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How do you feel about the threats of violence made by Curt against those people?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's the problem: the woman receiving these threats has no way to know whether this is some teenager on the other side of the country or the creepy guy down the block. She has to spend time thinking about each one and wondering whether to be worried or not, or whether the harasser is going to escalate from being an ass on Twitter to contacting her friends, relatives, coworkers, etc. on email/Facebook/etc. The one t…
Unfortunately, the goal of prosecuting threats is to prevent violence, not prevent people from being scared. If the chance of violence is relatively nil, (I already argued that I believe these guys are just terrible, wanna-be comedians) I don't think there is any case to be made that these guys are anything near sexual predators, just assholes and scumbags.
Threats are also illegal under 18 U.S. Code § 875(c). Even if there was no intent to carry out the threat, if the threat can be interpreted by a reasonable person as being intended to cause fear, it counts as a true threat. [1]
[1] https://verdict.justia.com/2014/12/10/supreme-court-consider...
A lot of people feel these threats should be taken seriously, and the law should be involved. I don't know what to think of this situation, but I want to ask you a question. Without irony or snark: How do you feel about the threats of violence made by Curt against those people?
Then he explained that's not an option for him.
People who get caught doing this need to be prosecuted, and if convicted, labeled as sexual criminals and placed on a register. Employers should be able to see the kinds of people they are employing or about to employ. As a father myself, this kind of behaviour makes me sick and I cannot understand people who feel they need to defend these kinds of sick comments.
You know, there are kinds of law enforcement response between "ignore it entirely" and "destroy someone's life forever".
Too bad he doesn't go into how he managed to track the 9 people down who he called out. Was he able to do it because he is a famous baseball player and has the resources and connections to make it happen or is it something any normal person on the street can do to stand up for themselves?
https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/investigation-online-gat...
People who get caught doing this need to be prosecuted, and if convicted, labeled as sexual criminals and placed on a register. Employers should be able to see the kinds of people they are employing or about to employ. As a father myself, this kind of behaviour makes me sick and I cannot understand people who feel they need to defend these kinds of sick comments.
> People who get caught doing this need to be prosecuted, and if convicted, labeled as sexual criminals and placed on a register. Ridiculous. Maybe we should prosecute people who talk about overthrowing the government on twitter with treason - they're threats! And safety is important! These threats on the internet aren't acceptable, but neither is your reaction to them. There is a vast difference between threatening…
As a father, I have warned my daughter about the Ring of Gyges. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges Look, at the end of the day, it's pixels. You can't even prove that posters are humans or robots on Twitter. Taking umbrage over a Turing-suspicious medium reeks of middle class moral panic and, in my opinion, has no business being on HN.
>You can't even prove that posters are humans or robots on Twitter. Did you read the article? Schilling found at least nine real humans. They've been suspended or fired. Some will go to jail. They were real men making sexual threats to his daughter, thinking they were anonymous. They weren't. Lots of women online face threats like Schilling's daughter received. Women in the tech industry face stuff like this. I'd say…
"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from repercussions"? Perhaps not, but anonymity sure does, and people who want to say ugly or cruel things will avail themselves of anonymity. In fact, those people would be the most likely to use anonymity, since it's cost is easily outweighed by the risk of those disproportionate retaliations.
So, I ask you, does retaliating against stuff like this tell people it isn't OK, or does it tell them that they need to be anonymous? What about when parts of the world conflict on whether a globally-distributed statement is OK?
Compare that with someone sufficiently invulnerable, Obama for instance. Or even Chuck Norris.
The other fact is that with a large audience, it'd be silly not to expect that some percentage would be murderers/rapists/other unsavoury types. Getting a dozen offensive tweets out of a million-strong audience is still only 0.000012%, orders of magnitude less than the actual threat of rape.