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.
Thanks Steele. Once again I’m struck by how different male and female creepshot-type sites are. Several pages into ‘Tap That Guy’ and I haven’t seen a single close-up of a dude’s crotch or a photo where his head has been cropped-out to focus on his body parts alone. Don’t get me wrong, I think both are creepy, but creepshot’s treatment of female subjects was creepier by far.
Ha ha ha, Steele, your little post would be more effective if anyone here was supporting sites that post photos of men taken surreptitiously.
hollaback — the last time I looked at it, it was mostly stories (no names), I don’t remember seeing many photos or videos. But I do feel like if someone is doing something bad to you (or you see people doing something bad to someone else), as opposed to just minding their business in public, it isn’t that problematic to document it. Rodney King video, anyone?
Also, on the sites that feature guys, creeptastic commentary isn’t in evidence.
@ hellkell- I’m not going to lie, I am having a little trouble sticking to some abstract concept of ethics when dealing with criminals (and I do think these people are criminals) when I know the law would not help any one of us in the least were our pictures taken. Or my sister’s or cousins’ or anyone I knew and loved. I’m just, like, what would Captain Picard do? But maybe Captain Picard would do exactly what Jezebel did (incidentally- Jezebel is a fun magazine but definitely sees the world in shades of grey- oh fuck we can never use that phrase again, can we?) . I dunno, but I’d feel pretty bad if I was all ‘hells yeah, shame the fuck out of these fuckwits’ and then one of them actually got killed. I’m going to file that under ‘unlikely’ for now, but if some Dexter wannabe gets a hold of one of these dudes I call first on feeling kinda bad about it.
Ok, I agree with Schticky about tubecrush being similarly inappropriate, as long as we’re comparing apples with apples: i.e. clothed people in a public place, not ass-shots, cleavage pics and upskirt photography.
But to compare ihollaback to that is like Sarah Palin claiming her First Amendment rights are being trampled when people criticize her. It’s like saying you shouldn’t be allowed to fight back in self-defence after being assaulted.
While the general consensus against doxxing is a good way to promote free speech, it should not be used as a shield against criminal investigation. A man who brags that he has given his six-year old son pornography, or posted photos of her students without permission should not expect to have their privacy respected.
I’ve got to disagree for a couple reasons:
1. I doubt that shitty things happening to them is likely, except
2. in the case of revenge for a specific act, in which case, their welfare comes second.
ttf: Ha, yeah, I think “shades of grey” is going to have to be retired for a while. And I wouldn’t want any actual harm to come to these guys, but I do wish they would grow consciences or some manner of self-shame and stop treating women as always on display and something less than human.
I’d love it of one of these assholes saw a pic of their sister or a woman close to them. Whatever would they do then?
Excuse me?
My Daguerreotype Boyfriend.
Annihilated.
😉
So this. It’s like we’ve all forgotten why free speech matters.
Also, one of the links mentioned that reddit does in fact have rules and recommendations, like don’t type in all caps and don’t submit images that are just all text. It makes me incredibly sad that being “shouted at” over the internet is apparently more noteworthy than intrusive close-ups of someone’s body.
@ hellkell- blame their sister, without a doubt.
Since when? The creation of the internet was about sharing information for education and development of new technologies.
Porn and free speech came later. Usually because of porn.
Cloudiah, that website is amazing.
Hahahahahahahaha, ANNIHILATED. Steele is beyond self-parody at this point and I love it.
(Although clearly his new catch-phrase should have been ANN-VILE-ATED. There you go, Steele, that one’s free.)
@ 2-D man- Eh, ya know, you’re probably right (except maybe getting your own justice might not be such a hot idea- people who have been victimized tend not to be the best at correcting for subjectivity when getting their retribution on. But, ya know, prisons are full of political prisoners and rapist walk free, I am not exactly crying rivers over this one).
Maybe the Redditors who are upset about their personal information being revealed shouldn’t have been the ones to reveal it, hey? Tumblr reinstated Predditors because they were able to demonstrate the information they posted was gathered from public sources. If these guys are serious about not being outed then they need to be more careful with their personal info.
It’s highly entertaining that Someguy lectures on how doxxing ” makes it real world serious, with employment ramifications, and physical violence” but manages to miss that having a pic with one’s face published in a sexualized venue can have the same effect. Face pics are a defining standard of identification. “Creepshots” are defined as being unconsensual so putting up a face pic on a creepshot site is by definition . . .yeah, you get it.
That joey is so cuuuuuuute …
@hellkell I am a sucker for old photos, and baby kangaroos.
I’m not sure where I stand on the ethics of doxing in these circumstances, Part of this may stem from the fact that I grew up in a pre-internet world, one in which people who wanted to be heard or published (beyond graffiti on a toilet wall) had to step into the public sphere and be identified — in other words, be held accountable for their speech. Perhaps if someone is publishing stuff that will “ruin” his life if he is outed, he shouldn’t be publishing it. Perhaps that is why, even though I take advantage of the anonymity of the internet, I take care not to write anything that I couldn’t stand behind in person.
@kittehs’ I know. And so is the baby kangaroo.
Thank you folks, I’ll be here all week.
LOL cloudiah!
Some Dumb Guy has been “patially banned,”
cuz his postings are totally canned.
On your very own blog,
Some Dumb Guy, you can clog
all the threads that you want – here you’re spam.
applause @hippodameia!
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
And yet once again, the feminists fall back, flailing, excusemaking and justifying double standards when it becomes apparent that men and women in fact behave about the same in regards Creepshots.
Steele, what double-standard? Show me anywhere here where someone has said that creepshots of men are okay?
Steele you doof. Between my comment and yours, several people pointed out a bunch of notable differences. Good bid at cherrypicking, but no.