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.
TL; DR:
Atheist doxxes lady blogger, totally in good faith not a deliberate act of intimidation it wasn’t even her home except cough yes it was.
Dude tries to write an article about reddit, everything is terrible.
Did I miss anything?
….daaaang. I knew Frederick Douglass was awesome, but the more commonly-seen portraits don’t convey that he was also hot.
Well Steele, if you can’t trust our description of creep shots, and you can’t see it for yourself, there’s really no need for you to be here arguing about it, is there?
You are going to maintain that taking surreptitious mobile photo up someone’s skirt is the same sentiment as taking a surreptitious shot of someone fully clothed? Are you fucking kidding me?
Steele: “in order to maintain my credibility to the people of this website, I am going to tell them that they don’t have credibility.”
Okay.
Why are you here?
Actually, the internet was created to have a distributed communications network that could survive a nuclear strike against a major center of power. That’s why Arpanet, which was the precursor (one of a few) to the modern internet, was created in the first place by the Department of Defense. It was about creating a communications system that wasn’t linear.
It was some other precursors, developed by academics, that began to introduce other concepts and purposes. And porn, naturally. 😉
Yeah, I wouldn’t touch steele with a 10 foot varpole. Nothing productive comes out of that… just lots and lots of oblivious comedy.
Shticky was just close enough to the orbit of reasonability that he was worth adressing seriously. Right before he spun back out into the Oort cloud.
Jesus Christ, the intellectual dishonesty, it burns.
I’m going to leave right now and go ride my bicycle to pick up my kid from Kindy. The sun is shining and it’s a bit windy. I’m goign to ride, and I’m going to pretend none of this conversation with Steele ever took place.
Totally unrelated to anything, but I love reminders that I am talking pretty much real-time with people on the other side of the world. It’s just cool.
…I’m having far too much fun with My Daguerrotype Boyfriend now.
I have to link to this one, because (a) hot and (b) it’s downright uncanny how much Houdini looks like a younger, shorter version of my boyfriend in this picture. If I didn’t know the age and subject of the photo, I could totally believe he was my guy’s long-lost brother or something. Spooky!
Even if both were evilly evil, what’s the point? It’s not like assholishnesses cancel each other out so feel free to be dickheads to everyone. And I do believe dave made a point of saying there were even guys on the reddit site, too. So, while it might be fun and all to quantify and qualify which gender was being awful to the other (that would be a job for the interns), can’t we just focus on this one incident people (and by people I mean steele)?
I am so glad I’ve addicted someone else to My Daguerreotype Boyfriend! And here is another fun site: http://mansplainingryan.tumblr.com/post/33403317187/submitted-by-lansie-sylvia
I’ve never seen My Daguerrotype Boyfriend before – I love it! Have y’all seen Bangable Dudes in History? I have a bit of a boner for Stalin, even knowing how evil he was.
Steele, my man, seriously…. that a web community called “creepshots” dedicated to posting non-consensually taken pictures of women is not a good thing is self-evident. If you can’t figure that out then you have no hope for grasping basic logic.
As soon as I saw that ridiculous picture of Ryan, I thought, “Someone is totally going to turn that into an internet meme.” Glad to see I was right!
Vintage guy is cute and all, but I’d rather cuddle vintage kangaroo.
On the doxxing – no. I don’t care how awful the people it’s being done to are. The only case in which I could possibly see it would be if it was to help a criminal investigation, and even then the ethically correct thing to do would be to pass the info discretely along to law enforcement. On the idea that tubecrush is the same thing as Creepshots – lol. When the ladies on tubecrush start posting shots of ballsacks that they took by sneakily angling a camphone to look up some unsuspecting guy’s shorts, then we’ll talk. The idea that Hollaback is in any way comparable to Creepshots just makes the people suggesting that look like morons.
The frequency with which he expresses very strong and definite opinions on sites/threads/etc that he’s never even looked at, and yet somehow he knows in his heart that they’re not that bad and if we say they’re bad we must be lying, is particularly amusing. We should start a counter just for that.
I too find the young Stalin disturbingly attractive. Although in terms of that site in general, the young Che Guevara wins.
I know Steele will blame it on his misandrist teacher, but that kind of writing fail is actually more about the writer being stupid than the writer being uneducated.
My oath, young Stalin’s about as good an example as you could get of beauty =/= goodness.
I remember seeing that Houdini pic in the newspaper when I was in my early teens … and keeping it.
Though if you want someone who was beautiful AND a decent person, I’d vote for the Prince Consort.
And hey, how’s this – not a “Whoot, Hot!” photo, but this is a photograph of Wellington. Yes, Wellington as in Waterloo.
Trivia: Sir Robert Peel is the last prime minister of Great Britain of whom there are no photos. Which is kind of a pity, because he was a good bloke.
I don’t understand why the personal information has been taken down. If some piece of shit from creepshots, or god forbid violentacrez, was anywhere in the vicinity of my real life I would want to know that, for my own safety and the safety of people I care about.
I hope the trend of doxxing these people is sustained and the information is posted somewhere public and easily accessible.
Doxxing isn’t something I would approve of normally but these people get off on the nonconsensual aspect of what they do to the women around them, which is a good reason to think they are a risk to those around them.
Holy crap! Young Charlie Chaplin had a sort of Burt Lancaster thing going on behind that moustache. And young FDR? Friggin’ dreamy.
Also Steelpole admitting he doesn’t know anything about the position he’s defending. Good. The first step is admitting the problem.
The thing about the idea that doxxing is justified in this special case is, what happens when some angry MRA decides that he’s totally justified in doxxing a woman who pissed him off? Once you argue that sometimes it’s OK when it’s justified, that opens the door to other people doing the same thing to targets who you might not like it being aimed at because hey, they think it’s justified.
This is not a smart path for us to go down. It’s also unethical imo, but even for people who disagree or don’t care about that, it’s still a tactical miscalculation.
Is this the pic of young FDR you saw, Sir Bodsworth?
The introduction of photography wasn’t always kind to people. Here’s the naval hero Lord Cochrane in his prime:
http://www.thegalleryofheroes.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Thomas-Cochrane.png
Here’s him after they finally got around to inventing the camera:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Foto_Lord_Cochrane.jpg
No, it was this one:
http://mydaguerreotypeboyfriend.tumblr.com/post/27329117110/franklin-delano-roosevelt-at-18-1900-looks-like
If I was fifteen years younger… and he was like a hundred years younger…
On second thoughts, forget it.
Wow, FDR was just a lad there!
LOL now that’s just cruel – poor Cochrane. At least he had the excuse of being a good few decades older in the photo than the print!