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
Nothing says “I’m not making shit up!” like flouncing when someone asks for evidence. /s
Welp, ninja’d like twice over.
Oh no a shocking and insightful glimpse into the parts of my psyche that i have been suppressing how will i ever recover goodbye mammoth i must now depart for my penitent cave in the wilderness
“You are not freethinkers btw”
Oh nooooooo! Right in the feels 🙁
Oh good, he knows things because he saw them on a Twitter account which has now been deleted.
Oh, and he didn’t stick the flounce. That’s -2 points.
“While you’re here, may I ask how you know that she asked David to write this article?”
i saw it on twitter. she had another twitter account @jenny_lyne1234 which she has also deleted now.
No, really, I saw it in a duplicate Twitter account that has now been deleted! I wasn’t the only one who saw it either, my girlfriend who lives in Canada and my uncle who works for Nintendo saw it too!
Okay, I’ve done all the investigating I can without actually watching the videos (not an option at this point in time). Judging by the description of the contents, I haven’t seen any evidence that The Foot is an actual Nazi or Holocaust denier; instead, he’s a shit-poor debater who got out-maneuvered verbally by… Ray Comfort, or as most atheists know him, Banana Man. This is not exactly a high-point in Thunderfool’s resume, but it’s not really evidence of Nazi sympathies.
Which means that yes, the letter campaign, both to his employer and the cops, was way out of line. However, any sympathy this might have garnered has subsequently been destroyed by his own reaction, which was clearly an effort at not only retaliation but escalation. And yes, unlike the letter campaign, the Patreon complaints ARE valid, because his conduct very clearly violates their ToS. I hope that particular spigot gets shut off.
(Note: If someone can point to a transcript of him either saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, or that the Nazis were good guys, I’ll happily retract this conclusion. From what I’ve been able to find, he just stumbled into accepting the idea that the Holocaust happened because of science, but that science is still a net good for humanity, which is profoundly stupid and inept, and shows that he’s not a great thinker outside his field. Dunning-Kruger may as well be called the Dunderdolt Effect.)
Was the Twitter account, perhaps, deleted just before she could expose Vatican II as a devious Illuminati plot to ignite Jupiter?
Sorry, milkshake fan, that is not “evidence.” That’s “hearsay.”
@freemage: I didn’t watch his debate with Comfort when it was new (I was still watching his creationist videos at the time) because I didn’t want to give Comfort the oxygen. I knew it kind of flailed along until it ended rather damply but I didn’t know Tfoot was so poor a debater as to accept Comfort’s frame.
Wow.
ask david about the twitter, i bet he will admit to it.
And if he does, milkshake, what does that prove? That someone being attacked by an online hate mob would like to have their side of the story heard? Why do you hate free speech, milkshake fan?
it proves that she was lying about wanting to apologise to him because at the same time she was trying to get a hit piece written about him.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freethinker
do any of you consider yourselves to be freethinkers?
Oh no, the dictionary! Our arguments cannot repel firepower of that magnitude!
I freely think that you’re an idiot.
I’m pretty sure you have your timeline messed up, considering the apology that Thunderf00t refused is linked above. And asking someone to write an article about a situation isn’t the same thing as asking them to write a hit piece about someone. But since you consider this post about something he’s actually doing to be a ‘hit piece’, then you must agree that what he’s doing is wrong.
Being a freethinker doesn’t mean “I have to accept any claim that Milkshake Fan makes and at face value!” It means we can evaluate claims and come to our own conclusions about their validity.
I don’t think you’re much of a freethinker, either, Mr. Toe-the-Thunderf00t-line.
LOL i just noticed linked to those bloody bogus articles by margaret pless
the first one says that thunderf00t is an MRA! it also connects this to sargon of akkad who NOTHING to do with this, and also calls him an MRA!
the second article states as a fact that thunderf00t is “working with baphomet” LIBELLOUS!
Milkshake fan, nearly everyone considers themselves freethinkers and nearly everyone is guilty of confirmation bias at some point in their lives. That is a pointless discussion.
Well I would expect not, since he died in 2279 BCE!
I’m growing bored of this surprisingly quickly, but I would still like to see milkshake justify how any of the things they’ve said about Laughing Witch or even the other articles linked above warrant the attacks she and her husband are receiving.
This could have been a huge get for Thunderf00t if he had taken legal action like an adult, or even just taken the high road and spoken out against it as a general ill. Instead he retaliated in a way that makes him and his ilk look far far worse.
“Someone who has 400,000 Youtube subscribers and gets a substantial secondary income (Perhaps even greater than his salary?) by putting their face in front of a camera to complain about feminists *is* in the public eye.”
But that is not the job Laughing Witch was writing letters to now, was it?
“That’s very noble of you, but I guess you forgot to relay this info to Dr. Mason himself. He’s the one going for “revenge” in this instance, doing unto others what was done to him and then some.”
And he’s wrong. His doing it does not make it RIGHT for someone else to do. It is still wrong. Look up “tu quoque”. People make this mistake so often, we gave it a name.
milkshake fan, she didn’t contact me, I contacted her. (That’s why I was asking on twitter if anyone had her contact information, which I obviously wouldn’t need if she had contacted me.) Sometimes writers contact the people they are writing about before writing about them, to ask them questions and so on. Oh, and my supposed “hit piece” is critical of her actions as well as of his, though obviously more critical of him, because he’s the one who’s unleashed a hate mob.
Also, I’ve banned you for being tedious and repeatedly posting nonsense.