I don't think they took them seriously because video games, and because the entire thing appeared so unbelievably silly from the outside. I wonder if they might take them more seriously now?
You are talking about anonymous twitter accounts and 4chan posts. For all we know the 'victims' could have made them themself to get fools like you to give them Patreon bucks.
I recall that the systemd package maintainer for Debian got death threats. From outside, hearing about death threats related to volunteer work to package software that is given out for free is something I strongly suspect sound unbelievably odd. This happened after gamergate and I doubt anyone got arrested for it.
I recall a few months ago during the days of meeto here in Sweden, children of accused parent got threatened thus resulting in the family leaving the country for a while. No investigation was mentioned in the news article.
From what I see, now is not better than before. Death threats made online/sms/phone is not taken serious unless there is contributing reasons to take it serious.
Her article seems to be about what could be done to stop anonymous trolls from terrorizing and threatening women. How about prosecuting them, since terroristic threats is already a crime? Unfortunately, as Hess discovers, the police don't care much about online stalking, which is consistent since they don't care about IRL stalking either.
The Supreme Court has ruled that only specific and credible threats can be prosecuted. Other threats, distasteful and disgusting as they are, are protected as free speech. It's gonna be very hard to prove that an online troll mouthing off constitutes a specific and credible threat. And the Justice Department is usually not interested in borderline cases, both for efficiency and out of fear of creating unfavorable precedent.
This is a country where you're allowed to burn someone in effigy and call for their execution, protest soldiers' funerals and celebrate their death as punishment for America tolerating gays, call for the overthrow of the US government, hold up a mock severed-head of the President, publicly hope for his assassination, etc. We take a rather expansive and absolutist view of free speech.
Since when is it? If there is one thing that will get you banned from 4chan it is posting or requesting child pornography. I am not a fan of much of the content on that website, but linking them to child pornography looks like a smear job.
How many arrests have happened because of CP posted on, say, Facebook? Or on Reddit? Is there any proof that CP is more likely to be posted on the 4chan imageboard than anywhere else on the Internet? Do you think the owners of 4chan somehow encourage the posting of CP?
Literally the first discussion I had with a friend who used 4chan, a decade or so ago, was about how people posted lots of child porn on /b/, but it typically got removed.
It doesn’t matter who encourages what. The mods obviously don’t like it, but somehow 4chan spent years attracting tons of people who love to post child porn.
It's just as possible to post CP on any other web forum that allows images to be uploaded. Uploading illegal content has always been a rule on 4chan and has always lead to a rapid ban and report, attempting to pin 4chan as being complicit in spreading CP is a baseless smear.
That's like saying the internet is associated with illegal drug distribution because sometimes people buy drugs over it. It's true, but not representative. That's not how most reasonable people would summarize it.
That's not how most reasonable people would summarize it.
Only because a reasonable person would choose a more subjective statement, to convey the full breadth of depravity a visitor could expect to find on 4chan.
I mean, you've also got the gore pics, the incitements to racial and political violence, the fucked-up hentai, the homophobia, the raids on children's games, and the incessant insistence that everyone kill themselves.
Or they might not take it so seriously, and describe it mostly as a bunch of bored immature people trying to blow off steam and entertain themselves and each other. And they take it too far somewhat frequently.
But maybe people at your middle school were more mature than at mine, and never tried to gross each other out by tricking them into checking out this really cool site called goatse.
Off topic but, is it me or does Business Insider hijack the back button on mobile? And why do websites forward to a country domain and not the actual domain you are trying to visit?
Can you imagine if the feds prosecuted every idiot who made a death threat online? They have criteria for identifying particularly egregious cases worthy of prosecution. One of the criteria, mandated by the Supreme Court of the United States, is that the threat must be credible and specific. That's gonna be impossible to prove for online trolls mouthing off.
When people play the “I’m getting death threats” card, put on your skeptic’s hat and realize that every person who arouses any controversy gets death threats online. It’s awful but it’s inevitable. Ask yourself if they’re just trying to deflect from whatever controversial thing they did in the first place.
Not that it matters, but I don't think she's even trans, so we have this dude making up accusations that sound really bad to him, but which won't actually bother anyone reasonable.
The death threats are sort of like a DDoS attack on someone's life when you get thousands of them. You can go after an individual who sent a single death threat but then they're just an idiot who made a single death threat online, right? Well put a thousand idiots who only made a single death threat online together and you can make someone's life a living hell.
> Ask yourself if they’re just trying to deflect from whatever controversial thing they did in the first place.
People forget how gamergate actually started. A bunch of “gamer journalists” were caught red handed colluding with game producers to write stellar reviews for some botched B-list games (e.g. “depression quest”). People were rightfully upset and any discussion on the subject was banned from reddit and similar forums. The “harassment campaign” narrative was pushed much later to deflect from the gaming journalism controversy.
> realize that every person who arouses any controversy gets death threats online.
I offer no comment on the rest of your post, but this part mirrors my own experience.
My wife posted on Facebook a year or two ago about her opinion on a mainstream controversial topic, and it went viral seemingly instantaneously. Within 12 hours she'd gotten shared almost 10k times, and received hundreds of private messages. Of those, more than two dozen were direct death threats, some with the names of our children and other personal details.
They didn't prosecute the ones made against GamerGate supporters either. Just because fake news pretended they didn't exist, doesn't make them less real.
Those are probably faked, right? Or it's only fake when it doesn't support the narrative you choose to believe?
It's quite clear: the victims of the "GamerGate" movement received death threats, so GamerGate supporters faked receiving death threats to make the other side also look bad. See? It's easy to manufacture an unverifiable tale to advance an agenda.
"Since Wednesday concerned people have been calling and emailing the prosecutor’s office in response to an online essay by Wu saying O’Brien had not acted on explicit rape and death threats originating from the 614 area code.
However, no criminal complaint had been filed in Columbus or with the county, O’Brien told me via email. Wu had never contacted him, and the office had received no recordings or phone number to investigate."
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