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This Industry is Fucked

blog.jessfraz.com

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Re: This Industry is Fucked

#261

Post by tptacek »

tzs wrote: post #163
tzs wrote: post #157

Several thoughts, some reasonable and some probably stupid, split into separate comments so the reasonable parts can be discussed and the stupid parts torn apart separately:

Part 2. These kind of email threats are overwhelmingly empty, in the sense that the person sending them is almost certainly not actually going to come over and do the things threatened [1]. Their power lies entirely in the threat itself. Consider training your spam filter to recognize these threats and automatically trash them. I would hope your normal correspondence with friends and coworkers, and the correspondence…

I don't understand why you assume that most threats are empty. Are people who mail you rape threats actually going to rape you? Probably not. Are people who are unhinged enough to send a rape threat capable of harming you in other significant ways? Yes, they are.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#262

Post by Lalabadie »

vonklaus wrote: post #259
purp wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's disingenuous to switch from your original context in which you, a bystander, urge listeners to believe that this is an unsolvable problem, to the context of the victim, which you aren't. If you, the bystander, decide to take a stand rather than write this off as too hard a problem to solve, you help the victim by giving them support, and you help future victims by decreasing, however slightly, the chance that ha…

I have been thinking about this more and more lately. It is a security problem, not a social one. >So let's fix it. I posted a thread earlier today trying to solicit advise about solving this and posted some of my own advise. I realized that there is a lot that can be done but I was focusing on the attacker. This is much more about defense than it is about offense.

> This is much more about defense than it is about offense.

What you seem to mean by this is "I don't believe we can prevent threats from being sent".

Harassment is also a cultural issue. A vast amount of people live among a circle of friends who believe that sending things like death threats in anonymous emails is something that can be done light-heartedly. It's what transpires when people downplay the situation by saying "They can't be serious" or to "Just ignore them".

You mix up the need to stop an offender in action, with the need to remove the situations in which someone becomes an offender. Changing this "acceptable threat" culture is the offense you describe as less relevant, but it's key to a long-term change.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#263

Post by purp »

Lalabadie wrote: post #262
vonklaus wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been thinking about this more and more lately. It is a security problem, not a social one. >So let's fix it. I posted a thread earlier today trying to solicit advise about solving this and posted some of my own advise. I realized that there is a lot that can be done but I was focusing on the attacker. This is much more about defense than it is about offense.

> This is much more about defense than it is about offense. What you seem to mean by this is "I don't believe we can prevent threats from being sent". Harassment is also a cultural issue. A vast amount of people live among a circle of friends who believe that sending things like death threats in anonymous emails is something that can be done light-heartedly. It's what transpires when people downplay the situation by…

Exactly right. Make it wholely unacceptable to make these "threats-in-jest" and a lot of the problem goes away.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#264

Post by purp »

vonklaus wrote: post #259
purp wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's disingenuous to switch from your original context in which you, a bystander, urge listeners to believe that this is an unsolvable problem, to the context of the victim, which you aren't. If you, the bystander, decide to take a stand rather than write this off as too hard a problem to solve, you help the victim by giving them support, and you help future victims by decreasing, however slightly, the chance that ha…

I have been thinking about this more and more lately. It is a security problem, not a social one. >So let's fix it. I posted a thread earlier today trying to solicit advise about solving this and posted some of my own advise. I realized that there is a lot that can be done but I was focusing on the attacker. This is much more about defense than it is about offense.

Thank you for thinking about this. It's a very worthy topic for thought. If you'd care to link the thread you mention, I'm sure others would like to help.

BTW, a very good primer on learning how to be helpful is http://juliepagano.com/blog/2014/05/10/so-you-want-to-be-an-...

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#265

Post by daveloyall »

TTPrograms wrote: post #241
wpietri wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is blaming you. They are asking you to take responsibility for your professional community. Will you?

>Nobody is blaming you. >The Industry Is Fucked. That's my industry that's fucked. Not some random people on the internet, not some assholes in a convention. The statement is that the entire industry that I participate in, interact with and identify with is fucked.

Nobody is blaming you. They are asking you to take responsibility for your professional community. Will you?

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#266

Post by anthonyb »

chroma wrote: post #196
delcypher wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't look like it's been mentioned yet but there is very related project called Online Abuse Prevention Initiative (OAPI http://onlineabuseprevention.org/ ). It would be a good idea to talk to them in addition to what you are already doing. It was covered on FLOSSWeekly earlier this year ( https://soundcloud.com/twit/floss-weekly-331-oapi ).

I would strongly advise against backing OAPI. The CEO & founder is Randi Harper. Her online persona is quite hostile, and she is often the instigator of online harassment. One of my acquaintances was the target of her ire. Her e-mails and call-outs eventually caused him to seek psychiatric help, including medication. So while I support the goal of OAPI, I think the founding members have attitudes that hurt the cause…

See points 2 and 5 above: you're part of the problem. In addition, labelling Randi as a "harasser" is a common gamergate tactic.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#267

Post by Nadya »

zaccus wrote: post #254
beloch wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, just one person like this is "enough" to really mess people up. You can have hundreds of normal, positive interactions in a week and it just takes one a$$hat to make you forget all that. Thanks to the internet, one guy can ruin hundreds of other people's days. He (or she) can do it anonymously and safely from a great distance. For the overwhelming majority of us, there simply are no barriers to preven…

IDK, she's talking about hundreds of vile personal messages. Sounds like more than one a$$hat to me. And I can't help but notice that as a man I don't get this kind of abuse at all. Literally 0 rape threats. I think when this kind of thing happens it should be called out. Sunlight is a great disinfectant.

>And I can't help but notice that as a man I don't get this kind of abuse at all. Literally 0 rape threats.

Men rarely send men rape threats. A woman threatening a man with rape usually isn't seen as threatening due to power dynamics between the sexes (good luck overpowering the man to rape him?) So that doesn't come as a large surprise to anyone.

But a large number of men do receive death threats and threats to their family. "I'll kill your kids" and "I'll kill your wife" are still threats against that person. They are meant to intimidate and control that individual, fearing for the people he cares about. He'll receive a picture of his girlfriend with another man's semen plastered on it.

You learn to ignore it - because there isn't another way to deal with it. Blaming a specific community for it is a joke. What do you want the community to do about it? Say it's not okay?

Well it's not okay. We say that, but it falls on deaf ears. You want us to do something about it. But there isn't anything to do about it. Simply saying it's not okay isn't enough. It won't stop what happens. If you think it will, I'd love to hear your reasoning for how you came to that conclusion and what alternative universe you've wished yourself into.

Telling people that theft is not okay doesn't prevent all theft. Telling people that killing people is not okay doesn't prevent all murders. Telling people that [this] is not okay does not prevent all [this]. That's simply a fact of life.

What people are saying is: "No, this isn't okay. It's still going to happen. What do you want us to do about it, we can't do shit. You're going to have to deal with it."

Somehow that gets interpreted as "This is okay, we endorse it. We aren't going to do anything about it."

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#268

Post by tzs »

tptacek wrote: post #261
tzs wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part 2. These kind of email threats are overwhelmingly empty, in the sense that the person sending them is almost certainly not actually going to come over and do the things threatened [1]. Their power lies entirely in the threat itself. Consider training your spam filter to recognize these threats and automatically trash them. I would hope your normal correspondence with friends and coworkers, and the correspondence…

I don't understand why you assume that most threats are empty. Are people who mail you rape threats actually going to rape you? Probably not. Are people who are unhinged enough to send a rape threat capable of harming you in other significant ways? Yes, they are.

To be clear, what I mean by "empty" is that the harm will be from the effects of receiving the message. The message is not a warning of an upcoming attack--it itself is the attack.

I assume this because I haven't seen any stats showing otherwise, and so I'm assuming that those making these threats are similar to those who make similar threats against athletes and entertainers, which we have more experience with.

The kind of people who will actually carry through with threats to murder or rape are almost always people who have a close connection to the victim, typically former spouses or former romantic partners or former business partners, or are people who are motivated by some kind of fundamentalist religious belief and believe they are doing God's work.

It's possible that this will change. The rise of swatting may be a sign that it is starting to, although swatting has mostly been directed toward non-tech targets so far. Swatting lets you call down offline harm with the emotional disengagement of online.

I think you are underestimating how different most people are online compared to offline. A heck of a lot of people who are civil offline turn very nasty online.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#269

Post by bsder »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #125
bsder wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every time I see posts like this, I see people commenting on it with varying statement to the effect of "that's a shame, but most people in tech aren't like that", or "I'm so tired of seeing posts like this, quit making a fuss." I'm tired of people whining in a blog post instead of calling the police. Death threats and violence threats like this are unacceptable. CALL THE POLICE. After a couple of high-profile case…

Since when do the police care about online harassment?

Police care about death threats. Really.

Now, if the harasser is 2 continents away, it's going to get circular filed. If the harasser is two continents away, though, you can just ignore the message.

However, if the harasser turns out to be in the same state or even the same county, the police will care a lot. And someone in the same state qualifies as an imminent threat. And has likely done it to other people.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#270

Post by bsder »

alaroldai wrote: post #121
cjbprime wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Death threats and violence threats like this are unacceptable. CALL THE POLICE. After a couple of high-profile cases put these kinds of assholes in jail it will stop. What evidence do you have that the police will do something? We could look at people like Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian, who I feel confident we'll agree have experienced massive and credible death threats. They report the threats they get to the po…

Also, from what I can tell posts like this are a lot more high-profile than court cases. I haven't seen or heard of many court cases dealing with this, and when I have it's been via a blog post. Calling the police might be helpful in the specific case, but unless it really is high profile, it's not going to help change the culture.

> Also, from what I can tell posts like this are a lot more high-profile than court cases.

High profile blog posts don't make it stop. In fact, it likely adds fuel to the fire.

A video of a perp walk will drive home to the anonymous cowards that this isn't acceptable.

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