via credit card. Now I'm ready to cave on that anyway.

I'd rather live in a society that has cops; rather drink in a bar that has bouncers. I'd rather talk in a space where threats of violence result in not only permanent expulsion, but the same legal consequences as saying the same thing to my face. (An assault charge. Mere threats are an assault. Hence the term "assault and battery" if actual contact occurs.) Right now, assault is a crime IRL but not on the Internet, in any practical sense.

And I think that 99% of this crap would stop if the commentators all knew that the threatened person could find out where they live and send over cops with an assault charge.

I have an appalling habit, of comments on news columns. It's pointless, I know, it's identical to shouting at the TV, but there you go. (It started with /. in the 90s) I notice that the NYT and WaPo, which require a sign-up to comment, almost never have harsh language, much less threats. I used to comment at The Atlantic, which did not...and now The Atlantic has shut down the whole comment system, since they were just providing a chat room that was mostly used by angry people, the thoughtful ones having been chased out of the bar with no bouncers.

Re:Srsly?

[AmiMoJo]

It's not well explained but in this case there is more to the story.

After Wonder Woman was the only decent DC movie and held up as proof that a female lead and director can make a good action/comic book movie, there was a bit of a backlash from the Men's Rights crowd. They decided that they would manufacture the same kind of buzz about Aquaman, holding him up as an example of the ideal hyper-masculine dude after Wonder Woman kinda humiliated him in Justice League.

What you have to understand is that they really don't care about men's rights, they just hate feminism and blame it for all their problems. So they wanted to make sure that Aquaman did well and send a message to the studios that manly man men movies were more profitable and popular.

Thus anyone criticising Aquaman is a target of these guys.

Re:Welcome

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is showing just how detached some humans can be from reality

What you are seeing is a symptom, not the disease. The problem, one of the problems with the internet is that there is nothing anyone can do to stop relentless people. It's all a king of the hill battle and there are people who are winning through sheer persistence, just because they metaphorically can't die and everyone else eventually gives up or moves on. In the real world, people who are relentlessly wrong suffer consequences and become irrelevant. There is no corrective for spouting stupidity on the internet. Yes, there are actual people on the other side of the screen, but they know you can't touch them and some of the them, depressingly many, are impervious to reason. Think anti-vaxxers. This causes an escalation of rhetorical violence. A simple expression of disapproval doesn't register, right? Dealing with the powerlessness against a relentless onslaught of stupidity is difficult for the most disciplined people, but lesser mortals eventually resort to these (ultimately just as impotent) tirades against their opponents. This effect is particularly pronounced if the opponent is in a position to reach a much larger audience.

Re: "the potential angry male ramifications"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like the SJW black bitch who ASSumed David Webb, conservative radio broadcaster, was white. If someone has a different attitude than that which "their race" should have (talk about stereotyping), then they must be either a sellout - or they are clearly using White Privilege. Because according to the SJW twisted world view, black people all think alike, look alike (no suits and ties allowed), and eat alike. The KKK has just manifested itself in the SJW/Democrat party.

How did she know they were men?

[grasshoppa]

The specific use of a gender over the generic "people" suggests the author has a chip on her shoulder; how does she know it was men, or all men?

The ad explicitly implied most men harass

[SuperKendall]

The ad said directly that "some" men were OK. That implies the rest, or majority, are not... how is that not an attack on men generally?

The whole ad had a condescending tone of an educational film you were forced to watch in school. Even ignoring that aspect though, clearly the ad is claiming most men harass women, which is simply not the case.