Minorkos posted:

it's basically a bunch of children repeating the same stupid poo poo over and over again and when someone challenges them, they tell them to go back to tumblr or reddit

also they like to post graphs of black people crime rates in the US

Paul Zuvella posted:

I know I'm super late to this, but I honestly have no idea and really need this question answered.

Why the gently caress does anyone care about this?
Like actually.

quote:

The Chilling Effect of Misogynistic Trolls

Quoting the last half of the article, emphasis mine.

That's also true of abusive trolling targeted directly at individual women trying to manage their own space online, and there has been plenty of that in the past week. One aggressive campaign that spilled over into comments on Motherboard's own pages was targeted at games developer Zoe Quinn, who found herself the prey of commenters who felt it necessary to comment on her sexual exploits as well as sharing her personal information and naked pictures across various platforms.

I won't bother to get into the details of the story behind this ridiculous hate campaign, but the recent furore started with a blog post by her obviously bitter ex-boyfriend and hinged on some relationship Quinn allegedly had with games journalist Nathan Grayson.

It might sound like high school, but part of the internet (#NotAllMen) has somehow tried to portray this as one of the worst examples of corruption in the gaming and media worlds separately and combined. And of course, as the woman in the incident, Quinn was the main target of attacks—despite the fact that journalists, not games developers, are responsible for the journalistic ethics most commenters insisted were the justified cause of their fury (though many were unabashed in their slut-shaming).

In reality, the editors of the gaming publications in question found no wrongdoing. On Wednesday, Kotaku’s editor in chief Stephen Totilo wrote a post to explain his site's stance, saying that "our leadership team finds no compelling evidence that any of that is true."

Ultimately, the subject of the controversy isn't really important. Enabling actual discussion on any topic is one of the modern internet's greatest assets, and it’s exactly what comment sections were made for. But this kind of aggression is not discussion. It's a campaign of abuse, and it has a chilling effect that undermines that free discussion.

Responding to the violent gifs littering their comments, Jezebel's staff wrote that, "This has been going on for months, and it's impacting our ability to do our jobs." For now, comments on the site are not automatically shown unless they're posted by a trusted user.

This difficulty for Jezebel writers and readers to enjoy the site freely is presumably precisely what the pseudonymous commenters are aiming for. They want to make life difficult for users interested in the kind of content Jezebel specialises in and reassert that the internet isn't for them.

In the same way that street harassment claims public spaces as somehow belonging to men, so online harassment of this explicitly gendered variety undermines the freedom of expression on the web by attempting to forcibly exclude communities and individuals belonging to those communities from participating.

It's a silencing tactic, and it's powerful. All too often, people suggest that victims of this kind of trolling should just ignore it; delete the comments, block the accounts, forget it ever happened. But that places the onus of policing this behaviour on the victim while giving repeat offenders carte blanche to spam targets faster than they have chance to respond, and undermines the real disruption this behaviour can cause.

The "ignore it" strategy essentially tells women to just shut up—which is exactly the underlying attitude of their attackers, and the cause of the problem in the first place.

This week has, however, seen a notable attempt to really tackle the issue. Web community fark.com took the no-nonsense approach of officially banning misogyny from their comments, though how successful it will be at enforcing the rule remains to be seen.

Of course, the move saw a predictable outcry from some parts: the same people who limit discussion by stampeding over dissenting voices are the first to cry foul when they feel that their freedom of speech—their freedom to bully and insult—is threatened.

It's a positive step in that it at least takes the issue of pervasive online misogyny seriously, though it’s kind of sad we should have to seek a technical solution to a social problem. And as long as the underlying power struggle exists, blocking a few comments on one site won't have any impact on the broader issue of misogynistic trolling.

As those who make a habit of belittling women's complaints so infuriatingly like to repeat, "This is the internet." What they fail to acknowledge is that they're the ones making it the way it is.

xx is a new column about occurrences in the world of tech, science, and the internet that have to do with women. It covers the good, the bad, and the otherwise interesting developments in the Motherboard world that have a sex or gender angle.

Shadoer posted:

So this whole bullshit has apparently started a new collumn on motherboard. And holy gently caress, you can just taste the hypocrisy in this article.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-chilling-effect-of-misogynistic-trolls

Paul Zuvella posted:

I know I'm super late to this, but I honestly have no idea and really need this question answered.

Why the gently caress does anyone care about this?
Like actually.

Yivgev posted:

its funny to watch morally reprehensible people slap fight about their hosed up personal lives all over the internet

is this really so goddamn hard to understand

Brannock posted:

yes.

Frank Viola posted:

Yep

FAROOQ posted:

Paul Zuvella posted:

I know I'm super late to this, but I honestly have no idea and really need this question answered.

Why the gently caress does anyone care about this?
Like actually.

Nonsense posted:

when were you cucked

FAROOQ posted:

FAROQ posted:

Shadoer posted:

Finally, some of us have nothing to do for a few days and are bored out of their minds and this is entertaining.

Junkfist posted:

Shadoer posted:

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-chilling-effect-of-misogynistic-trolls

Junkfist posted:

Shadoer posted:

So this whole bullshit has apparently started a new collumn on motherboard. And holy gently caress, you can just taste the hypocrisy in this article.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-chilling-effect-of-misogynistic-trolls

Junkfist posted:

turnways posted:

oh god, please, someone

please

make a public comparison of the media focusing on the few bad actors harassing zoe et all and calling everyone outspoken against them misogynists to those in the media calling everyone protesting in Ferguson unruly animals

i need this

Best Friends posted:

I'm really glad no important people in non baby man industries cheat

Junkfist posted:

Best Friends posted:

Someday, maybe some day in my lifetime, there will be a video game with ladies with giant tits. But to get there, we must overthrow the feminist oppressors who have ruined gaming

Best Friends posted:

Someday, maybe some day in my lifetime, there will be a video game with ladies with giant tits. But to get there, we must overthrow the feminist oppressors who have ruined gaming

NutritiousSnack posted:

i am not mad or care about this, hence why i will post about this one thousand times in two weeks.

SRS Poster posted:

quote:

very quietly, under Something Awful and Penny Arcade as "Cringe-Wrothy Break Up Stories."

'Quietly' posted on two of the biggest, loudest and most obnoxious gamer-bro-infested communities on the Internet outside of Reddit and 4chan themselves? I say this as a goon myself, SA loves drama; it is not a place where anything, particularly something accusing a woman in the games industry of wrongdoing, can be called 'quiet'.

Best Friends posted:

Yeah me too


I still don't even know what is going on except it involves caring a lot about someone cheating and the sacred duties of a video game blogger and every time I say this something hilarious happens like an earnest rage comic