How to Shut Down Reddit's CreepShots: Name Names
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The irony is that the creep hunters, e.g. "Samantha" themselves want to remain anonymous.
But aside for that, although I find CreepShots and the like abhorrent, e.g. a teacher posting photos of his students online, I find what people like "Samantha" are doing almost equally bad. Contacting people's employers and esp. the police on an alleged crime as the first step seems not only cruel and unusual punishment but may in fact may be illegal. What if "Samantha" makes an error in her identification and contacts my employer?
I don't want to comment on the "In my personal opinion, not all speech deserves to be protected..." comment, which has hundreds of years of debate on it. But "Samantha's" assertion that
"But Samantha believes that CreepShots is a gateway drug to more dangerous hobbies. Fetishizing non-consent "indicates [that CreepShots posters] don't view women as people, and most will not be satisfied with just that level of violation," she said. "I want to make sure that the people around these men know what they're doing so they can reap social, professional, or legal consequences, and possibly save women from future sexual assault. These men are dangerous."
is quite indefensible, to me. The idea that porn (not that these pictures are porn) will lead to predatory behavior was the leading cry of old-school feminism, but is not so widely accepted.
True, but I don't think the creepshot situation is comparable. In the porn case, you have material produced with the consent of the participants (ideally). Those arguing against it are using a speculative argument that some viewers might be led to predatory behavior from it.
In the creepshots case, the material is produced without the consent of the subjects, and is arguably obtained by people who are engaging in predatory behavior and rewarding them for that behavior. The link between creepshots and predators is thus not speculative, and it is combined with a gross violation of the privacy of the subjects of the photos.
Furthermore, the acceptance of creepshots harms all of us in the United States. A key aspect of our Constitutional protections against unreasonable intrusion in our private affairs by the government is the notion of a reasonable expectation of privacy.
When we, as a society, decide that some particular loss of privacy is acceptable that moves the bar a little on what the government is allowed to do.
See this fantastic article by Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on how we are giving up our privacy voluntarily and how that is giving more power to the government: http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox/dead...
In any case, I detest the Hammurabi-like "let me give you a taste of your own medicine" approaches. The correct reaction, for me, should be against Reddit, the company.
And similarly, against Facebook, G+, or Twitter for the content of their users. Anytime anyone posts something on a commercial site that we don't agree with, we should turn to the infrastructure provider for censorship!
Is Reddit responsible for censoring the user-generated content of their site, provided it is not breaking any laws? I was pretty certain we had a mountain of case law to the contrary.
You mean like the best photos of every 20th century street photographer, from Cartier Bresson to Gary Winograd?