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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

Honestly though, equating "online abuse" to some name calling on Twitter is totally disingenuous. What about harassment and rape threats and doxing and swatting?

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Yes, absolutely. We should not equate name calling with "online abuse".

And yet every time I read a blog or article about "the scourge of online abuse!" they inevitably inflate their claims by including 'name calling' as abuse.

Re-read, dude. I said we shouldn't equate online abuse with name calling, that doesn't mean we shouldn't consider name calling online abuse, just that the definition of online abuse is not limited to name calling, which is what the headline is doing.

Edit: My point is that this kind of dishonesty is now the norm when discussing online abuse.

don't worry, females are probably responsible for half of that other stuff too.

I don't see it that way at all. I think the sort of casually calling other women slags and hoes or whatever (ie normalised internalised misogyny) is a very different ball game to the gamergate style evil shit that happens.

Why not? Look at the case of Lori Drew [0]. She cyberbullied her daughter's friend into committing suicide. Women are not incapable of committing nasty stuff on the internet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Drew

I'm not claiming they aren't, but again, saying "probably" and assuming the iceberg extends equally the whole way down is entirely unsubstantiated.

I was merely saying that name calling and harassment are often completely different mindsets.

(Anecdotal) Doxxing long predates Gamergate and from what I've seen from BBS and hacker communities on IRC, women participate in doxxing just as much as men.

At best one could argue that there's simply less women in these communities due to societal pressures. During the past decade or so I've probably met as many transwomen as "real" women on these hacker IRCs.

However, I do believe that women are just as likely and willing to participate when they do end up in these communities. It's just that they're less likely to do so, just as they're less likely to end up working as programmers.

So what you're saying is "when women are part of a community they behave like the community"?

Then why is it so hard for people to believe that women on the internet are just as abusive as men on the internet? The internet is a community, or community of communities.

>Then why is it so hard for people to believe that women on the internet are just as abusive as men on the internet?

Is it? I don't find it hard to believe in the slightest, at least based on what I see on twitter and similar sites with a more even gender distribution.

Also, I don't believe you can draw any useful conclusions on the presence or lack of women in the aforementioned fringe communities. These communities are extremely small, and the extremes of abuse perpetrated by their members are vanishingly rare.

Why is this "evil shit" considered to be "gamergate style"?

Is it because so many anti-gamergaters engaged in it?

I agree that we need to be careful when talking about online abuse to distinguish between name calling, vicious name calling, and then threats of sexual violence or other violence. And I agree that at the severe end the perpetrators are probably mostly male.

But for one example of a woman making these extreme threats of sexual violence: one of the famous cases in the UK is the Caroline Criado Perez trolling. Two people went to jail because their tweets were so threatening and one of those people was a woman.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-trolls-is...

She got a longer sentence, because her tweets were more extreme, than the other (male) perpetrator.

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