'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

Welcome

[JBMcB]

to the internet. You seem to be new here...

Re:Welcome

[markdavis]

>"Welcome to the internet. You seem to be new here..."

Indeed. There is a component of Internet users who apparently have a huge lack of social skills, respect for others, or even basic moral values. Having watched this Internet grow from nothing to what it is today, I think it is showing just how detached some humans can be from reality when they are not actually in front of other people. They can spew hatred and stupidity without any regard to how it affects others, because perhaps those others are not real.

It seems to be the same thing that happens when some people drive- it is as if their brains fail to compute that those other cars around them are not just stupid machines in your way, but vehicles being driven by people. People who have thoughts, feelings, motivations, desires, hopes, goals, deadlines, frustrations, just like your own and yet with different viewpoints and realities.

The other main problem with Internet communication it that it is primary written. And usually written rapidly and with little thought. As a social creature, humans rely surprisingly heavily on social cues when communicating. We already went through one dramatic change when phones came on the scene- we lost all visual cues and had to adapt to just vocal ones. But with text, we lose not only visual cues, but the audible ones as well. It is so very easy to completely misunderstand such text- especially when emotions are involved.

So my advice to those using the Internet/texting/whatever:

1) Remember that you should never write (or say) things you wouldn't do if your audience weren't right in front of you. There are actual people behind the scenes.

2) Remember the golden rule.

3) Remember that what you write/say/do is often public record. And even if it were meant to be public, it can easily be so when copied/forwarded.

4) Remember to give people the benefit of the doubt. Don't assume you know exactly what was meant.

5) Remember to place reason above emotion. I am not saying you shouldn't be emotional, or have emotion, or passion, or empathize; just don't let emotion drive all your interpretations and responses.... try to have balance and run things through your logical mind before acting.

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.

Re: Welcome

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I'll bite. He installed a cabinet of people that want to dismantle everything we've accomplished thus far. Head of EPA: against the environment. Head of Education: against public education. Head of DOE: didn't know it meant nuclear. Head of FCC: against net neutrality. He filled the proverbial swamp rather than drain it. He essentially kidnapped thousands of children at the southern border. He's simply not a moral or ethical person, and often acts beneath the dignity of the office.

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!

One is compelled to wonder...

[mark-t]

... why a threat to kill someone, anyone, would not be a violation of their terms of service.

Honestly, if it isn't, I would have stopped using the service... and if my job depended on it, I would explain to my employer why I did so, or at the very least, require a raise on account of needing danger pay.

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...

Psychopaths and sadists

[LetterRip]

2% of the population are psychopaths; also 2% are sadists.

In a world of nearly 8 billion people - with 4% psychopaths or sadists that is 320 million people who have a natural tendency to do such behavior. So when you are on a platform like twitter or instagram and can be contacted by anyone - chances are you are going to encounter a large number of them. Since the platforms allows some anonymity - they can engage in their behavior with little risk of repercussions.

A negative review, not a bad review

[Atmchicago]

You mean to say that you wrote a negative review of the movie. Not that writing a bad review is ever justification to receive death threats, but now you're at risk of getting hate mail from the grammar Nazis too.

Idiot doesn't read review and just assumes...

[skam240]

Her review is hardly a feminist critique of the movie. The negative points it details are bad CGI, wooden acting, cheese ball lines, and poor romance sub plot chemistry while acknowledging that the character of Aquaman himself was much more fun than the rest of the DC universe heroes.

Now I haven't seen the movie so I have no idea how accurate her claims are but what is glaringly obvious is that there's no radical feminist agenda preset in it.

Re:Problem is scale though

[mark-t]

You can be pretty lax on what sort of comments are allowed and still draw the line when someone makes a threat against a person's life without really worrying about trying to censor people's views.

Re:I seem to aggree with the review

[Farmer Tim]

...but which super hero movie has an ironclad plot.

Iron Man, obviously.