mjg59 | Feeding the trolls

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advogato,
fedora

Feeding the trolls

A few years ago I got up on stage and briefly talked about how the Linux community contained far too many people who were willing to engage in entirely inappropriate behaviour, how this discouraged people from getting involved and how we weren't very good at standing up against that sort of behaviour. Despite doing this in front of several hundred people, and despite the video of me doing so then being uploaded to the internet, this got me a sum total of:

No death threats
No discussion about any of my physical attributes or lack thereof
No stalkers
No accusations that I was selling out the Linux community
No accusations that I was a traitor to my gender
No real negative feedback at all[1]

Which is, really, what you'd expect, right? The internet seems intent on telling me otherwise:

Well, she didn't do herself any favors by talking at conferences about women in tech, or setting up a feminist movement. If you wanted to attract abuse, that's a good way to go about it. It should be expected.
(Source)

MikeeUSA is a troll. He has no means to actually harm anyone, and he does it purely for the lulz.

Thus, MikeeUSA trolled a woman, and she took the bait. I just don't get why this is news, I've been trolled before, I don't get a news story.
(Source)

I was going to start a rant about how this behavior is encouraged by the macho men online, but this was just one guy harassing her. "Due to harassment" reads as due to harassment from the community, but she gave in to one idiot. She let him win.
(Source)

The full comment thread has rather more examples. If you stand up and say anything controversial, you should expect abuse. And if you let that abuse change your behaviour in any way, you've let the trolls win.

These attitudes are problematic.

The immediate assumption underlying such advice is that the degree of abuse is related to what you've said, not who you are. I'm reasonably visible in the geek world. I've said a few controversial things. The worst thing that's happened to me has been Ryan Farmer deciding to subscribe me to several thousand mailing lists. Inconvenient, but not really threatening. I haven't, for instance, been sent death threats. Nobody has threatened to rape me. And even if they had done, I wouldn't need to worry too much - there's a rather stronger track record of violent antifeminism being targeted at women than men.

I don't have to worry about this kind of thing. That means I don't get to tell other people that they should have expected it. Nor do I get to tell them that they should ignore it, or that if they don't call the police then they have no grounds to complain. And nor does anyone else.

The trolls don't win because someone decides that getting out of the tech business is more appealing than continuing to face abuse. The trolls win because we consider their behaviour acceptable and then blame the victim for inviting them in the first place. That needs to change.

[1] It was justifiably pointed out that saying all this while standing on stage next to a mostly naked guy wearing a loincloth with a raccoon tail covering his penis may have weakened my message somewhat.

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I wonder how many tongue-in-cheek versions of all of the above types of negative feedback you'll get as a result of *this* post?

Also, Skud quit a tech job which involved going to conferences. Not the geek feminism community!

Hello Matthew. The behaviour of the person that's harrassing this woman is unacceptable, probably criminal. I can't see how it's possible to excuse it.

To be honest, I can't see how the comments you quote can be seen as an excuse for this behaviour.

I wouldn't have made these comments myself. But you fail to address what the comments are really saying: that you can't blame the community for the behaviour of an individual, specially if the individual in question is clearly a scumbag that should be in jail or an asylum.

Should "the community" be more supportive of the victims of such behaviour? I would say yes, of course. But putting blame and shame on people you want support from is not as good an idea as you might believe.

To be honest, I can't see how the comments you quote can be seen as an excuse for this behaviour.

You have trouble seeing Well, she didn't do herself any favors by talking at conferences about women in tech, or setting up a feminist movement. If you wanted to attract abuse, that's a good way to go about it. It should be expected as saying that this behaviour is an inevitable consequence of her choices? Because if that's what you believe then you are part of the problem, and you deserve blame and shame.

First of all, you are - and IMO the whole geekfeminism culture is - doing a black-and-white drawing of everyone that dares to argue on one of these points. And this is one of the reasons why I usually try to ignore everyone from there. And that makes me definitely not part of the solution to your problem, even though I would like to be. Keep in mind that with the black-and-white stuff, I'm now automatically part of the problem.

Second, he is right in that these arguments should not make you part of the problem. As I see them, they're badly worded attempts to say the equivalent of "If you walk around alone at night in a crime area, it's no wonder you get robbed". And saying that does not usually make you a proponent of violent crime.

I would argue that whether or not people saying these things are good or bad people is roughly similar to the answer about who's at fault when women run around scantily dressed or wearing a burka and what to do about the reactions to that. Of course everybody should be free to wear or say whatever they want without death threats or even snide remarks. But I think you don't get there by labeling everyone not immediately 100% supportive of this and commenting about the ways in which you approach the problem as part of the problem.

And last but not least I do think that public shaming of people by name (or at least by pseudonym) as you do in this blog post is something that should be done as a last resort for really bad people. And I still think the really bad people are the ones sending death threats.

The really bad people who send death threats are able to do so because they're tacitly approved of by everyone who tells the victim that it's their own fault at some level. There's no significant social pressure against them, and their won't be until the apathetic majority are shamed into accepting that their behaviour is a significant part of the problem.

Ugh there won't be.

On one hand I agree. It is bad, both because it's a distraction from the actual problem at hand and because it shows a lack of understanding of that problem.

On the other hand you still sound a lot like the FSF, PETA or any other extreme group by accusing "the apathetic majority" of being "a significant part of the problem". Even when you are right, it doesn't help - not their understanding and neither your cause.

And what do you suggest doing? Right now there's clearly no desire on the part of most people to care in the slightest, and attempting to explain to them why this is a problem for people just leads to them claiming that it's the internet and what did they expect.

It's not surprising that pointing out the obvious and well-known gets perceived as supporting it - that happens in many other fields of life, too. If you want a feel for it, try going to your local LUG and telling them that they shouldn't be surprised that so much effort gets put into making Windows work well, and very little into Linux by comparison, because over 90% of the people who buy non-Apple hardware use Windows.

You will almost certainly get perceived as suggesting that this is a Good Thing, despite the fact that you are making an objective statement about the world, rather than a statement about whether it's a good thing or not.

In the same way, repeating the obvious "you knew it was dangerous" is unhelpful; of course she knew it was dangerous, but she did it anyway in the hope of making the world a better place for all of us. At the same time, it reinforces the bad actors' view that "this is acceptable behaviour"; it is by no means in the same league of bad as directly telling a woman to shut up, let alone the rape death threats brigade, but it helps them feel that their behaviour is accepted and/or tolerated, rather than despised and unwanted.

The worst bit? It's easy to rephrase the statement with the same content, but a different bias; how about "this is a bit shitty - why do we live in a world where trying to take a feminist stance gets you death threats in lieu of reasoned discussion?" to give you one rephrasing that continues to say "you should have expected this", but indicates that you don't accept it as how things should be.

(This is a different anonymous, say 2) The are no facts backing up that claim. Murder is widely criticised in the society I live in and yet it still happens. But these is a good example of why people who say things like you are right now deserve being flamed. Feminists make a lot of very wild accusations backed up merely on subtext (it doesn't matter here that not ALL of them are) if in a discussion someone does that to me I would certainly not, be happy. I see this kind of thing all the time. An idiot or a criminal says or does something demeaning to woman an feminists take the opportunity to denounce every one who disagrees with them of being collaborationists of horrendous crimes; rape, murder no matter when or where those happen. I do hope that their contribution to society (by empowering woman) is greater than the benefit they get to their own egos, because quite frankly they are too obnoxious to listen or be near to.

Well said.

Man, all the people who keep talking about "letting the trolls win" can have ... *counts on fingers* seven years of my inbox, and see if that makes them just a wee bit disinclined to keep doing this shit.

And Skud's been in tech longer than I have. I honestly don't know how she managed it for as long as she did.

Goodness, aren't you charming.

Thanks for proving my point, I guess?

Am I the only one how is totally shocked by all this abuse against women? I had no idea this stuff was going on at all. I had the naive view that the world had become more sensible in this respect and that there shouldn't be much need to be an active feminist nowadays. Perhaps to kick against the glass ceiling, but I thought we were most of the way already.

Of course it shouldn't be dangerous to post your opinion online, it is totally ridiculous that it is! Where are those crazy misogynistic fools coming from? I really don't understand how you can have grown up believing that women are in any way inferior to men, it doesn't make sense to me.

I don't understand why the police doesn't do anything, I don't think the abusers took that much effort hiding their trails, so it should be easy to locate them.

Hacker News comments are YouTube quality with bigger words and better spelling. These morons are our brightest startup flowers? We're doomed.

As usual, people will note that I am getting the gender-essentialist crap in anonymous comments, not

mjg59.

And people think there's not a problem! (I'm almost tempted to ask you to unscreen those comments so people can see,

mjg59.)

I've put them here rather than unscreen them, given that they contain advocacy for violence against women and I'd rather not expose people accidentally.

I have no words.

startup flowers are busy do stuff, not trolling the internet. :-) (at least I hope)

*nod* That's a good compromise. I can handle seeing/hearing that kind of thing with just a roll of the eyes, after years of exposure, but not everybody is as inured as I am (for which I thank anyone who's listening).

And hey, at least it's not annoying as the thousands and thousands of comments that spam "worthless whore dyke" through my whole journal! That was annoying to clean up. Heh.

(Why do they always believe 'dyke' to be a pejorative, rather than a descriptive, term? I mean, well, yes, I am! I often wish for at least a bit of creativity in the epithets. I mean, when I'm excoriating someone, I at least go for a bit of imagination in the insults.)

That's actually fairly mild. It was only generalized rape and murder threats, not specifically directed at me! I always count that a good day.

Every time I read these types of articles I get so confused :/

That commenter is almost certainly MikeeUSA, FWIW.

It does seem very much his style.

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