Let's be real here, SWAT teams showing up at your house is far different than 'having hurt feelings from something someone said.'
There's a reason that flag-burning hit the SCOTUS.
I am astounded by the viciousness and mendacity of those who are determined to undermine 8chan at any cost. These people are essentially fighting for total corporate control of every corner of the internet, just because 8chan doesn't promote their pet issue.
Except for all the evidence that's in the article, like the newspaper link with quotes from the police chief. But hey, if you ignore all the evidence, there's no evidence!
> Also, I'm not sure why anyone would give any credence to information from those sources in the first place.
Probably because they lie a lot less than GamerGaters seem to.
8chan is actually not a person, and no evidence has been presented that a user of the site has done any such thing. I have noticed a couple of posters in this thread posting a gish-gallop of links (mostly from discredited sources) purporting to prove something, but one sees upon inspection that they in fact do nothing of the sort.
Promoting a worldview is a tricky thing. To be really good at it, you have to believe, and the more unorthodox your worldview, the harder you have to work to maintain that worldview in the face of widespread resistance. The easy thing is to refuse to even consider anything to the contrary, to only talk with people who share your views.
This pattern happens over and over in tech, too; it's not like we're exempt. Look at the dot-com bubble, for example. It was an article of faith that the Internet would change everything. That it turned out to be true eventually didn't matter; enough people took leave of their senses that we wasted billions.
SWATing is horrible, but IMHO you should be placing more of the blame on our fucked up militarized police system that lets bored teenagers send an armored car full of soldiers, armed to the teeth and ready to kill to anyone's house with a single phone call. If it takes a few SWATings for the public to realize that this is completely unacceptable, so be it.
It's not directly relevant to the topic, but if you really believe this you should better educate yourself with regard to what has been done in the name of gamergate.
>IMHO you should be placing more of the blame on our fucked up militarized police system that lets bored teenagers send an armored car full of soldiers, armed to the teeth and ready to kill to anyone's house with a single phone call. If it takes a few SWATings for the public to realize that this is completely unacceptable, so be it.
SWATing has been an ongoing thing for quite a while, with a few cases making their way into mainstream news. Perpetrators (when caught) are prosecuted quite heavily. Waving off SWATing as not the fault of places which allow and encourage harassment in the form of doxing just because the military industrial complex exists seems like blaming auto manufacturers for drunk drivers.
"Fault" is a concept that I believes always lies with the person who is actually committing the crime, but I think the general idea isn't outlandish.
Say I've got a problem of drunks leaving the bars at night and pissing on the sidewalk. I can make it illegal, arrest anyone who does it, and when the complaints continue to roll in I can point out you can't make people not break the law. It is nobody's fault but their own, surely I cannot be responsible for another man's bladder.
Alternatively I can recognize the futile nature of attempting to correct this behavior with laws alone, and do something like install public toilets in problem areas.
Designing a society to accommodate people such that they are less likely to break the law does not mean that I am assuming responsibility for their actions, nor assigning fault to myself when people break the law.
No, really, gamergate supporters like Milo Yiannopoulos have also been doxxed, sent death threats to, sent threatening packages to, had their family members harassed, etc. The social justice movement contains honest supporters of diversity in tech, and psychotic scumbags like Shanley Kane. There are idiotic assholes on both "sides," and you shouldn't let them discount the entirety of the movements they "support."
I'm in no way excusing SWATing, but I absolutely think the outrage it generates should be directed towards our militarized police system. The drunk driving analogy is stupid because the benefits that cars provide to society outweigh the negatives of drunk drivers, but there is no good reason for an anonymous tip to warrant armed soldiers breaking into your house in the night, usually making no indication that they are policemen and not just thugs and robbers, and shooting you dead if you so much as move the wrong way in your confusion. It's a profoundly dangerous and easy to abuse system, and it needs to change.
I don't think someone searching his twitter feed for a phone number he himself posted for self promotion falls under the same category as taking selfies outside someone's place of work.
>The drunk driving analogy is stupid because the benefits that cars provide to society outweigh the negatives of drunk drivers, but there is no good reason for an anonymous tip to warrant armed soldiers breaking into your house in the night, usually making no indication that they are policemen and not just thugs and robbers, and shooting you dead if you so much as move the wrong way in your confusion. It's a profoundly dangerous and easy to abuse system, and it needs to change.
You're right, the system does need to change. And I would even agree that is linked to the issues of online harassment. However, that is not the cause of online harassment, nor would improvements to police reaction policies put a stop to doxing.
The parent commenter was referring to an incident when Shanley Kane tweeted Yiannopoulos' personal phone number, which was not intended to be public. He subsequently received a deluge of messages (does this qualify as "harassment"?) Such behavior is commonplace amongst the SJW set, and not so much among their opponents, contrary to the mainstream perception.
Either way they are both shitty behaviours, don't really think we need to take a one vs the other.
The kinds of harassment we've seen come out of one man's personal crusade against an ex-girlfriend are disgusting, and it's incumbent upon all of us to discourage it.