Curt Schilling Fights Back Against Daughter’s Twitter Trolls
onlyagame.wbur.org
onlyagame.wbur.org
https://38pitches.wordpress.com/2015/03/01/the-world-we-live...
From the ScotusBlog summary: Issue: (1) Whether, consistent with the First Amendment and Virginia v. Black, conviction of threatening another person under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) requires proof of the defendant's subjective intent to threaten, as required by the Ninth Circuit and the supreme courts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont; or whether it is enough to show that a “reasonable person” would regard the statement as threatening, as held by other federal courts of appeals and state courts of last resort; and (2) whether, as a matter of statutory interpretation, conviction of threatening another person under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) requires proof of the defendant's subjective intent to threaten.
[1] http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/elonis-v-united-s...
I think there is a line to be drawn somewhere between here and pycon (two men talking privately about something that could be understood as offensive).
That said I am surprised about two things:
* People trying to argue that this should not be punished because everyone would do if they were safe from repercussions. I strongly believe that a big chunk of the audience here would not steal, kill etc without reason even if they were sure not to get caught.
* People suggesting this should be in public registers etc. This story is most likely already a real problem for a few of those guys.
Side note: They are not alone. I've recently been reading several seemingly normal grown up people signed in with facebook accounts stating how they think a certain country should be nuked.
Edit: as tzakrajs points out these incidents are completely different and that was actually what I meant but I fully understand why it could be read as "a line connecting those incidents." My bad.
The PyCon incident was a moment of incalculable oversensitivity and probably should just be forgotten when considering the spectrum for which you hope to draw a line on.
Thanks for the comment! I fully agree that these to events are totally different (and that was kind of my point, -to separate between victims of real harassment and professional victims.)
PyCon staff of course will be sycophantic with upset
guests because they hate bad press.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5412553
There were plenty of overreactions in that case; Adria Richards for choosing to publicly shame rather than either talk privately with the developers in question or simply bring it to the PyCon organizers' attention, Play Haven for choosing to fire him over such a minor incident rather than simply giving him a warning, SendGrid for choosing to fire Adria rather than try to work with her to try and bring her behavior more into line with acceptable public relations, and a large number of people on the internet for going way beyond the boundaries of civil behavior in harassing people on both sides of the debate.
But among all of those over-reactions, from all accounts, the PyCon organizers behaved eminently reasonably.
I don't think her initial reaction was a good one, but it certainly didn't justify all the stuff that followed. Her apparent pattern of reacting loudly to small offenses ( https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/ ) also isn't something to become angry and outraged over. I'm not sure how to handle that, but I'm sure it won't involve death threats.
> by people that were extremely angered by something that should have been easily dismissed as a mistake.
It was a pretty big mistake on her part, going on for days and as far as I am aware she never apologized.
> Her apparent pattern of reacting loudly to small offenses ... also isn't something to become angry and outraged over.
Also not when it costs two people their jobs?
Conveniently, my argument is that the incident itself didn't deserve all the negative attention it got (it should have mostly been ignored), and in the absence of all that negative attention, Hank probably would not have lost his job.
Also, my point was to respond to the comparison you made:
And here folks I guess we have a real case of harassment.
I think there is a line to be drawn somewhere between here and pycon (two men talking privately about something that could be understood as offensive).
There's very little denouncement of the dongle joke. There's wide agreement that it wasn't outrageous. It wasn't the remarkable thing about the incident, merely the first thing that happened. Yet you've characterized 'pycon' as being on the other side of some line that defines real harassment.
If someone start a fire in a building then they would be stupid to argue that the reason people got hurt was because firemen didn't react quickly enough.
There is no doubt she started it, she could have prevented all this from happening in the first place.
* She took offence over a private conversation between
two others.
* She publicly shamed them by including the picture etc.
That said, yes, a lot of interesting decisions here.
Anyway, again, my point was that there was internet hate machine harassment following the incident at Pycon, following from some minor thing that should not really even catch the interest of strangers, just like in this story.
At one data entry job I had I got paid for piece work, instead of by the hour. One time they screwed up the math and overpaid me, by a lot (nearly a whole paycheck worth). It took a lot to convince the people in charge that they'd fucked up and needed to take the money back.
Philosophically, I think there's a long overdue conversation to be had about non-physical harm. Our kids know how to treat cuts and bruises, or how to get help with a broken bone. But what about damage that gets caused inside? If you think about it, not only is the old "sticks and stones" mantra false, it's downright misleading. What's the worst pain you've ever experienced? Was it caused by physical pain, or words?
Thankfully, this is not an absolute fact, as otherwise people (including many activists) would be routinely jailed for obvious rhetorical techniques said in jest: http://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-01/43-threat...
https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/investigation-online-gat...
At that point, as he mentioned, many of these people were college athletes, so their names would also show up on rosters and various campus newspaper accounts of games.
While it is possible to harass anonymously if you try, it's pretty likely that many of these people didn't even try; they just didn't think and said the first thing that came to mind that they knew would get a rise out of Curt Schilling.
On what planet is that ok?
How do you feel about the threats of violence made by Curt against those people?
Then he explained that's not an option for him.
I want to date your daughter, I want to take your
daughter to prom, I want to hit on your daughter etc.,
those? Those are guys being dopes and saying what guys
say. This stuff? This is so far off the radar it’s
pathetic.
Graphic descriptions of rape and violence against a minor are a completely different ballpark.
Should he not have made the "special forces" comment? Maybe. That's what showed people that they could get under his skin by making comments about his daughter, so some people took that and escalated quickly. But I don't think anyone would read that as any actual threat, and the people who escalated and graphically described raping his daughter are fully responsible for their own actions.
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1563667-boxer-curtis-wood...
Of course, this is not a practical answer as we'd have everyone driving around everyday trying to locate assholes, but I can't help but feel good about the troll being exposed as a coward. Like in those fight videos where the bully gets it. I hate watching fights, hate watching real-life violence, but the bully getting what he deserves is an exception.
"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from repercussions"? Perhaps not, but anonymity sure does, and people who want to say ugly or cruel things will avail themselves of anonymity. In fact, those people would be the most likely to use anonymity, since it's cost is easily outweighed by the risk of those disproportionate retaliations.
So, I ask you, does retaliating against stuff like this tell people it isn't OK, or does it tell them that they need to be anonymous? What about when parts of the world conflict on whether a globally-distributed statement is OK?
This is no different to real life.
Compare that with someone sufficiently invulnerable, Obama for instance. Or even Chuck Norris.
The other fact is that with a large audience, it'd be silly not to expect that some percentage would be murderers/rapists/other unsavoury types. Getting a dozen offensive tweets out of a million-strong audience is still only 0.000012%, orders of magnitude less than the actual threat of rape.
Here's your answer then. It's not, and it never will be.
When these horrible tweets are made, there's always a contingent who says that the target should ignore them. You probably should if they are completely anonymous. But if they aren't - have at 'em!
I think of taking precautions online as being like defensive driving (or any kind of risk management really). If Alice gets sideswiped on the highway because Bob was on his cell phone and didn't check his blind spot, Bob maybe gets charged with failure to maintain the lane or something like that. Doesn't Alice share some responsibility by recognizing that Bob, being on his cell phone, posed an elevated risk and managing accordingly (say by changing to a more distant lane)?
Secondly, you should be able to congratulate your daughter on Twitter regardless of your status as a public person.
I can't be held responsible for your actions. Making an innocent tweet about your daughter is not something you should have to be worried about. That's chilling freedom of expression! So you can't be a proud dad because some arsehole might threaten to rape your daughter? Give me a break.
I agree that Alice in my example doesn't have any legal fault for the accident. Maybe this is a cultural difference, but as I see it she does share some responsibility for being in the accident if she didn't make a best-effort attempt using known-good practices to avoid it. All drivers share that responsibility.
I'm assuming you see it happening as you drive past. But do you look into each car intently to see what the driver is doing? I see drivers on phones, but I'm sure I don't see all of them. I'm normally aching the traffic and the way they are braking/swerving to determine if the driver is someone to keep clear of.
There is no cultural difference on this one that I'm aware of. In Australia you must be aware of what is going on around you on the road. But you asked about victim blaming - I think someone above expressed it better than me, and you thanked them for their post. That's the one I'm going with :-)
Er, yeah, it is. The victim always knows they exercised "poor risk management", to some degree. You don't need to reinforce that point. It's not what the takeaway lesson should ever be. It detracts attention (and implicitly averts blame) from the perpetrator.
We don't aspire to live in a world where "risk management" becomes the takeaway lesson from events perpetrated by conscious actors (i.e. you should always exercise risk management when it comes to things like hurricanes).
Because then you start saying things like:
"She shouldn't have been walking alone at night."
"She shouldn't have been wearing that dress."
"If he didn't want to get raped he shouldn't have gone to prison."
This is a delicate issue. The answer to your question has to be: No, not per se...
However there are some other things to keep in mind:
() If one suggests that the victim's poor risk management absolves the perpetrator of responsibility in the slightest degree, then one is definitely blaming the victim.
() Sometimes that subtext -- that the perpetrator is not fully responsible -- is present but not stated explicitly. So I think people are often right to be aware of the possibility that that's underneath what is being said.
() On the other hand, sometimes that subtext is absolutely not intended, but is heard anyway. A lot of people have trouble with the notion that two parties to an interaction are both 100% responsible for their own choices. And someone recently victimized may not be emotionally ready to look at how they allowed it to happen. So one must be careful here; but sometimes, if one wants to get the point across, it's necessary to emphasize that the perpetrator is still totally responsible for their own actions.
So in your example, if you were to suggest that Bob's fine should be reduced because Alice could have prevented the accident, that would be victim blaming. But if you're only saying that Alice could learn from this (to be more alert, to try to stay out of other people's blind spots, and to watch out for nearby drivers using cell phones) then that isn't victim blaming.
This, or threat of murder or serious injury should be not acceptable in any form.
You have a complete history of a users tweets and a record of how long the person has been active, number of followers, textual analysis of the tweets, block/mute status with respect to other people, whether you follow ect. It seems like it should be really easy for twitter to put messages into a spam/harassment folder, never to be seen by the target.
...Really?
Edit: Not only would this alter a core and fundamental aspect of how Twitter currently operates but it would certainly be non-trivial to implement in an unobtrusive manner.
Who wants what blocked? Is there a generic 'spam/abuse' filter? Is it on by default? Are those tweets put into a spam/abuse section or entirely unviewable. What happens when someone sends a tweet that is blocked by the filter, are they notified?
Try to clearly define what metrics/identifiers you would use to determine a tweet is offensive and should be blocked and then call this implementation trivial.
As a father myself, this kind of behaviour makes me sick and I cannot understand people who feel they need to defend these kinds of sick comments.
On an unrelated note, I think you win the best username award :P
I'm sure the guys who penned the constitution would agree that it wasn't about giving you the freedom to act like a jackass without repercussions.
Although many of these tweets clearly cross the line of tastelessness, how many sexual jokes/innuendos are less obvious and more controversial about whether they are tasteless? We don't need to criminalize this. Nobody's rights are being violated, in my opinion. We shouldn't be using the criminal system unless there is a clear threat of violence, not just some internet trolls trying to get a reaction out of a celebrity....
"Teach me your knuckleball technique so I can fist your daughter"
You really think this is a creditable threat of violence and not someone trying to make a very, very, very poor taste joke? There are very few tweets I would even consider threats, most were just scumbags trying to get some twitter fame by making terrible baseball sexual innuendos.
There are other ones like "Kurt bleeds more from his sock than gaby does when shes on her period" that in no way could even be construed as a threat, but I feel they are getting lumped into the same category, simply because they are distasteful.
Didn't the gamergate lady have actual threats on her life? I know her information was doxxed and people actually put her house in their threats.
I disagree completely, especially in the eyes of the law. If a comedian says he's going to kill someone, nobody is going to prosecute him. Threats have to be creditable. The tweets posted by Kurt all make some reference to his baseball career and then try to use that to make sexual jokes about his daughter. They are just terrible jokes and should be socially ostracized, but we should not be using the legal system to punish these kinds of tweets. The line is too unclear. None of the posted tweets contain any serious threat that doesn't contain some baseball innuendo, at least the ones Kurt published. There is a difference if someone said e.g. "I'm going to rape your daughter when she gets here" and that tweeter lives in the town of the school. One might be able to consider that creditable. We don't prosecute people who make others scared, we prosecute people that we believe have a creditable chance of harming another human being.
(Or might I suggest you read up on KotakuInAction on reddit and tell me how it is anywhere borderline close to this?)
… and, yes, it's rather relevant: GamerGate started with a bunch of people on 4chan attacking a stranger on social media at the behest of her ex-boyfriend but it escalated quickly to coordinated harassment on a bunch of different forms of electronic media and attempts to bring it close to home with real-world stalking at work & conferences, SWATing, etc.
That's the problem here: the people who started it might have had no intention of anything beyond enjoying making someone else unhappy but they repeated things widely and loudly enough that other people fell for the cover story and escalated it further.
The ideaisn't too bad in this particular case when the question is "what do gamergaters write?" : )
> repeated things widely and loudly enough that other people fell for the cover story and escalated it further.
this reminds me of someone else.
[1] http://www.crimeandfederalism.com/2015/01/gamergate-swatting...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditoftheday/comments/2yb80x/m...
Now you start reading before making assumptions!
SERIOUSLY: The reddit link is about KiA being subreddit-of-the-day.
The other link is about the Swot[sic] team, and it is NOT on reddit.
Now you wait until you are sober and/or ready to read before you comment : )
If you have reason to believe otherwise, please bring the links. ;-)
(Now, if you don't mind, take a minute to consider what you have just said in your last comments.)
And you still haven't provided evidence of anything else.
As the sign next to the radios used to say: think-push-speak.
I'm trying to point out that you are acting as if you have already made up you mind: whatever the facts, gg-ers are wrong.
In this case it seems you are, among other things, denying that KiA is Subreddit-of-the-day. Which is very easy to prove.
I suggest you read through this very carefully and find out exactly what you commented on instead of jumping to conclusions[1]. Because, you know, -this isn't reddit.
[1]: Protip: This often a good idea elsewhere as well.
Please though, stop making personal attacks.
> Please though, stop making personal attacks.
Sorry. My apologies for that. Will stop.
That said, you're linking to a post written by Mike Cernovitch, one of the more vociferous people in GamerGate, where he's making the popular argument that he's the real victim here.
Again, let's review the evidence: if you read more than the headline it's immediately obvious that there was no actual SWATing or even threat to do so and, more importantly, none of it was done by Zoe Quinn. The person who actually posted his address used the information which he'd listed on a business directory before removing it and apologizing:
https://medium.com/@ManfredVonKarma/mike-cernovich-based-law...
The key thing, of course, is that he wouldn't have been able to use a stranger’s actions to justify the anti-Zoe hate campaign. If you read it closely, notice how each claim in the article starts with something true but then adds unsupported insinuations that Zoe was masterminding it in an effort to shift the ire to her rather than the person who actually wrote the post.
The Guardian article is probably right in naming baphomet (on 8chan), but then follows it up with some very shady language to link it with KiA. I have visited baphomet a few times, and they seem to be doing their own thing, whatever that may be.
As far as I know, Reddit has very strict policies in place to discourage doxxing (except on r/doxme). KotakuInAction, the one you called gamergate's organizing site, cannot be involved in doxxing. Though I'm not a regular reader, I visit it every few weeks to see what they're up to. Not only have I not seen any doxxing there, I have seen threads discouraging such behavior. Also see their Rule #2: "This is the quickest way to a ban, not just from us, but the Reddit admins. Seriously, don’t do it. Take every effort to ensure that your posts do not include any personal information, especially in screenshots."
The one thing which I would bet on is that if something bad did happen – and given that her dad is a celebrity hated in some circles, that's less hypothetical than it might seem in your first reaction – there would be people coming out of the woodwork to ask why she didn't report it.
Threats are also illegal under 18 U.S. Code § 875(c). Even if there was no intent to carry out the threat, if the threat can be interpreted by a reasonable person as being intended to cause fear, it counts as a true threat. [1]
[1] https://verdict.justia.com/2014/12/10/supreme-court-consider...
Even a reading of a cursory summary of this case would have told you this. Did you actually read the outcome?
However, even if you would not feel differently, I don't think all of the people who said what they did would even have the nerve to say those things in person. The internet creates this imbalance where the effect of actions is felt much more by the recipient than the actor. This, at least, is not a good thing, and a slightly different context than a comedian making a tasteless joke.
How is she to know or understand that they're not next door, or down the street?
To me, the best kind of sanction for this is exactly what's happening: social shaming and exclusion. But it falls quite a bit short of something that requires legal involvement.
A good deterrent to making these kind of public comments is the social pressure of others around you knowing that you in fact act/think this horrible way.
This, or threat of murder or serious injury should be not acceptable in any form.
Ridiculous. Maybe we should prosecute people who talk about overthrowing the government on twitter with treason - they're threats! And safety is important!
These threats on the internet aren't acceptable, but neither is your reaction to them. There is a vast difference between threatening someone and actually doing something, and the way our criminal justice system treats sexual crimes borders on cruel and unusual.
You're saying that someone should have the rest of their life ruined because they made a lewd threat on the internet? We've all heard the story of the kid who went streaking on a dare but happened to be near a playground so now he's labeled a sexual predator for the rest of his life. Do you really think that is a good response to this kind of thing?
>As a father myself, this kind of behaviour makes me sick and I cannot understand people who feel they need to defend these kinds of sick comments.
Punishing someone won't ease the anxiety you feel about the safety of your kids; there will always be something else waiting to ruin their innocence. You probably confuse people saying your reaction to these comments is extreme with people defending the comments. Regardless, you want to label someone a sexual predator so that you can feel better about the fact that you're scared for your kids. That is disgusting and scarier to me than anonymous threats to my family on the internet.
> ...labeled as sexual criminals and placed on a register.
I understand you're pointing out the fact that grandparent said "if convicted," but parent's point is that _even if convicted_, being put on a registry for the rest of your life is extreme.
..and if convicted..
The case in point relates to harassment and threats of rape here.
What part of that isn't illegal exactly?
Since when did this become acceptable?
I don't think this crime should go on that special list. I think a reasonable maximum for this crime is a few months in prison, similar to misdemeanor battery.
If that was the point you were making, I apologise as I misunderstood you.
Schilling took a stand and it seems like he got decent justice as it is. Why the knee jerk reaction that more laws must be needed?
It wouldn't be acceptable if she was 30 or 90.
The solution is quite simple: if you're not willing to ignore trolls, don't use this kind of social network.
You should NOT drag your family into the business, not even if PR person will tell you that it increases your brand equity.
I am saddened by the responses I have seen below from HNers.
The story relates to sexual threats of violence and rape of a minor. I stated that the offenders should be prosecuted and IF CONVICTED dealt with strictly under the applicable laws.
Our society is slipping into a nasty place where people feel that it is quite appropriate and acceptable to threaten and harass others online.
I think that it is a practice that needs to be stamped out, regardless of whether the threats are by men against women or vice versa; racial, homophobic or religious.
It shouldn't be tolerated by the mainstream, which when you look on twitter, often appears to be the case.
As in the physical world, behavior on the Internet must be governed.
To begin with, the physical world doesn't have a single standard of ethical or moral behavior, as it varies subtly or greatly by jurisdiction.
The Internet doesn't really have the same territorial boundaries that are presently vital to the functioning of humans in the physical world, either. Of course there has been some legislation on the matter and many have tried to assert jurisdictional power (famously in file sharing cases), but those are all highly volatile concepts.
Indeed, each site chooses its own specific rules and guidelines. They're globally accessible, ad-hoc jurisdictions in of themselves, in many ways.
Finally, the web application platforms themselves are not entirely blameless. They've created highly gamified, bizarro worlds where people are signaled and conditioned to engage in forced and obnoxious "social" behavior that many would consider totally histrionic and narcissistic if done in the physical world. The need to post every picture, to post every vapid thought in a global public bazaar... most humans simply aren't used to such a thing, and evidently cannot cope with the repercussions of it, either.
Governing behavior on the Internet is doomed to end in an ambiguous mess without enacting ID laws that would subvert its purpose.