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.
I think the fact that I “indirectly enabled” things that happened centuries before I existed is actually kind of awesome. ALL MORTALS MUST FEAR ME, EVEN THOSE WHO ARE LONG-DEAD OR NOT YET BORN. MY EVIL POWERS KNOW NO BOUNDARIES IN SPACE OR TIME!!!
Steele, you are so dumb.
Is this the dumbest thing Steele has ever written? I rather think it is.
A sense of proportion, you do not haz it.
hellkell, are you saying my evil powers are not limitless? I was feeling so potent, but now I feel kind of flaccid. 😉
Oh, looky, Steele has a sad. If it’ll make you feel any better, Steele, let me assure you that the Holocaust, the Dark Ages, the Crusades and the Inquisition all provided “real men” like Brutsch with plenty of opportunities to rape children.
Cloudiah: so many jokes, so little time.
Dude, Chen did not cause Brutsch to go to jail. He did not cause him to lose his job. He took widely available information (through Reddit) and made it even more widely available, that is all. Brutsch is still free to (should he so choose) continue to spew his vile bullshit. It’s just that now he is being held accountable to his statements.
Brutsch has apparently lost his job:
http://www.dailydot.com/news/violentacrez-reddit-troll-fired-gawker-profile/
How much do you want to bet that some Reddit “hero” offers him a new one?
And the reddit thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/pointandclick/comments/11dkn9/tea_break_escape/c6mlq3u
Let one of his fellow scumbags hire him. Still can’t work up any sympathy for him.
Oh, wow. His “woe is me” routine is too much. Shoulda thought of that sooner, dude.
I am not saying that outing B****** and the Inquisition are the same thing, you disingenuous scumbags. I’m saying that they both stem, at their core, from the same evil impulse that seems endemic to humanity- the desire to silence and suppress. Free speech would have stopped the Holocaust, the Reign of Terror, and the Crusades, because there are always some people who see evil for what it is.
Adrian Chen did not carry out the Reign of Terror, it’s true- but in fact, he and Robespierre are of one mind. Disingenuous manginas
Really? I always thought things like the Holocaust and the Inquisition and the Crusades stemmed from the evil impulse defined as the desire to dominate other groups, by, among other things, violently possessing and humiliating women, but I guess I was wrong. Glad you mansplained it to me.
Also, lol, wut? Robespierre was a “mangina”? Do tell.
Brutsch’s firing is unsurprising- anyone could have predicted it. It seems that- as was wont to happen eventually- the manginas and feminits have finally reached their rotting maggot-infested tendril out into the real world, and destroyed a family. B******’s life has been destroyed because of the disgusting revenge fantasy of one vile mangina.
Losing one’s job does not destroy a family. Having sex with one’s stepchild, however, tends to have that effect. Pretty sure “manginas” and feminists didn’t hold a gun to Brutsch head to force him to fuck his step-daughter.
Disingenuous Manginas is the new name of my Jedward cover band.
This upstanding citizen moderated a subreddit with pictures of dead children?
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
Steele. Dude.
Do you condemn the prosecution of sex offenders or distributors of child porn because they ‘destroy families’? Are you really commuting guilt that far?
Guess who is REALLY destroying Brutsch’s family?
HINT: his name starts with a B and sort of sounds like ‘wretch’.
Actually that’s exactly what you said, because you’re a piss-poor writer who’s convinced that he’s not.
Amused – More distortions and lies, mixed in with the meaningless shaming word, “mansplain”, which might affect cringing lickspittles but has no effect on one who has not “drunk the Kool-Aid”, as it were.
Robespierre, so far as I know, wasn’t a feminist. However, again as you’ve ignored, I am saying that in point of fact the impulse to silence is the same in both Chen and Robespierre (and Hitler, and Stalin, and so on).
I am immensely disheartened to see that PZ Myers, who I respect immensely, is laying down his support for this little piece of totalitarianism.
You, you mean “mansplain” is meaningless whereas “mangina” is not? My, my.
If you believe in the freedom of speech so much, why on earth do you want to silence Chen?
Also, where is the lies? Are you seriously saying that the Crusades happened because of an impulse to silence? That’s a new one in the study of history. All those thousands of people trekked all the way to the Middle East not for booty and not for spoils, but in order to silence. Yeah. Riiiight. As I’ve said before, thanks for mansplaining.
Totalitarianism generally requires that authority be exerted over someone.
Your desire to conflate ‘silence’ and ‘expose’ is really telling, dude.
Oppressors seek to dehumanize, and those marginalized by anonymity fear it.
Reporters seek to humanize, and those privileged by anonymity fear it..
Excuse me. I’m going to take a look at the Reddit thread. I may even offer to send a little money B******’s way, if he’s taking donations, and he’d be a fool not to. The oppressors can by no means silence everyone.