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.
Unless the guy watching your kids is participating, right? teachers? religious leaders? politicians? dads-seeking-custody? rape crisis counselors? Doctors? Surely there are men who have access to vulnerable people who get off on invading the privacy of others, and they have made themselves potentially known by participating in websites like these. Predatory sexual behavior (even just online with photos) is a big red flag that people deserve to be alerted of when possible. Its practically a data base of potential safety problems for children in communities all over, and its supposed to be ignored? Look at what is at stake for the creepers vs the rest of us. If the creeps don’t want to be exposed they can stop with this shit or go get some help.
@Slavey,
That’s a grim hypothetical world you inhabit. The real world, however, works a bit differently.
I think Franklin Douglass was better looking in his 40s/50s. The statue of him (there is also one of Lincoln) at the Museum of the New York Historical Society is great… both of them life sized. Both with lots of people taking their photos next to them. Douglass gets more traffic than Lincoln (perhaps because he is on a more trafficked street).
Steele: Perhaps there was some inappropriate behavior; Reddit appears inclined to such, given the horde-like mentality. However, I have to believe it was far less than Boobzland claims, given your slanderous past.
The fuck dude. Go to this post (on REDDIT) and follow the links. Just because you don’t have the intellect (or perhaps the honesty) to say, “I don’t know”, rather than, “I don’t like you so I’ll pretend you do nothing but lie,” doesn’t mean this is the only place to get information.
We’re supposed to believe you are in a graduate program? Why? If this is the standard of research you conduct, I feel a lot of pity for your teachers, because not being able to just skip past your drivel to something interesting can’t be worth what they are being paid to grade your work.
You’re asking everyone to trust the criminal justice system to deal with sexual crimes against women, something they are notoriously bad at. Unless you are lucky enough to get a conviction and land your creep on the sex offender registry they are free to go do it again anyway, virtually anonymous once again. I can understand advocating going to the cops instead of vigilante justice, but I can’t understand advocating that instead of prevention via outing potentially dangerous men.
If any of you knew someone personally who was doing something like this, would you hesitate to tell women around them about it? I sure as fuck wouldn’t. Lord knows the rest of the world doesn’t have our back- women need to warn each other about this kind of shit to prevent a problem before it occurs. Men need to know that they can’t shame women and expect to be sheltered in doing so. I cannot fucking believe there are people talking about a “slippery slope” of outing when the women on creep shot are outed and shamed to begin with. Its like complaining about a slippery slope of violence when the other side has already unloaded an assault rifle. Its bullshit.
Someone enlighten me here: What does doxxing mean exactly? To publicly write something like “NAME did this or that to me”, that’s one thing, you can say the creep just got what he deserved. If it’s publishing a photo of someone and saying “person on this picture did this or that to me”, that’s a different thing, since unless the creep had like two heads or three eyes there are bound to be loads of perfectly innocent people who happen to look like him.
>Someone enlighten me here: What does doxxing mean exactly?
It usually comes down to releasing somebody’s personal information, inculding real name, contact information and place of work to people who disagree with the person.
Vigilantism is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the “bad guy,” particularly when we’re dealing strictly over the internet. I don’t like mob mentality, no matter who is part of the mob. Things escalate far too quickly. I am totally with you when it comes to the shitty way that rape and sexual violence is handled by the authorities. I do not believe that means that the public would do a better job.
That substitute teacher is a criminal who was preying on his students. He was rightly fired from his job and is facing a criminal investigation. He was also turned in by someone at the school who was also a Reddit user and recognized the classroom and the girl in the photo.
As far as I know, doxxing is compiling personal information (name, age, location, internet handles, etc.) which is then posted publicly.
However, given that apparently these guys weren’t doxxed, but had their employers/family/whomever contacted in *real life* with information about their behavior, I really don’t feel the need to condemn it.
I wanted to qualify: I do not believe that Adrian Chen writing an article about Violentacrez is “blackmail.” I think it’s disgusting that Reddit allows these criminal subreddits to exist — and yes, I believe that taking voyeuristic photos of people’s genital areas and posting them online is criminal, and that website devoted to dudes crotches sounds nasty to me as well.
@Steele
I’ve been following the whole CreepShots debacle on reddit, and it actually was doing some pretty illegal stuff.
I read some of the Reddit threads… My gods are these folks delusional.
Telling someone, “I’m going to tell everyone you’re doing this unless you pay me money/perform some unrelated action,” is blackmail in the legal sense of extortion.
Telling someone, “I’m going to tell everyone that you’re doing this unless you stop doing this,” is NOT blackmail in the legal sense–it’s fair warning.
As for the ethics of doxxing… honestly, it comes down to a ‘use of force’ situation. To stay ethical, a person needs to only use the force needed to prevent further harm, not exceed it. As an analogy, if someone is wildly flailing around, but unarmed, it’s (generally) considered acceptable to grapple them or to use non-lethal force, but not to shoot a firearm at them. If they have a knife or gun themselves, lethal force becomes a legitimate option.
In the case of Redditors, it’s become plainly obvious that the only thing that will get them to act ethically is public shaming of their real-life identities. Because their behavior itself is so abhorrent and harmful to their victims (the people being exploited by the photographers and posters), action is needed. Doxxing seems to be the most appropriate method of bringing their conduct to a halt.
This is web site has the lowest quality of women and useless to any quality men. You are on your own ladies, enjoy gas shortage and despair and you small smelly apartment.
This web site has the lowest quality women on earth and the most useless women of all,
Enjoy your loneliness and your small smelly apartment with your cats and dogs, Women are strong and independent, You are on you own losers,
Bahaha!!! You know that thread in the mrm subreddit with a title like: ‘the evil overlords at srs have successfully shut down creepshots and that other shitty subreddit, and mrm is next!’. The first comment is some dude saying (grimly, with steely determination in his eyes I imagine) ‘Let them come.’ Seriously, dude, if they did, what exactly are you going to do about it? It’s reddit, not Sparta- if they shut it down (which they won’t) there is exactly nothing you could do about it.
This is a different kind of reddit creepsplosion, but look at what’s getting upvotes on r/mr right now.
Emphasis added. None of the replies take issue with his proposed campaign.
Oh, wait, read that thread a little further- they are planning on shooting the srs’s computers. Cunning strategists these fellas are not.
@ cloudiah- jesus fucking christ- what are the odds this guy is typing that safe in the confines of his prison computer room?
@Cloudiah – That has to be the worst MRA thing I’ve read in a long time. Jesu.
yeah, I have to admit I read it and then thought, “He can’t have actually just said that, or if he did, I am sure people will downvote it.” And then I looked again. o_o
Apropos of nothing, have y’all seen PUA.txt on twitter?
@hellkell
“NWO, having your pic on Hollaback is not being doxxed, not even close.”
Possibly not, but what’s the difference between a random man taking a picture of a random woman and posting it, and writing something like town slut or the neighborhood bicycle? Or a random woman taking a picture of a random man and writing town pervert or local molester?
The one is a man claiming the woman is a slut which carries a social stigma for the women. The other is a woman claiming the man is a molester, which carries a social stigma for the man and possibly trouble with the law.
There both the same. A photo and description based on the photo taker. The second however, could get you in trouble with the law. Which is worse? You tell me?
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@pecunium
“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?”
Have you ever written a single word anywhere condemning the way which women abuse men? Hell, every MSM outlet was running with the end of men book, from the atlantic to huff post to forbes. Women journalists were practically orgasming with verbal abuse. Did ya say even two words online defending men? Not likely. You expect men to man up and simply take everything any woman says. But women must be treated like infants lest they get hurt feelings.
You expect men to be honorable but you demand no such thing from women. You expect men to be concerned about womens feelings but you don’t expect women to be concerned about mens feelings. I’ve never seen the name pecunium in any comments when MSM women journalists feel it’s their duty to belittle men. Do you go by another name?
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@captainbathrobe
“That’s a grim hypothetical world you inhabit. The real world, however, works a bit differently.”
Except it’s reality. In the real world false accusation are the rule, not the exception. So much so that cabs in many countries are required to have cameras, not to protect them from theft or violence, but to protect them from drunken womens false allegations. Rape is the swiss army knife word for every occasion. If you want child custody, it’s rape. If you want revenge, it’s rape. Late getting home, it’s rape. Caught cheating, it’s rape. Want attention, it’s rape. Don’t wanna pay a cab fare, it’s rape.
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@Freemage
“In the case of Redditors, it’s become plainly obvious that the only thing that will get them to act ethically is public shaming of their real-life identities.”
If it’s unethical to show a picture of how a woman dresses in public. Isn’t the woman unethical for dressing like that in public? Are women infants? Do women need to be dressed like a toddler so they’ll be decent in public?
Inurashii, I hadn’t, but I discovered there’s an associated tumblr too.
PUA.txt on Tumblr.
Spaghetti H. Monster on a pogo stick, that baseball bat quote is disgusting. And the only objection to it?
Cloudiah – I feel like I’m pretty cynical after lurking here for a long time, but I refreshed that thread and saw the bat comment got one more like. And I was surprised and saddened for some reason. You’d think we’d learn.