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.
Amused, could you perhaps school our good friend Steele on the finer points of totalitarianism, since you lived it? I’ll make the popcorn.
Steele, admit it. You are so dumb, you are really dumb. For real.
By all means, send Brutsch all your money. He needs to buy kiddie porn.
Well Steele, you know what they say about jester’s fools and their money…
Hey, at least he had enough sense to use “cringing lickspittles” rather than “manginas” in his whinge about shaming words. For Steele this is progress, even given the painfully awkward “as it were” at the end.
I wonder how many of the MRAs wringing their hands over this (I’m looking at you, Steele) have breathed a word of objection to Register-Her?
Hellkell: Well, pornography was illegal in the Soviet Union and kiddie porn would probably land a man in a gulag for at least a couple of decades, so I guess Steele can use that to support his argument about suppression of speech. On the other hand, rape was only loosely prosecuted (if the rape took place at the rapist’s resident, that was virtually an absolute defense to the charge), so I guess totalitarianism is good for rapists? Sure, you couldn’t express your violent tendencies with her camera, but you could do so with your penis. Also, female gulag prisoners were fair game, so MRA’s would love to be guards there.
resident=residence
Damn you, lack of an edit button.
“Excuse me, I’m going to flounce over to reddit because my arguments have gotten wet and seem to have fallen apart in my hands.”
Steele’s metaphors are just getting weirder and weirder.
I think it’s not so much about weird metaphors as name-dropping. He’s heard of the Crusades and the Reign of Terror? A scholar and a gentleman. Aren’t you impressed?
You are such an upstanding hero for freedom Steele.
You know, most people wouldn’t touch the jailbait ect reddits with someone elses ten foot pole to moderate them. And his defense seems to be largely that he was skating on juuuust this edge of the law when it came to what was posted.
Most disturbing thing: some girls look older than they are. Also, none of these women and girls were contacted to ensure they consented to possibly thousands of unknown people fapping to the pics.
Fixed that for you.
The fact that you are defending a guy who posted sexualized photos dead children shows that someone is vile here and it is not us.
I am glad he got fired. I hope he never gets hired again and is reduced to living under a bridge like the troll he so earnestly desires to be.
This was the metaphor I found particularly weird:
I think of tendrils as rather pretty things.
But I guess Steele thinks of something like this when he thinks of tendrils.
::puts on racecaller’s hat::
And in the ManBoobz Troll Handicap, as they enter the home straight NWOwly is tiring, he’s falling back, he’s neck and neck with PellOfManyNames, the rest of the field are falling away but now it’s Steelbutthurt! Steelebutthurt is surging!
Holy tentacle porn Batman!
Oh, no! The feminits reach out with their tendrils! EEK!
It tickles!
getitoffgetitoffgetitoff!!!
What about this sort of tendril?
I like this this myself.
I lol’d so hard at these sentences right next to each other. This is basically Steele telling us he’s a Poe, right?
Varpole: I say only this, and say no more: If any harm should come to Michael B******’s person, Mr. Chen will have blood on his hands.
You are lying.
BTW, given the situation re Amanda Todd… you have less moral high ground than you normally do. Given that you are usually arguing knee deep in a hole, that’s a pretty pathetic place you are choosing to stand now.
Your idiocy and stupidity, have no place in this thread, cloudiah. This is a man who was outed, humiliated, and endangered by a morally berift, piss-drinking, taint-licking mangina. It is a subject of substance, and I’d ask you to treat it as such.
She gave you more respect than you deserved. All she asked was that you be adult enough to keep your word. You failed.
The same way you failed to keep your word about “ejecting” Tom Martin from the MRM.
Because all wrongs can be traced back to suppression of those who would point out its evil. Which is what Chen is doing. And you’re on the wrong side of history.
The fuck are you talking about?
All Chen did was take some very public comments and link them to some other very public deeds.
You would suppress that, in the interest of allowing Brustch to continuing his assaultive behavior of women.
That’s some standard of morality you have.
I am not saying that outing B****** and the Inquisition are the same thing, you disingenuous scumbags.
YOU aren’t?
Cloudiah, and the rest of the Boobzers defending Chen, are frankly evil, and indirect enablers of all the suppression and oppression that led to the Holocaust, the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and virtually every other horror known to humankind. Because all wrongs can be traced back to suppression of those who would point out its evil. Which is what Chen is doing. And you’re on the wrong side of history.
Seems to be just that; they are the result of the same urge; ergo they are equivalent.
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.
Chen had free speech. He published some facts. People read them. They evaluated them. They made a decision.
They chose to condemn him for being a shitbag and a creep.
You don’t like it.
I don’t care.
Chen wasn’t trying to silence. He was making it possible for Brustch to be accoubtable for his actions.
Paul Elam, however (BTW, did he ever respond to your complaint about Tom Martin), is trying to silence people with Register Her. I don’t recall you complain about that.
Which is more proof of your idea that the standing in the Mariana Trench equal moral high ground.
For my part, I didn’t really think I could think much less of him; even though Chen managed to humanise him some. Then I saw that he’d been fired, which let me know where he worked. He was employed by a payday lender.
Aw Steelebutt, I’ve missed you XD
How can Steeley get his analogy the exact opposite to what it should be?
Brustch is/was the one conducting a ‘reign of terror’ and Chen is the one who used free speech to make him accountable for his actions. So yay, free speech/freedom of the press. Sometimes it does work.
And also, the internet isn’t an alternate dimension. It is part of the same world we live in.