Check out my NYT piece on the right-wing media’s tendentious takes on accused bomb-threatener Juan Thompson. Here’s the lede:
Tag: cyberbullying
So Twitter has finally given Milo Yiannopoulos the boot — apparently for good — after the Breitbart “journalist” gleefully participated in, and egged on, a vicious campaign of racist abuse directed at Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones on Twitter earlier this week.
[UPDATE: Milo has been banned for good from Twitter. My thoughts here.]
More than a year and a half of manbaby whining wasn’t enough to derail the opening weekend of the Ghostbusters reboot: the film took in a greater-than-expected $46 million in the US, and Sony is already talking about a sequel.
And so the Lady-Ghostbuster-haters have returned to their roots. And by that I mean harassing women. The woman they’ve chosen to target this time? Leslie Jones, who, in the tiny minds of her harassers, has two strikes against her: 1) she’s one of the stars of the Ghostbusters reboot and 2) she’s black.
If you’ve been wondering what you could do to support Chanty Binx, the feminist activist who has endured three years of harassment for the “crime” of yelling at a couple of Men’s Rights activists at a protest in Toronto, consider donating to her legal fund via this GoFundMe.
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Earlier today, a Muslim man was reportedly shot and stabbed by three masked men outside a mosque in Houston, Texas. Yesterday, another Muslim man was beaten outside a mosque in Orlando, Florida by a man who reportedly told him that “you Muslims need to get back to your country.”
So I suppose that we should be grateful that Men’s Rights Activist Jack Barnes hasn’t, as far as I know, shot or otherwise physically harmed any Muslim Americans. So far, at least, he has confined himself to threatening them with murder on Twitter.
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A little over three years ago, a Canadian feminist with bright red hair confronted some Men’s Rights Activists outside of an event at the University of Toronto.
So this Social Autopsy debacle is one of the saddest, most surreal spectacles I’ve seen in a long time.
Social Autopsy is, as you may have heard, a spectacularly wrongheaded attempt to fight cyberbullying by posting the personal information of alleged bullies online — that is, in internet lingo, by doxxing them, thus exposing them to the sort of vigilante “justice” that the Internet handles so very, very badly. Social Autopsy planned to assemble a database of 150,000 alleged bullies; how they were to be selected wasn’t altogether clear.
Categories
advocacy of violence antifeminism attention seeking bullying citation needed creepy evil fat fatties evil women excusing abuse gender policing harassment homophobia men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny patriarchy PUA reactionary bullshit rhymes with roosh shaming tactics that's not funny! things that aren't satire trigger warning
Attention-seeking manosphere guru Roosh V posts article on “Why You Should Beat Your Kids” [UPDATE: Was it plagiarized?]
So it seems that some Men’s Rightsers and manospherians, reveling in the negative attention they’ve managed to get from the mainstream for some of their more reprehensible postings, have decided to up the ante a bit, posting stuff that’s so deliberately over the top in its despicableness that even some of their readers have been taken aback.
A case in point: A paean to child abuse recently posted on Roosh’s Return of Kings blog. (Let me put a big TRIGGER WARNING on all the quotes from it that follow.)
Categories
a voice for men actual activism advocacy of violence antifeminism are these guys 12 years old? conspiracy theory douchebaggery facebook censoring rape memes the world is ending oh no gross incompetence harassment hundreds of upvotes imaginary oppression johntheother men who should not ever be with women ever misandry misogyny MRA not-quite-explicit threats not-quite-plausible deniability paul elam reddit threats
Facebook: Page advocating murder of feminist blogger “doesn’t violate our community standard on bullying and harassment.”
Several months ago, you may recall, feminist activists got Facebook to agree to remove blatant sexist hate speech from its site — much to the chagrin of many Men’s Rights Activists, like Paul Elam of A Voice for Men, who declared, in a post filled with alarmist rhetoric, that “feminist ideologues are co-opting Facebook, and they will root out any and all opposition to their worldview.” AVFM’s John Hembling, meanwhile, denounced the feminist activists as “fascists.”
Ever since then, Men’s Rights activists have been playing a game of “gotcha” with Facebook, trying to prove that the hate-speech monitors there only care about misogynist hate speech, and don’t actually care about hate speech directed at men. Every few days, it seems, there is a new thread in the Men’s Rights subreddit purporting to document this alleged “double standard.”
Ten days ago, for example, a Men’s Rights Redditor called dizzy_j got nearly 400 upvotes for a post complaining that “I reported three anti-men Facebook pages for gender-based hate speech today. Only one was removed.” Six days ago, DerDietrich got 580 upvotes for submitting this supposed evidence of a double standard. Trouble is, you can’t actually prove a double standard with a handful of examples.
But I would like to suggest an alternate hypothesis, which also fits the anecdotal data provided thus far by the MRAs, and provide an additional piece of anecdotal evidence that supports my theory and undercuts theirs.
My hypothesis is that Facebook is shitty at recognizing and dealing with hate speech and harassment, no matter whom it’s aimed at.
My evidence for this? Well, yesterday bloggers at Skepchick noticed a Facebook page targeting a specific feminist/skeptic blogger and asking if she “should … be murdered.” The anonymous poster — who identified her by name and posted pictures of her on the page — coyly avoided a literal call for murder, writing instead:
We should not ever break the law. Rather, we should advocate , through lawful land constitutional processes, to have the law changed so that it is legal to kill [name redacted by DF]. Alternatively, we should, where legal, request that [name redacted by DF] kill herself. Relevant laws should be changed so that suicide, and advocating suicide, is legal.
The Skepchick bloggers reported the page to Facebook for its obvious violations of the site’s harassment policies.
And they received this reply from Facebook (I’ve covered up the blogger’s name):
I think it’s fair to say that if Facebook can’t recognize a page calling for the literal murder of someone as harassment there is something very wrong with its system for dealing with harassment and hate speech.
The page has since been taken down, though it’s not clear if it was removed by Facebook or by the original anonymous Facebooker.
Get your act together, Facebook.