Phil Mason, better known online as Thunderf00t, is a scientific researcher and YouTube bloviater who’s turned his hate-crush on video game critic Anita Sarkeesian into a surprisingly lucrative part-time job; his seemingly unending stream of YouTube videos attacking Sarkeesian, many of which have drawn hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, have without a doubt contributed mightily to the harassment directed against her by the online mob known as #Gamergate.
Now Mason is trying to defend himself against charges that he has become the de facto leader of a vast hate mob that harasses Sarkeesian and other women … by encouraging his followers to harass a woman who charged him with exactly this.
And a good number of Mason’s 400,000 YouTube followers have taken him up on this challenge, flooding the Yelp page of the business the woman runs with her husband with fraudulent one-star reviews and besieging her and her family business with angry and harassing phone calls (at least one of which the perpetrator has put online).
The story of this particular debacle began this past January when the YouTuber who calls herself Laughing Witch sent a letter to Mason’s employer, accusing the YouTuber of harassing Sarkeesian and other women and repeatedly suggesting that he and his followers were a bunch of Nazis. Her email was part of a letter-writing campaign by a number of feminist Youtubers who hoped their letters would get Mason fired from his research job.
Mason, who apparently faced no repercussions from the letter-writing campaign, decided last week to retaliate against Laughing Witch — real name Jennifer Keller. He posted a video about Keller’s letter, following up with a second video posting her name as well as screenshots from the web page of Porcelain Tub Restoration, the company she runs with her husband.
While Tunderf00t didn’t explicitly command his army to harass Keller and her husband, he suggested to his supporters that they post their thoughts about her on the business’s Yelp page — and they did, cratering the company’s rating with literally hundreds of fake one-star reviews.
Yelp has been removing the most obviously fake ones, as well as those referencing her letter about Thunderf00t, but many remain up as “not recommended” (in other words, questionable) reviews, including a number of clearly trollish ones accusing Keller of being a Nazi.
These negative reviews, as ludicrous as many of them are, have apparently hit the business hard. Keller and her husband have set up a FundAnything page in an attempt, they say, to make payroll in the wake of the attacks on their and their company’s reputation online. On the FundAnything page Keller’s husband, Paul Burns, writes:
We are getting slanderous lies about our services and people posting deplorable images on review sites, as well desecrating our star ratings and customers calling. No one clicks to a service company with 1 star rating.
According to Burns, the 26-year-old “family based service business with 14 employees” may be forced to close “because of a brutal mob attack on our social review sites.”
Mason’s response to this campaign being waged in his name? Another video, in which he declares that “Karma [is] ONLY A BITCH, if you are one!”
Except that this isn’t “karma,” a supernatural force that Mason, a self-avowed “skeptic,’ presumably doesn’t believe in anyway.
This is an organized harassment campaign, instigated and encouraged by Mason himself.
While I’ve enjoyed Laughing Witch’s videos in the past, I think the letter writing campaign was wrong. Writing employers is a low blow. And despite Mason’s many flaws as a thinker and a human being, he’s no Nazi.
But the wave of harassment he’s brought down on Keller — and which he has not made even the slightest attempt to rein in — is indefensible.
And it’s getting worse by the day: 8chan’s Baphomet forum, a haven for malicious doxers and harassers, has now jumped aboard this harassment train, targeting not only Keller but her supporters as well. They’ve doxed one other YouTuber already, and are working on doxing others.
In a Baphomet thread, one anon happily reports that the attacks on Keller are causing her great distress:
While Mason at first suggested that he would call off the attack if Keller apologized to him, he has since refused to accept her apology, and seems positively gleeful about the pain he’s caused her and her allies.
The internet has officially hit another new low.
I’ll post more on this as it develops.
NOTE: Thanks to Daily Kos blogger idlediletante (Margaret Pless), who provided me with a number of tips on this story. She’s written three posts on the subject so far:
Family Business Brigaded on Yelp by MRA YouTube Stars
Phil Mason is Working With Baphomet to Ruin DC Business
How it Feels to Be Targeted By An Internet Hate Mob: One Man’s Story
Another low for Phil Mason. It’s understandable he was angry over the letter campaign. But to not accept an apology/truce shows he’s petty and graceless.
What exactly do you want her to do?
Are you a gotcha troll trying to bait us into saying we think Sarkeesian should dox, harass, or commit violence against gamergaters?
Cuz this
Also seems a little
@weirwoodtreehugger
The fact SXSW organizers haven’t responded officially gives credence to your vibe. personally I’m rather chary when I hear “big tent” in any context. I have encountered it as a dogwhistle to justify Freeze Peach for racists, etc.
Not saying that’s the case here, just the reason I’m wary about the situation as described.
Shorter Bazia: “Quiet down, ladies, a MAN is here to tell you how you should be handling your harassment!”
@Bazia
I’m not sure how exactly you know what Sarkeesian or her defender have gone through that the rest of us don’t, because I certainly would not go telling people how they should have handled personal terroristic attacks unless I had all the pieces plus some awesome book that tells me exactly what to do in every situation ever. I certainly hope you aren’t suggesting they have acted weak and meek in the face of oppression, right?
I was severely bullied at school. My father had a solution: “You are too damn nice.”
Thank you. That sorted it.
Orion said: “The overwhelming majority of small businesses will never be targeted by internet hate mobs. A user might understand that there’s no protection against vandalism, but if 99% of pages are never vandalized, that 1% error rate doesn’t really make it a bad tool for the consumer.”
Sorry, but I know numerous small business owners (mostly of restaurants, coffee houses and bars) — in both big cities and small towns — who have been targeted by malicious Yelp campaigns, in most cases almost certainly by local competitors. The system is leaky as a sieve and almost designed to be abused, and my anecdotal experience leads my to believe than the abuse rate is far higher than the 1% that you suggest. I’m curious as to where you drew your stats from.
Re: the whole holocaust thing, the context is that in his debate with Ray Comfort, Ray tried to corner him with a question about the Holocaust. Because Mason was a stammering idiot, he waffled on the question of “Was the Holocaust a bad thing?”
There’s also this storify thing.
https://storify.com/a_man_in_black/thunderf00t-is-really-bad-at-debate
$3400 for each new YouTube video indistinguishable from the last 500 videos where he rage-drones at his laptop camera about how girls are scary, Anita Sarkeesian is the most endlessly fascinating person on Earth, and if you go to an atheist convention he will try to suck your toes?
I’m in the wrong business.
Dammit, I remember liking Thunderfoot years ago. Was there a period he wasn’t horrible or was I just really dumb?
DodoHunter
Nope! He was always an ego-tripping douchebag, from the very beginning.
Don’t feel too bad, though. Plenty of people were duped. It’s easy to not realize how messed up it is to threaten a teenager with legal action when the teenager is a sociopathic douchebag with an immensely punchable face.
I think it’s OK to write to someone’s employer if they are behaving badly outside work, but (usually) wrong to apply pressure to the employer to fire that person. Does Mason still work for a university? They
I don’t know the details of the letter-writing campaign so I don’t know on which side (if any) of the very fuzzy line it lies and mileage would vary anyway, but I’m not inclined to condemn it outright.
Let me be clear: if undue pressure were placed on Mason’s employers to fire him, I’d consider them the victims, not him. I sincerely hope they can find a legitimate reason to fire the shit.
Oops, somehow censored my own sentence there. I meant to say that if he still works for a university, they’d (rightly) find it hard to fire him for his online activity so pressuring them to do so is probably the wrong approach, morally and practically.
Laughing Witch consulted us a little while ago about suing a certain MRA. We urged caution. I really wish that she had consulted us before she contacted Mason’s employer. I think that she would have gotten more good advice. (Don’t!)
That said, Mason’s reaction is reprehensible.
Laughing Witch, I’m really sorry that you’ve gotten hit with this MRA siht storm. They’re very good at flinging poop.
magnesium: Isn’t he the one who tried to argue that the holocaust was a good thing? Not that necessarily makes him a Nazi, I guess. Just a self-obsessed moron who thinks being a contrarian makes him look smart.
You (and other people her) might want to watch these vids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBJmBK__heg – MUH UNPLUGGED VIDYA!!!!!11oneone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ2uJKo-NLo – Explaining the Letter to Thunderf00t’s Employer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLUmrLXHv7M –
Dr. Mason Doxes Feminist Laughing Witch-I Write a Letter
“Possible suicide might happen.”
“Repeat suicide might result!”
Wow, MRAs love to wallow in their own toxic rage and thoughts of suicide (their own or another’s). I cannot understand why these nice guys can’t get a date.
Take a break from the sads & mads. This is fun & funny & really accurate:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/watch-this-clueless-white-dude-realize-how-privilege-works_5626a12be4b02f6a900e5230?cps=gravity_2689_1888803996776841777
C.S.Strowbridge | October 26, 2015 at 5:49 pm wrote: Everyone should go to Patreon and report his account. He is clearly breaking the rules there.
https://www.patreon.com/guidelines
“After creating a Patreon page, any Creator caught in the act or convicted of making credible violent threats, committing violent crimes, malicious doxing, coordinating nonviolent harm such as fraud, or encouraging others to do the aforementioned harmful activities may be banned from using Patreon.”
Just restating what was said above. There should be financial consequences to TF’s actions, and he is clearly violating his Patreon terms of service. People can use this article or the Daily Kos articles as evidence of his malicious doxxing.
Ad me to the list of people who doesn’t see the letter campaign as that bad. The way that Thunderf00t has acted is completely unacceptable. We rightly call for football players to be dropped when they abuse there wives even though that clearly doesn’t effect there ability to throw a ball, I don’t think it should be any different when its a researcher commanding a hate mob to ruin peoples lives.
Keep in mind that Thunderf00t is a public employee, he’s paid by taxes. Complaining about public employees is fairly common, there are ethics committees dealing with these complaints, it doesn’t mean they will get fired necessarily, but he can be asked to behave better online while he’s working for that Institute. Calling him a Nazi is a bit too far, but given how these people like the term feminazi, I don’t know what there is to complain about. But hypocrisy is one of their strengths anyway
As I understand it, Laughing Witch accused Phil of being a Nazi, and that was stupid, not only because he’s not a Nazi, but because sending someone’s employer a letter accusing them of being of Nazi is a ham handed and obvious attempt to smear him. Nobody’s going to take that seriously
If someone were to actually take the time to objectively and dispassionately document Phil’s hate mongering activities and put them in context, his employers might be very interested in that. I can’t do it because I can only sit through the occasional Thunderf00t video.
About a year ago, I did catch Phil on video accusing Anita of personally getting him kicked off Twitter, and applying proof that was 100 per cent disprovable. I made a video of this, and I link to iut whenever I can. He’s making up stories about her at the height of the death threats and bomb threats, and of course, no one questioned him. It was despicable.
https://youtu.be/Ed__AIKtsHE
Raising another paw here. I think Thunderf00t has the right to say any old garbage he pleases. His employer has the right to know about it and weigh if this is the sort of image they want.
Posting false reviews in order to fuck with someone however IS questionable at best, criminal at worst.
I don’t understand how the letter campaign could have been wrong, unless of course it is wrong to ‘rock the boat’ by saying like maybe, well, *maybe* calling a war on a person in the name of sexism should *maybe* not be a thing we do. Maybe?
The ‘other team’ complains about ‘PC gone WILD! We can’t say anything!’
Well, try this f*****g shoe on once and see how it fits.
“While I’ve enjoyed Laughing Witch’s videos in the past, I think the letter writing campaign was wrong. Writing employers is a low blow. And despite Mason’s many flaws as a thinker and a human being, he’s no Nazi.
But the wave of harassment he’s brought down on Keller — and which he has not made even the slightest attempt to rein in — is indefensible.”
he hadnt done nos uch thing. he simply showed the evidence of th epeople who tried to destroy his career, the same people who bragged about it. They tried to destroy his life and …the fact taht you side with this peolpe is disgusting
delavrancea, watch this vid. -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ2uJKo-NLo – Explaining the Letter to Thunderf00t’s Employer
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/pls.gif
Why would he show evidence to people if he didn’t want people to take action against Laughing Witch? Like, seriously, this could have been handled privately several months ago instead of publically now. You don’t make something like this public unless you want the public to take actions against someone.
Oh, and this one too. -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBJmBK__heg – MUH UNPLUGGED VIDYA!!!!!11oneone