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Reddit Creepsplosion, Part Eleventy Billion and Two [UPDATED]

There’s drama on Reddit again, with a veritable army of Redditors rising up in righteous indignation to fight off those evil man-haters who’ve challenged their ineffable right to free speech to post creepy and intrusive and possibly illegal pictures of women and girls.

I don’t have the energy to catalogue the whole murky mess so let me just point out a few of the key events here, all of which have inspired multiple mega-threads full of sound and fury and lots of misinformation.

1) Reddit user Violentacrez, the founder of r/jailbait and r/picsofdeadkids and countless other skeezy subreddits, deleted his account after learning that Adrian Chen of Gawker was working on a story about him that might include his real name.

On Reddit, where bullshit travels at the speed of light, Redditors convinced themselves that Violentacrez, who took pride in being Reddit’s “creepy uncle,” was being “blackmailed” by either Chen or ShitRedditSays, conceptualized by most Redditors as some sort of collective supervillain not unlike Star Trek’s Borg. (On the Men’s Rights subreddit, moderator Ignatiusloyola, a major purveyor of misinformation on the current controversies, even suggested that I might somehow be mixed up in all of this, which is of course not the case. ) Violentacrez has come forth to say that Chen was not in fact blackmailing him in any way.

Naturally, Redditors have risen up to defend the honor of Mr. Acrez, who despite because of his incredible skeeziness was a beloved figure amongst the Reddit masses. Indeed, the moderators of a number of popular subreddits – including r/politics and, of course, r/mensrights – have banded together to ban Gawker and Jezebel and all related sites from their alleged free-speech zones.

A few links if you want to explore this further:

Redditors Stand Up to Gawker to Protect Child Pornography (AtlanticWire)

[Mod Post] A tribute to Violentacrez, who was doxxed and was being threatened in real life, and an important message to ALL subscribers (please upvote this self post) (NSFW subreddit thread; unreliable information within)

2) The CreepShots subreddit, devoted to surreptitiously taken pictures of attractive young women (and possibly a few men), has vanished, apparently either banned by Reddit’s admins or taken down by the subreddit’s moderator after someone threatened to expose his name.

But this was not the only attempt to creep-shame the creepshotters:  A tumblr blog called Predditors posted the personal information of 20 or so Redditors who were active posters in r/creephots; all the info was gleaned from other Reddit postings of theirs. (Most of this information has since been scrubbed from the site.)

Naturally all this has inspired much indignation amongst Redditors, who are seemingly unaware of the irony inherent in their indignation about the invasion of privacy of those who ran and/or enthusiastically participated in a subreddit explicitly devoted to photographic invasions of privacy. (I don’t support revealing the personal info of these people, but at the same time I’m having a little trouble working up any sympathy for them.)

Rumors have spread on Reddit that one Redditor was physically attacked after being exposed as a CreepShot regular, but the only source of information on this is a user with the Reddit handle of POTATO_IN_MY_ANUS, so let’s just say that this is unconfirmed for now.

Links:

How to Shut Down Reddit’s CreepShots Once and for All: Name Names (Jezebel)

Internet Wars Over Women’s Bodies (Forbes)

The Internet War Over Creeps on Reddit (AtlanticWire)

/r/creepshots mod blackmailed into shutting down the sub a.k.a. The Admins Sure Doxxed The Ball On This One (ShitRedditSays thread)

r/creepshots has been removed due to doxxing of the main mod (SubredditDrama thread)

So it begins. Creepshots member beaten up following the Jezebel article which doxxed 20 Redditors (SubredditDrama thread)

There are naturally many more threads on the various aspects of all this on SubredditDrama right now.

Naturally, the good people of Men’s Rights have some thoughts on all this, many of them based on things that aren’t true.

/r/Creepshots and /r/violentacrez taken over by SRS by blackmailing with doxxing info. Apparently r/MensRights is next. (NOTE from DF: Nothing in this headline is true.)

Update on ViolentAcrez/Gawker/Adrian Chen/CreepShots (Substantially more accurate than the previous thread.)

Why does SRS feel the need to fuck with everyone? (Assorted SRS vilification based mostly on misinformation.)

Can the recent doxxing events be seen as an act of terrorism against this (or any) subreddit?

I’ll update this post with more info as necessary.

EDITED TO ADD: Here’s a giant list of links to media coverage of all this.

EDITED AGAIN: Chen’s article has been published on Gawker.

Meanwhile, the now-infamous Redditor POTATO_IN_MY_ANUS, the source of much of the dubious information discussed above, has been banned from Reddit; more importantly, he has been caught doctoring a screenshot of a conversation between him and a Reddit admin explaining why he’s being banned. So pretty much all of his claims, including the one about a creepshotter getting beaten up, are now suspect.

Also, here’s a screenshot that purports to be from Violentacrez explaining why he left Reddit.

 

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aworldanonymous
12 years ago

I’ve actually been following all of this for a while now, a few new creep subs have sprung up recently, I’d post the links, but the concept disgusts me too much to go to the subs to fetch them.

inurashii
inurashii
12 years ago

I’ve been wondering if you’d cover this one.

hellkell
hellkell
12 years ago

I can’t believe Tumblr took Predditors down. That is some bullshit.

inurashii
inurashii
12 years ago

Tumblr is seriously noodle-spined. It’s a tiny coding team who can’t seem to believe how huge their baby has gotten and therefore have no customer service to speak of — they’ll cave to literally any DMCA abuse.

rjjspesh
12 years ago

I have a Tumblr where I hoarde all my pictures of Loki/Tom Hiddleston. I need them all in one place because reasons

inurashii
inurashii
12 years ago

I have a tumblr too. I rant about stuff and post cute/hilarious/absurd videos. My primary partner likes to tell me that my dashboard is weird.

hellkell
hellkell
12 years ago

I sound ancient, but I don’t get Tumblr.

Sgt Grumbles
Sgt Grumbles
12 years ago
Vitamin D
Vitamin D
12 years ago

Look, i hate pervy pervs as much as the next person, but posting their info on the internet is just irresponsible- they were shitty people doing shitty things, but there are shittier people out there who could do shittier things if they think no one will condemn them for it. And, frankly, we have ethics and justice and the like because throwing asshats to the dogs is just inhumane.

rjjspesh
12 years ago

Yay for weird dash!

hellkell
hellkell
12 years ago

Yeah, I can’t work up too much sympathy for these pervs. I get the impulse behind Predditors. What are you supposed to do when reddit won’t do shit about these types of subs popping up all over the site?

aworldanonymous
12 years ago

The reddit creep is a cancer on the site as a whole, I like to think of SRS and project PANDA as the chemo.

someguy bored with your schtick
someguy bored with your schtick
12 years ago

I won’t defend /r/creepshots, but how was it different from tubecrush?

How is /r/creepshots which at least allowed the removal of pictures different from the hollaback sites which have iphone apps that allow anonymous picture taking and labeling of men as criminals and don’t permit takedown or rebuttal?

Creepshots was pretty much vilified by most people at reddit, and yet Hollaback is applauded at the Atlantic Wire and many many major webzines.

Doxxing is bad because it is very easy to game. David, you happened to get the name “Manboobz” at reddit before anyone else. But someone could claim DFutrelle or Manzboobz etc. and then easily post information that would seemingly be linked back to you.

Doxxing is bad because the Internet was supposed to be about speech, and the cure to ugly speech is more speech, but doxxing as Adrian Chen and Predditor does it takes an online argument, and an online discussion and makes it real world serious, with employment ramifications, and physical violence.

Adrian Chen could have made his report about violentacrez without the doxxing, and it would have been just as powerful and probably even more widely applauded. But Chen bypassed all the conversation and just played the trump of doxxing.

So is that the world we want? Where instead of an Internet of free speech and discussions we all have to post behind idiot pseudonyms and use tor to avoid bans and tracking and the person with the best doxxing technique wins?

Anyway, just how is creepshots ethically different from tubecrush or ihollaback. These are all pits on non-consensual photography resulting in objectification of other humans. creepshots seems to encourage underage photography, ihollaback encourages defamation, tubecrush just encourages sexualizationa and objectification.

The reddit disapproval of doxxing is correct, and since the Atlantic Wire has hyped ihollaback they are either dense, or hypocritical.

timetravellingfool
12 years ago

Ok, schticky, dave is against doxxing. He’s said it before now and he’s said it in the above article. He’s just giving us the gossip on this one.

hellkell
hellkell
12 years ago

Wrong, stick boy. Hollaback is not about objectification, nor is it about defamation (I’ve never seen names to go with the blurry cel pics). Nice try though.

Tubecrush is pretty similar to creepshots, and both are about objectification. I’m not in favor of photographing people without their consent.

timetravellingfool
12 years ago

@ hellkell- yeah, sympathy isn’t exactly overwhelming me either. But, ya know, ethics and doing bad shit to bad people makes you bad people and stuff.

someguy bored with your schtick
someguy bored with your schtick
12 years ago

A problem ttf is that David has partia-banned me to three posts, so it is hard to correct the misinformation and counter the insults against me.

But while David claims to be against doxxing, he is not against writing misleading paragraphs like this one:

“Naturally, Redditors have risen up to defend the honor of Mr. Acrez, who despite because of his incredible skeeziness was a beloved figure amongst the Reddit masses. Indeed, the moderators of a number of popular subreddits – including r/politics and, of course, r/mensrights – have banded together to ban Gawker and Jezebel and all related sites from their alleged free-speech zones.”

In which he conflates /r/mensrights and /r/politics advocacy AGAINST doxxing with love for violentacrez.

If David wants to claim he is against doxxing, he should behave appropriately and acknowledge that in the ./r/mr and r/politics threads there is much discussing of VA’s ugly behaviors, the problems of doxxing though, and how free speech is easy to defend when it’s about flowers, but the true defense comes in defense of ugly free speech.

But that’s not what that paragraph is about. It’s about David’s boring schtick.

someguy bored with your schtick
someguy bored with your schtick
12 years ago

So this is my last post because David has partia-banned me, but “I’ve never seen names to go with the blurry cel pics” hollaback encourages photographs. Photographs may not have the names themselves (especially since the claimed targets are of anonymous men), but hey, between Google, Facebook, tineye, etc., Between friends and acquaintances, it’s not hard to identify people on hollaback.

Hollaback, to the best of my knowledge does not blur faces, and does not verify stories.

If Hollaback reformed some of its policies and did blur faces, it would be a different story. As it is, it is just an easily game-able justice porn site.

hellkell
hellkell
12 years ago

Shut up, Stick Boy. That is not what David was saying, and you know it.

Vitamin D, so women just have to take this kind of shit? I am not in favor of doxxing, but the question was what are women who are sick of this supposed to do? Wait for reddit to pull their thumbs out or until Conde Nast jerks their leash? I don’t think this can be filed under “bad things make you bad people” in this instance.

hellkell
hellkell
12 years ago

‘Night stick boy. Whatever dude.

Steele
Steele
12 years ago

Excuse me?

http://tapthatguy.com/

Annihilated.

hellkell
hellkell
12 years ago

You’re excused, Steelebutt.

inurashii
inurashii
12 years ago

Why in the fuck is anyone even talking about taking candid photos of dudes and taking candid photos of ladies like they even sort of have the same societal context

Why is anyone suggesting that doing an article about a dude who LITERALLY fetishizes underage women is similar to Doxxing someone

Why is Steele posting a website that none of us have anything to do with as though it’s a refutation of dick-all

Does any of this make sense but I’ve been drinking so I don’t understand?

I’m thinking ‘no’

timetravellingfool
12 years ago

@ schticky- Dude, for the most part we’ve been to the mrm subreddit- most of us know there is a fairly decent population of sexist-but-not-crazy dudes there who wouldn’t go for that shit. And freedom of speech is like any other right- yours end where mine begin. I should be able to walk down the street without having my privacy violated and my image taken without my consent to be fapped to by a bunch of strange dudes. Further, does your freedom of speech really include picture sharing of strangers/ Is there some idea your spreading, some ideology that is being oppressed by a fascist regime? No, we know there are hot people who walk on the street, your explicit pictures of them do not enlighten us in any way. In fact, what is being done is more like theft- people are creating and stealing images of these people for their own purpose, and the best possible outcome is these people are ok with it. At worst, they are violated, offended, publicly humiliated, or (an outlier) put in danger. If you have more to say on the subject, why not post on your blog?

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