seen from Sweden
seen from Romania
seen from United States
seen from Spain
seen from China
seen from United Kingdom
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Yemen
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from Hungary
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from South Korea
seen from United States
[Popehat](http://www.popehat.com/2013/02/04/reddits-doxxing-paradox/): > Why is identifying Bell acceptable to your community, but identifying Violentacrez unacceptable to your community? There was fire were there was smoke in the cases of both Violentacrez and Bell. Doxxing - the 21st Century equivalent to vigilante posses - has produced a fair number of innocent victims, though.
[OVERDUE MRYR - FROM OCTOBER]
As someone who has sent out a couple links to reddit before (I think I sent out Obama's and Ira Glass's AMAs), I just wanted to send out this Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web
Absolute must read. Its very long, but if you spend time thinking about internet, speech, and/or if you enjoy reddit, its a very important.
I'm done with reddit,
MM
ps. i highly recommend reading the comments.
pps. hat tip to MSM for sending it to me
"In the case of Adrian Chen, the Gawker writer who revealed Violentacrez’s real-life identity, I think he’s perfectly justified in doing so. Whether certain denizens of Reddit like it or not, Chen was practicing journalism, and writing a story of a figure of note (and of notoriety) on one of the largest and most influential sites on the Internet. They may believe that Mr. Brutsch should have an expectation not to have his real life identity revealed on Gawker, but the question to ask here is “why?” Why should that be the expectation? How does an expectation of pseudonymity on a Web site logically extend to an expectation of pseudonymity in the real world? How does one who beats his chest for the right of free speech on a Web site (where in fact he has no free speech rights) and to have that right to free speech include the posting of pictures of women who did not consent to have their pictures taken or posted then turn around and criticize Gawker for pursuing an actually and legitimately constitutionally protected exercise of the free press, involving a man who has no legal or ethical presumption of anonymity or pseudonymity in the real world? How do you square one with the other? Well, you can’t, or at least I can’t; I have no doubt some of the folks at Reddit can guide that particular camel through the eye of the needle.
But they would be wrong. Mr. Brutsch’s actions are newsworthy, and it’s neither libel nor defamation for Gawker to correctly attribute his actions to him, whether or not he ever expected them to be attached to his real life identity. If they don’t think so, I heartily encourage them to take up a collection for Mr. Brutsch so he can sue Gawker. I know what the result would be, but I think the path to getting there might be instructive to some Redditors."
This is also a key part of my thesis. I'm going to be arguing that social media is serving the same function as feminist 'consciousness raising' groups did in the 60's. In The Feminist Mystique, Betty Friedan described "the problem with no name" that plagued so many housewives--that being, the expectation that women have no ambitions beyond devotion to family and servitude in the home. Once women began meeting with one another and talking about social inequities, they realized that they were not alone in their feelings that there was something deeply wrong in society--that powerful, unspoken forces were working against their happiness and autonomy.
Similarly, young women connecting online today on sites like Jezebel, The Frisky, The Hairpin, Feministing and Feminista are gleefully sharing experiences of everyday sexism and misogyny and discovering the power of calling it out. Not just calling it out, but, in many cases, laughing at it. The idea that feminists are by definition humourless is being repudiated online over and over again, and young women are seeing this and starting to recognize that this and other anti-feminist myths are just that, designed to scare them away. What makes the internet 'safe' for misogynist trolls also, to a certain extent, makes it a safe place for women (try as those trolls might, via threats and harassment, to make it otherwise). That is, women can share ideas and express themselves online in a way that the real world often doesn't allow for. In essence, young women talking to one another online are raising their consciousnesses in the same kid of giddy, communal way their foremothers did in their living rooms throughout the 60s.
"Make me a sandwich!"
Examples of this to come, but meanwhile a quick list:
The Predditors Tumblr: A blog devoted to systematically unmasking the worst of Reddit's misogynist creep squad.
Violentacrez's 'doxxing' (outing) by Gawker. The biggest troll at Reddit, hoisted on his own petard. Live by the internet, die by the internet. The most interesting thing about his outing are the cries of 'free speech' from his defenders--many of whom seem to believe that internet anonymity and the freedom to harass, intimidate and threaten people online are somehow sacrosanct.
The Susan G. Komen Foundation reversing its decision to defund Planned Parenthood as a result of immediate and outraged online pushback. This story, from way back in January, is what got me thinking along these lines, and feels to me like the moment the War on Women went from cold to hot. That is, when women spontaneously mobilized, via Facebook and Twitter, and started fighting back.
Whitney Phillips on Troll Culture
From her article "What an Academic Who Wrote Her Dissertation on Trolls Thinks of Violentacrez":
Trolls are cultural scavengers, and engage in a process I describe as cultural digestion: They take in, regurgitate, and subsequently weaponize existing tropes and cultural sensitivities. By examining the recurring targets of trolling, it is therefore possible to reverse-engineer the dominant landscape. Consider trolls’ deeply contentious but ultimately homologous relationship with sensationalist corporate media. For example, when trolls court emotional distress in the wake of a tragedy by posting upsetting messages to Facebook memorial pages and generally being antagonistic towards so-called “grief tourists,” they are swiftly condemned — and understandably so. But when corporate media outlets splash the most sensationalist, upsetting headlines or images across their front page, press the friends and families of suicide victims to relive the trauma of having their loved one’s RIP page attacked by trolls (and in the case of this MSNBC segment, by forcing them to read the hateful messages on camera), or pour over every possible detail about bullied teenage suicides, despite the risks of “copycat suicide,” the only objectively measurable media effect, and in so doing slap a dollar sign on personal tragedy, it’s just business as usual. In both cases, audience distress is courted and exploited for profit. Granted, trolls’ “profit” is measured in lulz, not dollars. Still, the respective processes by which these profits are achieved are strikingly similar, and in many cases — which I chronicled throughout my dissertation — indistinguishable. I am not arguing that members of the media are trolls, at least not in the subcultural sense. I am however suggesting that trolls and sensationalist corporate media have more in common than the latter would care to admit, and that by engaging in a grotesque pantomime of these best corporate practices, trolls call attention to how the sensationalist sausage is made. This certainly doesn’t give trolls a free pass, but it does serve as a reminder that ultimately, trolls are symptomatic of much larger problems. Decrying trolls without at least considering the ways in which they are embedded within and directly replicate existing systems is therefore tantamount to taking a swing at an object’s reflection and hanging a velvet rope around the object itself.
If users like Violentacrez are the 'id' of the internet, social justice bloggers are its 'superego'.
Just an idea I'm working through.
If Ever a Point Was Missed...
...it was by all but two (maybe three) of the people in this discussion captured by The Social Times that involved Michael Brutsch aka ViolentAcrez aka the pathetic racist creep who ended up being exactly the kind of person you'd think he was based on his "internet persona" that wasn't really a persona but just him being awful.
In that image capture of a private mod discussion on reddit, you'll get to read much hand-wringing about "doxxing" (or as we call it in the real world getting found out for the horrible shit you say and do), exactly how often and which specific times he was banned, how CNN misrepresented him/didn't present his side of the story, choice of shirt, etcetera.
It's like having everyone at a table read a story about Lance Armstrong vacating his 7 titles because of the doping scandal and then watching as they immediately start arguing with each other about bike frames.
More from the Social Times
>If someone bleats to you about any of this being a "free speech" issue, you can safely mark them as either ignorant or pernicious - probably ignorant, as the understanding of what "free speech" means in a constitutional sense here in the US is, shall we say, highly constrained in the general population. Additionally and independently, the sort of person who who says "free speech" when they mean "I like doing creepy things to other people without their consent and you can't stop me so fuck you ha ha ha ha" is pretty clearly a mouth-breathing asshole who in the larger moral landscape deserves a bat across the bridge of the nose and probably knows it. Which is why - unsurprisingly - so many of them choose to be anonymous and/or use pseudonyms on Reddit while they get their creep on.
