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.
The young Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (a composer who wrote “Hiawatha” – not to be confused with poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote the “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”) has some of the most perfect eyebrows ever to grace this earth.
Just sayin’
@Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby III
Man. They say the camera adds twenty pounds, but I didn’t realize it also added forty years.
@ Kitteh – When you mentioned the Prince Consort, I thought I was in for a picture of the current Duke of Edinburgh. Nothing against Prince Philip, but I was pleasantly surprised to see a portrait of Prince Albert instead. He was a yummy fellow (there was more than a dynastic reason that he and Queen Victoria had nine kids, I’d wager).
Now I’m no racist, but I just don’t find sepia people attractive.
Give me a break with this disingenuous bullshit. A high school teacher was taking pics of his female students and posting them on that board.
@Nada
“Really can’t figure out what Hollaback has to do with this. Um, girls and women aren’t taking photos of boys and men because they want to fuck them (and want creepy strangers to explain how they want to fuck them, too, in detail). They are doing it because these guys have harassed and/or assaulted them on the street.”
That’s quite an assumption. Isn’t it? Judge, jury and executioner. A girl takes a picture, says man “X” is bad and it’s gospel. She could just as easily be a spurned lover, an ex girlfriend, attention seeker, or maybe she wants to extort money.
Say I was doxxed? I wouldn’t put it past anyone here to cry rape within a day. It wouldn’t matter that it was a total sham. I would instantly lose my job, my name and picture would be on the front page of the local paper, I would be arrested. My accusers name would be safe and anonymous.
Even after it was proven to be a total lie I still wouldn’t get my job back. No company would deal with the company I work for if they employed an accused rapist. I couldn’t get another job. One quick search of my name would quickly reveal me as being an accused rapist. Everybody remembers the bad things about a person. There would always be doubt in the back of everyones mind, even my friends and family. Oh, to my face everybody would nod their heads and say poor john doe, he was falsely accused, but as soon as I was out of earshot I’d be john doe the rapist.
The power of the self annointed victim is all powerful. The false accuser would breeze through life as if nothing happened. My life would be effectively over. I could never get another job, my friends and family would slowly find ways to avoid me, there’s always that little bit of doubt in that backs of their minds. I’d eventually drift off, working under the table odd jobs to survive, sleeping on grates and railroad yards, stealing clothes from laundromats when I had to. Maybe commit some minor crime so I could spend the winter in a minimum security prison.
All it takes is one word from any woman to end a mans life. And you think hollaback is a good thing?
@ kiki- Is that a joke? Vitamin Fool baiting? Because I would love to make a submission to this site: http://www.notracistbut.com/
I agree with CassandraSays. I have a hardline stance that no matter how terrible the other person is, doxxing is still wrong. To me, it seems like a form of vigilantism and it can lead down a slippery slope into a doxxing feud. Even when people have good intentions with the doxxing, and only want to doxx creeps like at creepshots, the same people get carried away end up targeting innocent people. So it’s best to not ever go down that road.
I’m surprised at how handsome Josef Stalin was. I feel bad for even thinking that, knowing how terrible he was. If we’re confessing to finding people attractive even though we don’t like their actions and beliefs, then I will admit I think Paul Ryan is hot, too. I’m ashamed of it, but I can’t help it.
Bionicmommy, I more or less agree, but is it really doxxing if the info is readily available?
@ hellkell- I think the same argument was made by that atheist turd/spearhead contributor who doxxed a woman his group was having a disagreement with? Showed a picture of her apartment and everything. He was forced to resign his post at some national council of atheists over it or something. He found her info after some google digging and found it through a library data base if I remember correctly. Not as easy, I grant you, but comparable.
@ kiki- just got your joke. face is very red right now.
Like timetravellingfool was talking about, Justin Vacula said the same thing about digging up Jen McCreight’s personal address and posting it at AVfM. His defense was that it was on the Internet and therefore publicly available information. I rejected that reason before, so I should be consistent and reject it now. So even though I agree with the intentions of Gawker and Jezebel, I still disagree with their actions.
Another big problem is what if they get the wrong person? When that whole Agent Orange thing happened, they ended up targeting and harassing women who have nothing to do with feminism or the MRM. There is no guarantee that Gawker or Jezebel wouldn’t make mistakes like that.
@timetravellingfool – no worries. And I think red people are totally hot.
I agree with Bionic Mommy, doxxing is counterproductive. Further, if a crime has seemingly been committed then contact the authorities and let them handle it. The cops are looking into the teacher who was photographing his female students, for example, and found that he’d also been sending nude images of himself to underage girls.
>I won’t defend /r/creepshots, but how was it different from tubecrush?
Not linking to the dude’s facebook or other social media profiles and backlinking those to tubecrush would be a pretty big point… I guess?! I mean, maybe?!
Actual full body shots, even showing the faces would be another one. I mean, creepshot hates faces for some reason and is all about giving tits and asses centerstage in their shots.
The language is also pretty tame compared to the shit you get to read at creepshots regularily.
Some Dude: 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.
No, it’s not. You were limited in your posting privileges because you are repetitive to the point of being nauseous.
But that doesn’t prohibit you from actually addressing any misinformation. Countering insults… well that’s a different thing. I can’t see that a whole lot of original material has been forthcoming in the insult dept., mostly because your schtick is so much of a muchness that it’s all one sort of grey blur in my mind.
But you continue to be a font of misinformation; both direct and indirect. That Dave has not much sympathy for those who have had the shit they put out on the web being collated; as a response to the ways in which they have been invading the privacy of others… not the same as encouraging it.
If that’s the standard you are insisting on… how many words have you written on AVfM, the Spearhead, etc. condemning the ways in which they abuse women? Shall we; because of that, consider your misogyny proven?
You pretend that what you care about is, “free speech”. Bullshit. Doxxing of this sort is free speech. It’s less questionably legal than publishing upskirt shots. It’s less morally ambiguous than publishing creepshots.
It’s less actionable than publishing a recognisable image of a person without their consent in a non-news related way (though absent a profit motive on the part of the photographer/publisher such a tort is hard to win). So unless someone can show that it’s an incitement to violence; and that the doxxer had good reason to believe that might be the effect, you are out to lunch.
The predditors tumblr has some ethical problems; but it’s not illegal; as such it’s a violation of your stand on free speech to be against it.
redditors have the right to be assholes. People who are offended by that have the right to call them assholes. They can even point out to all and sundry just who those assholes are.
Cope.
I didn’t really see Predditor when it was up, other than a couple screenshots in the (Jezebel?) article, but how are the people behind it getting the info? And how much info was posted? I think it’s one thing to, say google someone’s user name and aggregating that info versus going to a government database and digging up someone’s address, like the Surly Amy/Vacula thing. I’m still undecided on Predditor, mainly because I don’t know where the info came from.
NWO, having your pic on Hollaback is not being doxxed, not even close.
Oh, hold the fucking phone- I just took my lazy ass over to the jezebel article (finally) and this is what I read:
[blockquote] A 25-year-old female Redditor has finally come up with a way to beat Reddit’s r/CreepShots posters at their own game: compile their personal information and report them to their bosses and local authorities. So far, it’s working. [/blockquote]
That isn’t in the slightest bit unethical- that’s being a responsible citizen.
Oh, eat a bag of dicks, blockquotes.
reginaldgriswold: it seems that info was easily grabable from screen names and what not.
ttf: welcome to the party.
polliwog: Yes, that was my first rational thought. My first actual thought was Dawwwww!
2-D Man: 2. in the case of revenge for a specific act, in which case, their welfare comes second.
No.
That’s vigilante justice. It’s feuds, and lynch mobs. It’s the opposite of civilisation.
That’s why we have courts.
varpole: I will clarify that I do in no way, shape or form condone Creepshot behavior; however, it is not indicative of any especial animus toward women; as can be seen, such behavior is distributed amongst both genders and reveals nothing but a poor character in the individual.
Really? The same sorts of behavior?
Ok. Find me the equivalent of this:
His past entries include a comment about a woman bent over in a park: “See, this is an example of an upskirt that is perfectly legal to post because the goods are plainly visible to the general public. Circumstances like this are rare, cherish them!”
His photographs bear such titles as “I’d busk her fest!” and “Who likes a MILF in a skirt?”
Find me the women saying, “Who likes a “hot rod?”, and “I’d dance on that pole”.
It will be easy, if the behaviors are the same.
Of course, a couple of comments later you admit you either have no idea what you are saying, or are lying through your teeth.
Compare: “however, it is not indicative of any especial animus toward women; as can be seen” to, Am I to trust the word of feminists that the Creepshot Reddit was as creepy as portrayed in this post? Given the extent to which Boobzland is given to exaggerate, I think not. But unfortunately, I can’t view it, as it has been deleted.
So how do you know it wasn’t possessed of any animus toward women? You don’t, and you admitted it.
Ideology (women/femists are wrong) trumps all else.
Way to go Torvus.
>Signs that you may be a huge nerd: your first reaction to this site is, “But almost NONE of those are daguerrotypes!
Guilty as charged.