The Internet Shaming of Lindsey Stone | Hacker News Reader

The Internet Shaming of Lindsey Stone

theguardian.com

102 pointsmjohn71 comments

This mob mentality is horrifying. The response is always disproportionate. The instigators, these antagonists, seem to be purposely unaware of the magnifying effect of their actions. This is the same ugliness which reared its head when the PR person tweeted a few tweets which were a bjt too clever, and upon arrival in South Africa the pitchforks were eagerly awaiting.

People trip over themselves to point out the transgressions in others, especially when there is little consequence to the accuser for being incorrect in their assumptions.

Like I said before, not only should the shamed suffer consequences, by definition in these cases, but these mob components should face consequences too. They should also face scrutiny when searching for jobs, etc.

People involved in asymmetrical bullying should experience some sort of consequence for their irresponsibility.

I think this is another example of the undesirability of politically correct attitudes. Here in this case it was politically incorrect to 'desecrate' a sign which symbolized respect for the dead. ironically, I think most of those dead, would have found in life retrospectively, fun in the statement of the photo. But I'm assuming feelings I should refrain from.

Stories like this are a window into an ugly facet of our culture: eagerness to see others punished. I'm not sure if it's Schadenfreude, exactly, but it's damn close. Sadly, between hideous talking heads like Nancy Grace, and the faceless multitudes on social media, there is a lot of encouragement to wildly overreact to any perceived wrong-doing, to assume guilt based on the briefest account of some incident, and to seek as much damage to the target as possible.

Next time you see the crowd forming up, pitchforks in hand, try to be the person who counsels restraint and understanding. Some day it might be you they're after.

I'm leaning toward the guys with the Twitter bot being malignant narcissists, so I agree with you. At a minimum, they are gas lighting the victim. I hate to have to watch the video, but I am.

I watched it and it's painful. I got up to this part where the bearded dude says this:

> we're not doing it, its doing it.

Actually they, the spambot owners, are doing it and saying they aren't doing it is a 100% lie and is very untrustworthy. While there is a slim chance they have no control over the bot, we can expect technology to quickly give them an 'out' on that particular accusation. Autonomous corporations will be capable of building their existences based on a simple set of rules put into place by us humans, and running autonomously. They will literally be uncontrollable from the standpoint of the creator.

Excusing yourself from blame based on a presumed disconnect of intent has to be a type of cognitive bias as the argument "I'm not doing it, it's doing it!" is a fallacy.

It's the classic Goebbels Defense: "I just wrote some speeches. I didn't kill any Jews.".

The Internet outrage beast is fearsome. I wish more people would focus the attention on those in power. For every Lindsey Stone there are people with real influence who are actually disrespecting or harming the military. I know that lots of social injustice is deeply embedded at the lowest levels of common society, but average folks don't need scarlet letters and endless shaming or harassment. Education and awareness normally suffice. The elite who perpetuate wrongs only benefit when the peasants are infighting. If the outrage machine has any deserving target, it's those at the top.

Allowing outrage and vengeance of "those at the top" versus "average folk" is exactly what those who engage with the Internet outrage beast think.

The short explanation is that what is "the top"? They believe that their targets are those with power, or privilege, or money, or are an elite, or are not normal and average. It may be an accurate belief. But that's not the point. The point is that it is 100 times easier to convince yourself of someone else is a deserving target than it is to restrain the beast.

Every example in the article was rationalised to have been deserving targets of the Internet outrage beast, which is why it attacked them. Far harder it is to step back and advise tolerance, understanding, empathy, patience.

I don't think it's that hard. Normally these are people with multi-generational wealth and power, top bureaucrats, board members, and politicians. Add to that corporations, governments, and other institutions as a whole. I think some people get distracted by race, gender, or modest wealth thinking those confer natural power and influence, and they do to a degree, but they're not a valid endpoint of outrage at Internet scale.

Oh, many of the people you list are indeed the endpoints of outrage at Internet scale--though some (like politicians) are certainly more visible than others. But we sort of expect politicians and the less-liked CEOs to be the regular targets of Internet vitriol and don't pay much attention when it happens. What described here is when it happens to people who aren't prepared for it and whose companies just want to wash their hands of the problem. (Note though the case of Brendan Eich--although it was a non-profit in that case which made the mob harder to ignore.)

Agreed, it's not hard to identify those at the source or root of most of the worlds problems. It would be great, but I think it would be very hard to permit and allow the Internet vengeance machine to only be unleashed on these select targets and to be restrained and forbidden on lesser offences, because the vengeance machine just wants righteous vengeance and doesn't care if the target is a lesser offender.

"those in power" have been receiving and handling things like the allegedly fearsome "Internet outrage beast" for millennia. It's impressive to people who can get stepped on, but Dubya is still Dubya, no matter what the Internet says about him.

Lindsey Stone's situation was scary because there were people who held power over her, like employers, who would listen to popular opinion. But no matter how many "Fire John Boehner" things show up in social media, it isn't actually going to happen that way, because no one is scared of such political talk.

The beast is only fearsome when it has leverage. And with "those in power", it doesn't. It's quaint, is what it is.

"It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor."

The difference between Lindsey Stone and John Boehner is that no one can fire John Boehner by calling him out to a parking lot and forcing him to hand over his keys. The only way for him to lose his current position of power is for him to not have more pieces of paper with his named marked on them than any other name, on a special Tuesday that occurs bi-annually, in schools, churches, and libraries in a certain, small geographical location [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio's_8th_congressional_distri...

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Federalist_(Dawson)/70

Speaking of the Executive, but the same arguments apply.

Well, except for that Howard Dean noise incident.

Political candidates aren't "in power". You'll notice that, after his run, Dean became Chairperson of the DNC, and is a plausible contender for 2016.

Before his run, he quit all of his jobs. There's a reason that happens. Imagine that the board of directors for Godfather's Pizza had fired Herman Cain during the 2012 campaign over the allegations of sexual misconduct. It's not that he had much of a chance, but what kind of chance would he have had then?

It's interesting -- I'd read about this story before but hadn't seen the actual picture. If you have even a mild sense of off-color humor it's really not that bad (I get the joke even without being "in" on it.)

The problem is "the crowd" doesn't generally have even the slightest, subtlest sense of humor, so something like that going public is trouble. Call it the Mass Whoosh Effect :(

There's probably a bit of a Poe's Law thing going on. You see it in one context, your reaction is that it's a joke about the sign. You see it in another context, you think it's a comment about the cemetery.

What I find scary about cases like this is that nobody in the angry mob ever seems very hurt or genuinely upset - instead you see people thrilled and energized to be part of getting someone fired. If you remember the Justine Sacco thing (the woman who tweeted something before boarding a plane and went viral before landing) twitter was positively giddy about it.

More than anything else it resembles the Two Minute Hate. People seem to really like having something to be righteously angry about.

I'm not certain, but I think it could be described as sadism. The same reason people enjoy blood sport.

These academics are awful!

Before doing an experiment that involves a third party, normal ethical standards are to get consent, which they clearly did not do. It sounds like the Uni of Cologne forced them into taking down the spambot - probably for a number of reasons, including but not limited to: possibility of civil action being undertaken against the University (you might want to look up the Tort of Passing Off to start with, then perhaps defamation), the terrible publicity this was getting (largely caused by the smugness of the three academics, especially Dan O'Mara who contradicted himself a number of times and appears to have taken the position that their actions were the fault of Jon Ronson) and the unethical way the project was being conducted.

There are conflicting views of the @jon_ronson bot in the Guardian article - a few people are saying it was created as a parody account to satirise Jon, yet it was being done by an automated bot that apparently had algorithms that took information (fairly badly) from Wikipedia. That's not satire, and it's not parody - and besides, the bot for some reason got confused quite often and there were clearly a number of unrepresentative comments made about Jon. I'd be very interested in seeing the code though - if this was for academic interest, then the academics should publish these algorithms for review because they appear to be faulty.

It's remarkable that one of the academics wrote a response on The Guardian stating that they were trying to show the world the tyranny of how we are all being manipulated by the power of algorithms. Which they have done by targeting Jon Ronson to manipulate him to prove their point. That would be credible had their experiment been conducted in a more open, transparent and ethical way - and involved consent!

It appears though that you are related to the academics - what exactly is your relationship to them?

It's worth keeping in mind that the interview is heavily edited and Ronson is being a bit disingenuous at several points, pretending to not understand things that he almost certainly must.

David Bausola isn't so much an academic as some sort of artist/marketer combo. He's done some interesting Twitter bot things in the past. Strange and odd, but interesting. I've followed him and his experiments for years now, and it's just one of his things. I think he, at least, is genuinely interested in online identities and how people present themselves through Twitter and other social media. I don't believe at all he's a troll, though I do think his fascination with Ronson's responses is rather cold and clinical, and a bit more empathy would be appropriate.

Having said all that, obviously they should have taken down the bot when Ronson was upset by it. My suspicion is they saw an opportunity to talk about what they do and get an audience for it, and they exploited that. Which is, of course, the wrong thing to do.

What sort of things were you thinking of? I didn't really see any point he was being disingenuous...

So looking forward to Jon's book on this. "Them" was superb.

Also, was it just (white, male, non-Jewish) me, or did Adria come across really badly in that interview?

Yep, she certainly did.

It is merely luck that "Henry" as a developer is in extremely high demand and so got a new job right away. I'm not sure he would be so gracious and understanding about it if his family were suffering as a result of Adria's tweet.

There's also the issue of blending in with the crowd... things like this can't really stick around for a white male average-looking "John Smith".

But female developers are rarer and black female developers named Adria are rarer still, so in that sense the deck was stacked against her from the beginning and it doesn't surprise me in the least that she hasn't been able to find a new job yet; she also suffered a lot more as the recipient of the internet hate machine. Those things are bound to make her less happy about the whole situation.

None of the victims came across as happy about the situation. Nor should they have. The things Adria suffered were despicable, deplorable and unimaginably distressing for most of us, I'm sure.

But she did come across badly. Both relative to the other victims and generally. I've no idea if that was her or Jon's writing of her, but it was disappointing.

My acknowledgement of my gender, race and religious privilege was intended as an invite for anyone to disagree, tbh. I'd like to know if someone who isn't male, white and non-Jewish reads the piece, whether they read her as being more sympathetic.

Do we know that she hasn't been offered something? The whole thing was so high profile and she had so many defenders that I'd be quite surprised if no one had offered her a reasonable position. Now obviously whether she would have found it reasonable is another discussion.

She was a "developer evangelist" which is really more of a people-person type of job. I feel the same way about her as about the other woman that Ronson wrote about: they didn't deserve to be mobbed, but considering that their job was effective communication I'm not surprised they'd find it hard to find work after demonstrating terrible skills at communicating.

Adria Richards made it very public. Whoever those developers were, they kept very quiet and Hank apologized and didn't assign any blame to Adria. That's the real difference.

> “Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”

... I'm honestly shocked anyone could say that with a straight face. Apart from the incorrectness (is there any reason to believe a developer making a joke about dongles increases the risk of bodily harm?) -- what the hell does "your body" saying things have to do with anything?

I'm a guy and my "body" says all sorts of things that I wouldn't repeat or act on. She's implying she has no civilized control over her natural, probably rather miscalibrated like everyone's, instincts?

And to claim there's a risk of getting killed... it sounds like the no-fly list. Such obvious danger that we must restrict such people drastically because we're so sure they're going to kill people, but we've no actual evidence of wrongdoing to actually arrest or otherwise prosecute them.

And then going on to accuse the guy of starting a hate campaign against her? When all evidence points in the opposite direction? Perhaps she's planning a career move or book or something, and it's good publicity to just double down on her position, rather than just be another person that made a mistake?

It really hurts equality in tech when these incidents happen.

And to claim there's a risk of getting killed

Not to mention the idea that the presence of 2,000 bystanders offered absolutely no protection- because they were all white & male. Like, what, they would just stand there and watch her be murdered because she's a black woman?

And her tweet only said "not cool". If there was mortal danger, you'd think there'd be a bit more of a warning.

The most charitable way I can interpret it, is that she's trying to verbalize a genuine, if irrational, fear and unconscious thought process that drove her emotions in that moment. Talking about what "the body is saying" makes sense in that context.

Still, she is not quoted as saying something like "But I recognize that's irrational, and that tweeting would not save me if I were actually in imminent bodily danger." So my conclusion is also not favorable to her, or maybe that the article author has not been fair to her.

> When all evidence points in the opposite direction?

Hmmm, can't let that go. Look, everything done in that situation was a dickish thing, but Adria got dumped on in every exchange.

1. Guys enjoy a bit of innuendo without having the common sense to figure that it is inappropriate in the middle of a hall (quiet or not) at a professional conference. That's not cool.

2. Adria takes a photo and calls out the guys doing it to her followers on Twitter. That's not cool either.

3. A bunch of self-righteous twitter folks decide to make "Hank" pay, and tweet his boss demanding his job. Ugh.

4. His employers then fire him. WTF?

5. Internet shitstorm of epic proportion lands on Adria, rape and death threats, doxing, a DDoS attack on her employer, who is blackmailed to fire her. WTactualF?

I don't think anyone comes out of that smelling of roses. But "Hank" and Adria's misdemenours were pretty minor "could have done that better" or "could have been more considerate" stuff. There's no reason to assume any malice aforethought in either of them.

And more to the point, whatever "Hank" suffered, Adria was dumped on tenfold. So unsympathetic or not, we should all be really angry at the way Adria was treated. To suggest it her is attitude that hurts equality in tech is pretty low, I think. And, those of us who haven't been professionally assaulted, and personally threatened and hounded, should probably cut her a break before accusing her of doing it for profit.

Continue on in the story:

> Adria: "Maybe he’s to blame for complaining that he got fired. Maybe he secretly seeded the hate groups. Right?"

Um, no? With zero evidence, it's rather a big thing to accuse someone of.

She goes on:

> Adria replied that she was happy to hear that Hank “wasn’t active in driving their interests to mount the raid attack”, but that she held him responsible for it anyway.

So she accuses him. Then is told he didn't do anything. She persists in blaming him anyways. Apparently he's just guilty, full stop, no matter what he did?

Giving her a profit motive was actually intended as a compliment. As in, there's no way anyone can actually think it's fair or two same to blame someone for someone else's actions when there's no evidence it was their fault. Therefore, instead of just becoming another Lindsay Stone and painting over a past mistake, why not go all out, admit no fault, and gain followers that way? At least that makes sense.

The alternative is to actually believe she thinks it's fair to blame you if someone else acts on their own accord, but in your "favor". That's pretty horrific.

And I say that this incident, hurts equality, because the initiating episode isn't something that anyone should take seriously. Then, after all this abuse is piled on her, the same guy who made a joke is held responsible for an Internet mob. That distracts from the real problem, doesn't it?

(And as a "disclaimer", no one is excusing /b/, and it's stupid (and just weird) to 'shop porn pics and death threats. It draws attention away from the individual suffering.

But like groups that riot over cartoons, I don't think anyone expects to be talking to or convincing people taking part in the riot, right? What's an actual, useful, response, to the abuse Adria got? Does anyone support it? Does anyone think it's effective? Suppose I wanted to teach trolls a lesson or stand against them, how would I do that?)

You didn't get round to the point where all the evidence points in the other direction.

There's a lot in there about how and why you think Adria is unreasonable in her reaction to "Hank" and what happened. But that's not the same thing.

You're coming across as someone who feels they have a grievance against her. Particularly doubling down on the "profit motive" accusation. One that was, incidentally, used to incite against her in the initial onslaught.

> Does anyone support it? Does anyone think it's effective?

Would anyone rather talk about what Adria did and is doing wrong instead?

> You didn't get round to the point where all the evidence points in the other direction.

Wait, what? Where? I quoted from near the end of the section on Adria/Hank. After that it just mentions that he is a bit more careful, and Adria doesn't have a job. Where's the evidence?

Maybe I'm reading another story, because this one paints a very bad picture of Adria, basically having her throw accusations at this guy of inciting hate towards her, saying the guy was innocent, then saying he's to blame regardless. Could you tell me how I am misreading it, for real?

Sorry, I read your original comment about "the evidence points in the other direction" as being about the original incident, that's why I was expecting you to justify the point you didn't, in fact, make.

My apologies for deriding a made up argument.

Both were treated deplorably. "Hank" appears to have learned from it. Adria? If she's still beating up on the dude with three kids who got fired, I'm not sure she did.

I wonder if it is easier to 'learn from it' when a) it is clear what you did wrong was in breach of the rules of the conference you were in, b) you get a job pretty shortly afterwards, and c) you aren't threatened with death, rape and doxed out of your home and city.

I can imagine it is pretty hard to learn from it, in that case. So my natural default is to give her a huge amount of empathy in the situation. Especially given that I have no real likelihood of ever having to go through that myself.

"Hank" did get death threats, although nowhere near the level that Aidra got them.

It might not be as crazy as it sounds to you or me, who are guys.

Just like Internet mob mentalities can form, mob mentalities can form in real life. And it might not be a literal violent mob of people, but rather a collectively self-reinforcing sense of freedom from the normal constraints of society.

Conferences are the types of places where this sort of thing can happen, because almost everyone takes a break from their normal everyday life to go there. They're in a new location, often a fun one, and folks are explicitly relieved of their typical stresses and constraints. There's usually more free time and more drinking, and socializing with people one might never see again. There are more hookups and one-night-stands.

And so conferences do end up being places that women are harassed, groped, sometimes sexually assaulted. Tailhook is probably the most famous example, but certainly not the only one. Of course that sort of thing does not happen in the big ballroom during the keynote. It happens in the hallway, or in a hotel elevator, or the women's bathroom in an out-of-the-way corner, or outside a hotel room.

So a woman at a conference that is mostly men might know these things, and have her guard up. Even if she knows that it's unlikely that anything bad will happen, the consequences would be so horrifying that she might have an emotional reaction if she gets a bad feeling.

Important note: I am not saying that this particular conference had that problem. I'm just saying that her sense of danger might not be as crazy and unfounded as it sounds to guys like you and me.

The article quotes her as her suggesting she could be murdered, with 2000 bystanders looking on. That's considerably a bigger claim being made than assault in a hotel room or corner.

(OTOH, I'm fairly well convinced these threads are gonna go nowhere and reveal nothing interesting.)

She doesn't literally say that; the reference to being killed is a fairly well-known quote that attempts to illustrate that women often feel physically threatened in ways that men can't appreciate.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/188039-men-are-afraid-that-w...

> He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him.

It must get really tiring, carrying such a heavy chip on the shoulder. How is anybody supposed to know she's Jewish? If they did know and modified their behavior accordingly, they might end up being called bigoted. Is there any way to win this one in Richards's book?

"Could be inferred as offensive to me" -- wow. Again, how is anybody supposed to know what could offend you? If this is the standard for offense, it looks like the only winning move in communication is not to do any at all.

I'd feel worse about dredging this up so many months later, but Richards is active on Twitter lately arguing about it, so I'm not really opening old wounds. Maybe she has a legitimate beef about the exact timeline and chain of cause and effect as reported in the article, but righting that would really not make her look significantly better IMO. She dug her hole deeper in this new interview (at least the way it's presented to us), regardless of small errors it may have about the post.

P.S. Even if this is their fault for offending her with the joke, it doesn't follow that it's right for people to lose jobs over it. The article seems to suggest she intended that ("... people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.") Her justification for this disproportionate response is some mishmash of the offense, race, gender, and that the offender wasn't mentally retarded (seriously.)

"No one would have known he got fired until he complained... Maybe he’s to blame for complaining that he got fired." I can agree that it probably would have not turned so ugly if this fact hadn't come out. But this is not a card Richards can play without hypocrisy, IMO. They both experienced something negative in relative private, that provoked an emotional response that led them to post publicly about, that caused the "righteous pitchfork mobs" to react. If Richards had the right to tweet about the joke, "Hank" had the right to post his own negative aftermath on Hacker News. She found out the sword of righteous crusading on the internet cuts both ways, but does not admit her part in it.

Also, to be clear, I in no way condone the threats to Adria Richards and have mixed feelings about her losing her job.

She did, but HN doesn't come out looking very good either. The threats against her didn't start with her public tweet, they started with the dev's post here. That doesn't exactly imply good things about the HN audience/community.

(And if that feels unfairly negative to you, it might be a hint of how all the targets in this story feel.)

I'm reminded of the Roman Colosseum (albeit as portrayed in the movies). We are the mob, ready to boo and hiss and condemn a gladiator to death for the mistake of being on the wrong side of public opinion.

And since the internet does not forget, those convicted in the court of public opinion can never repent, can never reform, and can never make amends. Their lives from that day forward are defined by that history.

In a way, the chilling impact this has on our speech and our actions scares me a bit more than the government's effect on free speech. After all, the government's decisions can usually be challenged. The mob is, as phrased in the movie Gladiator, fickle. You could do nothing wrong and still be deprived of the ability to work, imprisoned by fear, all with no chance of appeal.

The bizarre side effect of online reputation management is the legions of writers that are being paid to produce content only for Google to "read".

I met such a writer in Europe a few years ago and interviewed her for a podcast: http://7thkingdom.org/2013/05/episode-12-writing-google-seo-...

It is odd when a writer makes more money writing for Algorithms than for humans.

There've been a few stories recently about internet shaming and their lasting effects.[1] Ironically, this seems to have caused old photos and negative articles to resurface.

Now if you search for [Lindsey Stone] you will once again see the original photo and the negative stories about it.

Her personal site and LinkedIn profile (presumably created by Reputation.com) are at the bottom of page 2... That is, nowhere to be found.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...

What this story really tells me is that what I considered to be an extreme application of political correctness has reached absolutely absurd levels. If I go down to the store and buy the materials and make an exact copy of this sign in my living room, take it down to the local park, put it down and take this picture, will people still be so offended? People need to get over themselves and ... in a word, I guess "grow up"? I don't know. But people take unimportant stuff way too seriously and don't take important things seriously enough.

Is the problem really with the substance of the complaints, though? Seems that the issue is more about the reaction and its massive scale... wouldn't it be the same problem if people were offended by something not having to do with political-correctness? For example, some religion-based complaint (like "look at this person doing work on a Sunday!"), or some arbitrary disagreement ("fucking hexagon patterns on a t-shirt?! What a jerkface!").

So I guess what I'm saying is it's the "extreme application" that's the problem, not the "of political correctness" part?

I agree that the extreme application is the bigger problem. I consider being politically correct a problem as well though because it creates a sense of entitlement. Now on its own that's not necessarily a terrible thing, it only really becomes a big problem when combined with the extreme application. But it does create an environment where the go-to response of "oh no, someone I've never met, across the country, did something I personally find offensive" is "I better start a crusade and get an apology for that!".

The joke about forking his repo was pretty good actually. Made me smile :)

Stories like this are why my disliking for people keeps growing. Why can't they let people do whatever they want without always feeling concerned?

This is the kind of thing justifying the Right to be Forgotten.

I live in Denmark and it would have been impossible for the employer to fire her here unless her job involved working with veterans etc.

However it's also almost impossible to fire much less likable individuals. Two cases come to mind:

1. Private company accidentally hires an openly Nazi right-wing extremist as a marketing intern. On the second day they discover his background and fire him but he sues them and win so the company is forced to pay him almost $5000.

2. This is very recent: The leader of an Islamophobic organization is also a child psychologist working for a Copenhagen municipality with many Muslim kids. 11 of his colleagues want him removed from the position and even though the case is ongoing, legal experts say that he is very likely to keep his job.

The Roman-derived justice systems are an attempt to stop this kind of behavior. The Rule of Law is the bulwark against "mob justice". It is utterly abhorrent.

It's also interesting how the perpetrators' victim-blame too.

We have done this to celebrities for decades with the caveat that they asked for this life when they decided to become a celebrity. Now with social media we all get a chance to make ourselves mini celebrities and there is a price to be paid.

I guess at this point it might be smart to have a class or two in school on how to interact online. Show people how once you put something online anyone can see it. And how something you think is funny can come back to haunt you. Forever.

> We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland

Perhaps many parents are now teaching their kids this. There's probably also many teaching their kids to attack first, by stripping away the privacy of their targets and smearing them.

You could argue that 4chan (as instigators in Adria Richards' harassment) aren't "normal people in a normal online community", maybe slightly less plausibly with Twitter users. But I see embryonic mobbing instigations on my Facebook all the time. I see middle-aged mothers posting horrific violent imprecations and "find out where that person lives" in response to news articles about some outrage or another. Ordinary people have this hate and desire in their hearts and aren't embarrassed to show it.

Wow, the OP opens with the longest side-anecdote I can recall from such an essay...it should be an essay in itself...though it doesn't really add much to the overall message of the piece. The public shaming that he instigated/felt happiness with was of a whole different magnitude than the kind Lindsey Stone underwent.

The academics as portrayed by OP are insufferable...they did write a kind of mea culpa afterwards (including claiming that they weren't behind the bot http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/30/how-bot...)...actually, OP's reaction to the spambot seemed a little over-the-top, though I'm only saying that in the context of Twitter abuse that people face today.

Edit: Maybe I shouldn't think of the headline as being the full representation of what this essay (book excerpt actually) is meant to cover...I'm surprised no one has discussed the Hacker News mention in the OP, specifically relating to the "dongle incident" at PyCon (maybe because most of us stopped reading after the comical description of what Reputation.com claims to do?)...I've always felt bad for Adria Richards, but equally bad for "Hank"...Richards did what those thousands of Lindsey-Stone haters did...make a snap judgement off of a seconds-long observation of someone much more complex than just his race, gender, and snarky jokes. And she nearly ruined his life. Let's not forget that...The harassment that happened to Richards is unconscionable, and I have no doubt that it ruined her life...but what she did also wrecked someone else's life...the fact that he was in a position to be able to recoup and stay anonymous (Richards waived that right when she tweeted to her followers) doesn't change that he, too, was unfairly punished by the Internet mob.

It's terrible what happened to Richards but she comes off extremely poorly in this article, like a caricature drawn by the stereotypical mens-rights-anti-feminist advocate.

> “Maybe it was [Hank] who started all of this,” Adria told me in the cafe at San Francisco airport. “No one would have known he got fired until he complained... Maybe he’s to blame for complaining that he got fired. Maybe he secretly seeded the hate groups. Right?”...Adria replied that she was happy to hear that Hank “wasn’t active in driving their interests to mount the raid attack”, but that she held him responsible for it anyway. It was “his own actions that resulted in his own firing, yet he framed it in a way to blame me… If I had a spouse and two kids to support, I certainly would not be telling ‘jokes’ like he was doing at a conference. Oh, but wait, I have compassion, empathy, morals and ethics to guide my daily life choices. I often wonder how people like Hank make it through life seemingly unaware of how ‘the other’ lives in the same world he does, but with countless fewer opportunities.”

I empathize with Richards as she thinks she was standing up against oppressive effects at a tech conference...but just because someone's a white guy with more privilege doesn't make them less human.

I personally don't think his reply was over the top. The academics didn't just use his name, they used his PHOTOGRAPH as well for their spambot. That makes it a personal attack on his good name and not just some generic thing. Reasonable people are going to think that the spam bot was him.

The vibe I got was that he started with that anecdote because he wanted to disclose straight out the time he publicly shamed some people and what the exact circumstances were. If he had not done so, people would have referred to that incident in the comments and he'd be on the defensive at that point. So he dealt with it instead as the lead, laying it all out. Another author writing a similar story who had not been in such a situation would not have to have that lead.

I find Richards considerably less sympathetic after reading this. My memory of that incident was that everyone involved regretted that it escalated to the point of people losing their jobs, but she shows no regret about the fact that her posts led to someone losing his job here.

It really seems to me that both employers are the real bad guys in that incident. In both cases, the most that should have happened to anyone was a reprimand.

Humans are still in our infancy with respect to this new global interconnectedness and instantaneous access to everything and everyone. I suspect that over time people will generally value access to the global stage, but they won't want to live on it. What we see now is in many ways just different facets of the impulsive desire for attention and that fleeting Warholian moment of specialness. I believe people will learn reticence again, and many of them will learn it the hard way.

I would love to read an interview of someone who goes on YouTube and posts those horrible comments we all see. That's the average human brain/life at work; it'd be so fascinating to understand how that somehow becomes common or acceptable.

For the most part, as you suggest, they're average/"normal" people. Many are probably young/immature but many I'm sure are not. If you called them on it, I imagine many would mumble a bit and say something to the effect that they were "just having fun."

Apposite: "Don't Pile On" - http://rc3.org/2015/02/14/dont-pile-on/

i'm in the future now and it's all high school, all the time.

Ok, so I'll be the one to say it. It seems to me that no one who's commented here served in the military. The threats that were given to this women are horrific, yes, she didn't deserve any of them. That being said, she should have never taken that picture, regardless of what excuse she had for taking it. And that being said, she should have known better than to post on social media. And that being said, she should have known about privacy settings. This is equivalent to walking around shouting racist terms on the streets and hiding behind free speech after someone attacks you. She didn't ask for any of the threats she received, but she also had exceptionally poor judgement.

She has a different sense of humor. To compare that to racism is absolutely ridiculous. Racism has negative intention. The picture and her sense of humor don't. The only reason it was poor judgement is that she didn't account for the politically correct idiots of this world making a big deal out of it. The rest of your points about not posting to social media are quite valid.

People died to preserve her democratic right to freedom of speech - and that freedom totally includes the right to make bad jokes.

I am a Marine, and HN is the first I have seen of this picture.

Most know better & keep their mouths shut since it serves no purpose to further fan the flames, even if it is something disrespectful - that is part of what it means to serve. All in the Armed Forces know that they help defend the right for people to say/do what they want, as long as it is lawful.

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