Comment by thrance | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrance | Hacker News Reader

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Full original conversation:

> Guy: Unfortunately if you won't change it I will be sharing it with the community

> Guy: I've love to support you in getting it remade ethically for cheap but if you're not willing to I'm going to let other artists know

> Guy: I understand you didn't know at the time, that's ok. That's why I'm trying to help

> Guy: I'll give you a day to think about it and I'll get you some names and prices of people who could either make a new poster or write up the board for you

> Owner: I have been attacked enough because of this. Disrespected and defeated how people bombarded me with mean comments and DMs. Many have unfollowed me. Go ahead and share if that's what makes you happy.

That's "the threat" the article is referring to. Incredibly bad framing, if you hadn't read the conversation you'd think the guy would have threatened to send armed goons, instead he's telling her he'll give the coffee shop bad press in a local image board.

Not saying I approve, but it's nowhere near as bad as the people who went off on the title alone think it is.

This is outright harassment. The guy is definitely making a threat, even though he is couching it as some sort of helpful advice.

A threat of what? Posting in local communities to talk about reasons to avoid a certain business is not an abusive or dangerous behavior, people do it all the time for all sorts of reasons, legitimate and not. Almost none of them have the consideration to talk to the business before doing it, so frankly this is a step above that.

Look, I hate your post. I think you used AI to generate it. I will give you one day to delete it and to hire someone I know to make another post for you. If you don't do that, I will go and tell a bunch of people that you're an asshole, and they may or may not come here and harass you too.

Signed, A very normal person doing things people do all the time for all sorts of reasons

Cool, in what world is that a credible threat?

That's actually really bad. The guy is threatening the poor store owner, complete with stupid movie cliches like claiming he's just helping when in fact the intent is absolutely not to help but to bully, threaten and in general wreck the guys business if he doesn't go along with this set of Mafia codes.

Also, you have to consider the context here. The sort of people who make these threats are invariably very left wing, and they have a long history of using violence against anyone they view to be doing harm to their protected classes. Whoever gets this sort of threat will be wondering if some Antifa type is going to throw a rock through their window.

> The sort of people who make these threats are invariably very left wing, and they have a long history of using violence against anyone they view to be doing harm to their protected classes.

The overwhelming majority of political violence in this country comes from the right [0].

You are trying to fearmonger by weaving a narrative that includes the mafia and antifa, a narrative that doesn't fit the events described in TFA. There is no credible threat of violence, at most the guy will use his platform to bad-mouth her buisness (questionable, I'll concede). Antifa doesn't throw bricks at coffee shops because they used AI.

[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-wing-terrorism-and-politi...

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