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usernamenumberUpdate Since my post, the author of the original post has posted a follow-up that provides a lot more about her side. It should definitely be read by anyone who reads what I have to say below. I'll comment on this and some of the discussion that's ensued below. (h/t ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zombie_dog) /Update
There's a tweet I saw getting RT'd a lot today, which read:
"Death Threats and Hate Crimes, Attacks on Women Bloggers Escalating http://bit.ly/oLNYy3 Please RT"
The link goes to this post by a blogger and business consultant named Naomi Dunford. The short version of the post is that it begins by describing two sites, which she dubs "mean site 1" and "mean site 2", but does not link to. She says of mean site 1, "The owner of this website didn’t seem to like me very much. As a successful woman on the internet, this is hardly surprising". She goes on to describe how the owner of mean site 2, whom she dubs a "hate blogger", found mean site 1, latched on to the hate for her, and sent her threatening emails, while bunches of his followers started sending her death threats.
I strongly support the anti-threat, anti-hate message of the many RTs I saw, and I'm a bit nervous about even posting this for fear of seeming victim-blaming, but upon reading the actual post, I have to admit to finding myself... dubious with regard to this specific instance. For one thing, any web-based content that cites linkable material but doesn't link to it is automatically suspect in my book. Linking is easy, and especially when someone who appears to be a professional blogger eschews good practice to make it it difficult for the reader to do anything but take her word on what the other guy said... well, like I said, I was dubious. That and, call me naive, but I at least like to think that nowadays, imperfect as the state of gender may be, "I'm a successful woman on the internet" alone is hardly reason for most people to be as pissed off at a random business consultant as the post described.
Fortunately, the post had enough quotations from mean site 2 that I was able to track it down, and through it I found mean site 1. These, it turns out, yield a lot of relevant information.
"Mean Site 1" is Letters to Dave Navarro, which is a site set up by the titular Dave's brother as an attempt (if one takes the purpose of the site at face value) to get through to said Dave with pleas of reconciliation after he purportedly left his wife and kids, changed all their banking passwords, refused any attempts at contact via phone, email, sms, etc, and (as far as I've been able to piece together) eventually shacked up, still incommunicado with the wife and kids, with... Naomi Dunford (search the ltdn homepage for her name for references to this).
Now, does this make death threats against Dunford ok? Of course not. But at least to me, the fact that she dubbed Letters To Dave Navarro "mean site 1", said only of its content that the owner of the site had it in for her because she's a successful woman, and made it as difficult as possible for readers to see the site for themselves, warrants a raised eyebrow for the other things she has to say. Maybe I'm being overly harsh, but there it is.
...and speaking of overly harsh, that brings us to "mean site 2".
"Mean site 2" is The Salty Droid. I do not like this site. It is, in fact, a mean site. The owner is juvenile and foul-mouthed, but I will say this in as close to a defense as I'll come of him: his site is devoted to delivering this vitrolic name calling to online "marketeers" who the site's proprietor believes to be dishonestly taking advantage of their clientele, he's been doing it for a lot longer than Dunford has been on his radar, and he seems to level the same amount of juvenile vitriol toward targets regardless of gender. The common thread among said targets is that they are online marketing gurus of the type that Ms Dunford seems to be (by this I mean no personal assertion re the integrity of what she does, just that she seems squarely in the demographic of which Salty Droid is critical).
This Dunford calls "hate blogging".
Salty Droid posted a response to Dunford's article here. Be warned, the post is not pretty, and I did not leave with a positive impression of its author, but he did add at least one important piece of information if (and to be honest I'm unsure how big of an 'if' this is) what he says can be taken at face value.
In her post, Dunford says that the owner of "mean site 2" (AKA Salty Droid) sent her "a harassing email... ending it with 'I guess I’ll see you around'".
Ok, that's pretty creepy, and I would feel threatened if I got that too.
In his post, Salty Droid reproduces what he claims to be the complete email he sent her. Setting aside the fact that while I'd call the email mildly insulting, and certainly not friendly, "harassing" seems a stretch to me-- read it for yourself if you can deal with his patronizing tone, it ends with "Anywayz :: I guess I’ll see you around the cyberspaces!". Especially given the context of this being an email from one blogger to another, that "the cyberspaces", at least to my mind, makes a huge difference.
Of course, Salty Droid could be lying, but the way I see it, on the one side we've got Dunford, who has already demonstrated a willingness to mischaracterize her opponents and hide, if not alter, information for her benefit, and on the other we have Salty Droid, who is a dick, reproducing a dickish email that he claims to have sent her.
If Salty Droid is not lying, then at this point I find myself loathe to take anything in Dunford's post at face value, which conflicts with my wish to not be dismissive of something as serious as an allegation of death threats, especially those motivated by gender or other immutable traits.
Really, of course, I don't know how much of what she says is true. But the fact that so much of it seems deceptive has been eating at me all day. I feel like an idiot when I realize that, essentially, what I'm whining about is the fact that I can't take random people on the internet at their words, but damn it wouldn't the world be a better place if one could, about this, at least? Wouldn't it be nice if I didn't feel a little sick every time a message with which I wholeheartedly agree, "Death threats are bad! Hate speech is bad! Sexism is bad! It ends now!" gets RT'd with a link to someone who, I'll just say it, I suspect is subverting the facts to make herself look more sympathetic at best and lying at worst?
If the message is supposed to be that threats of violence are never OK, what message is she sending by acting as though she has to villainize her critics and alter their words to sound more threatening for whatever actual threats she's received (assuming she has received any) to be not-OK?
Between this and the Demand Progress thing (and follow-up), I'm in a very bad mood re humanity right now. I try to take allegations of injustice, violence, rape, threats of same, etc seriously, just like I think most decent people do nowadays, and it pisses me the hell off when I see evidence of someone taking advantage of that. It is vital that "it's very rare for someone to actually lie about this kind of thing" remain a defensible position in order for real victims to get the treatment and justice that they deserve. A stupid pissing contest between bloggers is NOT worth making it harder for people to believe victims!
Finally, if any of the threats she describes are real, I hope she's reported them to the police, and not just her blog.
(Since someone's already asked, permission is granted to anyone who wants to link here. I'd be saying this in direct response to the post, but Dunford doesn't allow comments on her blog)
Comments on the update
I'm not sure what to do with this. In reading the situation described in the follow-up post, I really sympathize with her predicament... and am all the more confused. Why did she initially imply that the owner of "mean site 1" was only out to get her because she is a successful woman, and not that he's a psycho who thinks she's sleeping with his brother and that God told him that that's bad? And what about the comments from Salty Droid that seemed to have been taken out of context or outright altered? Why did she do that?
I care a lot about this issue, and have been sick with worry today considering the suggestion that I've contributed to the problem, rather than a solution. But what does one do when someone's claims of victimhood are demonstrably misleading and manipulative at best? Say nothing, because support for the cause is support for the cause, or say "we do not tolerate deception about this", when that statement can be taken advantage of by the other side?
Then what do you do when that person posts version 2 of her story and it's much more compelling, but you've already been bitten by what still look like previous attempts at manipulation?
Answer: I have no fucking clue. :(
Update II: I think this thread provides a good epilogue to the post.
zombie_dog) /UpdateThere's a tweet I saw getting RT'd a lot today, which read:
"Death Threats and Hate Crimes, Attacks on Women Bloggers Escalating http://bit.ly/oLNYy3 Please RT"
The link goes to this post by a blogger and business consultant named Naomi Dunford. The short version of the post is that it begins by describing two sites, which she dubs "mean site 1" and "mean site 2", but does not link to. She says of mean site 1, "The owner of this website didn’t seem to like me very much. As a successful woman on the internet, this is hardly surprising". She goes on to describe how the owner of mean site 2, whom she dubs a "hate blogger", found mean site 1, latched on to the hate for her, and sent her threatening emails, while bunches of his followers started sending her death threats.
I strongly support the anti-threat, anti-hate message of the many RTs I saw, and I'm a bit nervous about even posting this for fear of seeming victim-blaming, but upon reading the actual post, I have to admit to finding myself... dubious with regard to this specific instance. For one thing, any web-based content that cites linkable material but doesn't link to it is automatically suspect in my book. Linking is easy, and especially when someone who appears to be a professional blogger eschews good practice to make it it difficult for the reader to do anything but take her word on what the other guy said... well, like I said, I was dubious. That and, call me naive, but I at least like to think that nowadays, imperfect as the state of gender may be, "I'm a successful woman on the internet" alone is hardly reason for most people to be as pissed off at a random business consultant as the post described.
Fortunately, the post had enough quotations from mean site 2 that I was able to track it down, and through it I found mean site 1. These, it turns out, yield a lot of relevant information.
"Mean Site 1" is Letters to Dave Navarro, which is a site set up by the titular Dave's brother as an attempt (if one takes the purpose of the site at face value) to get through to said Dave with pleas of reconciliation after he purportedly left his wife and kids, changed all their banking passwords, refused any attempts at contact via phone, email, sms, etc, and (as far as I've been able to piece together) eventually shacked up, still incommunicado with the wife and kids, with... Naomi Dunford (search the ltdn homepage for her name for references to this).
Now, does this make death threats against Dunford ok? Of course not. But at least to me, the fact that she dubbed Letters To Dave Navarro "mean site 1", said only of its content that the owner of the site had it in for her because she's a successful woman, and made it as difficult as possible for readers to see the site for themselves, warrants a raised eyebrow for the other things she has to say. Maybe I'm being overly harsh, but there it is.
...and speaking of overly harsh, that brings us to "mean site 2".
"Mean site 2" is The Salty Droid. I do not like this site. It is, in fact, a mean site. The owner is juvenile and foul-mouthed, but I will say this in as close to a defense as I'll come of him: his site is devoted to delivering this vitrolic name calling to online "marketeers" who the site's proprietor believes to be dishonestly taking advantage of their clientele, he's been doing it for a lot longer than Dunford has been on his radar, and he seems to level the same amount of juvenile vitriol toward targets regardless of gender. The common thread among said targets is that they are online marketing gurus of the type that Ms Dunford seems to be (by this I mean no personal assertion re the integrity of what she does, just that she seems squarely in the demographic of which Salty Droid is critical).
This Dunford calls "hate blogging".
Salty Droid posted a response to Dunford's article here. Be warned, the post is not pretty, and I did not leave with a positive impression of its author, but he did add at least one important piece of information if (and to be honest I'm unsure how big of an 'if' this is) what he says can be taken at face value.
In her post, Dunford says that the owner of "mean site 2" (AKA Salty Droid) sent her "a harassing email... ending it with 'I guess I’ll see you around'".
Ok, that's pretty creepy, and I would feel threatened if I got that too.
In his post, Salty Droid reproduces what he claims to be the complete email he sent her. Setting aside the fact that while I'd call the email mildly insulting, and certainly not friendly, "harassing" seems a stretch to me-- read it for yourself if you can deal with his patronizing tone, it ends with "Anywayz :: I guess I’ll see you around the cyberspaces!". Especially given the context of this being an email from one blogger to another, that "the cyberspaces", at least to my mind, makes a huge difference.
Of course, Salty Droid could be lying, but the way I see it, on the one side we've got Dunford, who has already demonstrated a willingness to mischaracterize her opponents and hide, if not alter, information for her benefit, and on the other we have Salty Droid, who is a dick, reproducing a dickish email that he claims to have sent her.
If Salty Droid is not lying, then at this point I find myself loathe to take anything in Dunford's post at face value, which conflicts with my wish to not be dismissive of something as serious as an allegation of death threats, especially those motivated by gender or other immutable traits.
Really, of course, I don't know how much of what she says is true. But the fact that so much of it seems deceptive has been eating at me all day. I feel like an idiot when I realize that, essentially, what I'm whining about is the fact that I can't take random people on the internet at their words, but damn it wouldn't the world be a better place if one could, about this, at least? Wouldn't it be nice if I didn't feel a little sick every time a message with which I wholeheartedly agree, "Death threats are bad! Hate speech is bad! Sexism is bad! It ends now!" gets RT'd with a link to someone who, I'll just say it, I suspect is subverting the facts to make herself look more sympathetic at best and lying at worst?
If the message is supposed to be that threats of violence are never OK, what message is she sending by acting as though she has to villainize her critics and alter their words to sound more threatening for whatever actual threats she's received (assuming she has received any) to be not-OK?
Between this and the Demand Progress thing (and follow-up), I'm in a very bad mood re humanity right now. I try to take allegations of injustice, violence, rape, threats of same, etc seriously, just like I think most decent people do nowadays, and it pisses me the hell off when I see evidence of someone taking advantage of that. It is vital that "it's very rare for someone to actually lie about this kind of thing" remain a defensible position in order for real victims to get the treatment and justice that they deserve. A stupid pissing contest between bloggers is NOT worth making it harder for people to believe victims!
Finally, if any of the threats she describes are real, I hope she's reported them to the police, and not just her blog.
(Since someone's already asked, permission is granted to anyone who wants to link here. I'd be saying this in direct response to the post, but Dunford doesn't allow comments on her blog)
Comments on the update
I'm not sure what to do with this. In reading the situation described in the follow-up post, I really sympathize with her predicament... and am all the more confused. Why did she initially imply that the owner of "mean site 1" was only out to get her because she is a successful woman, and not that he's a psycho who thinks she's sleeping with his brother and that God told him that that's bad? And what about the comments from Salty Droid that seemed to have been taken out of context or outright altered? Why did she do that?
I care a lot about this issue, and have been sick with worry today considering the suggestion that I've contributed to the problem, rather than a solution. But what does one do when someone's claims of victimhood are demonstrably misleading and manipulative at best? Say nothing, because support for the cause is support for the cause, or say "we do not tolerate deception about this", when that statement can be taken advantage of by the other side?
Then what do you do when that person posts version 2 of her story and it's much more compelling, but you've already been bitten by what still look like previous attempts at manipulation?
Answer: I have no fucking clue. :(
Update II: I think this thread provides a good epilogue to the post.
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 05:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 06:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 12:50 pm (UTC)That being said, thank you for the research. It's sad that in this case, someone seems to be co-opting this issue for vindictive reasons.
I feel a bit conflicted on whether to link back here as you asked people to do on Twitter. Does people reading a debunking hurt the cause? I suppose I will, though, because the truth is too important, and my Twitter readers should be treated like adults.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 01:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 01:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 01:52 pm (UTC)Ultimately I reached the conclusion that if people don't also say "NO!" when someone tries to take advantage of the growing willingness to say "NO!" to harassment, assault, etc, then the latter becomes all the more vulnerable.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 02:53 pm (UTC)-Cyberbullying/hate crimes exist. Maybe against women, maybe bloggers.
-One woman on the internet accused others of hate crimes.
-Woman's lover, it turns out, is a dick, family is trying to pressure him back into a communication/not-screwing-his-family situation. Woman feels threatened by this public plea. Maybe because she thinks this will be your typical "blame the other woman" scenario, maybe some other reason. Unclear.
-Salty Droid is also a dick, and had some nasty stuff to say about same woman. It was colorful, and probably not worth saying. It is in dispute what was actually said in email, which may or may not have contained language suggesting her not being around any more, which could, given his admitted dislike of the woman, be construed as a death threat.
Basically it's still in dispute whether there were death threats, and it's unclear whether multiple parties were trying to get her to shut up as a blogger, or whether they had other reasons for attacking her (and in the case of the Dave Navarro letter, whether they were even attacking her at all).
But I feel like some people will read this post and be like "all women bloggers are liars and homewreckers, there are no actual hate crimes being committed against them -- mean things were said, and they deserved them." Because this may be the only instance that people will see.
It's interesting to think about. Do her internet "attackers" feel like she's "wronged" this other guy's family/society in some way, and seek street justice? Are the things written on the internet that relate to the blogger intended to make her shrink from public attention, perhaps not blog? Finally, what impact does posting an analysis of the dialogue between the blogger and those she accuses, have on your readers?
I'm not going to pass judgment on any party, nor "pass it on" (as with a bad game of Telephone). In this particular instance it's just not worth it.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 03:21 pm (UTC)"Blog death threats spark debate publisher", BBC News, March 27, 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6499095.stm
Wagner, Mitch (2007-03-26). "Death Threats Force Designer To Cancel ETech Conference Appearance". Information Week. http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/03/death_threats_f.html Retrieved 2007-03-27.
Havenstein, Heather (2007-03-27). "Death Threats Force Blogger to Sidelines". Computerworld. http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9014647&intsrc=hm_list
Tweney, Dylan (2007-04-16). "Kathy Sierra Case: Few Clues, Little Evidence, Much Controversy". Wired. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/04/kathysierra Retrieved 2008-01-04.
Finkelstein, Seth (2007-04-19). "Accusations of sex and violence were bound to grab the headlines". Guardian.co.uk. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/apr/19/blogging.comment Retrieved 2008-01-04.
Schwartz, Mattathias (2008-08-03). "The Trolls Among Us". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?pagewanted=all Retrieved 2008-08-03.
Kathy Sierra; Christopher Locke. "Coordinated Statements on the Recent Events". http://www.rageboy.com/statements-sierra-locke.html Retrieved 2007-04-12.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 03:48 pm (UTC)I sympathize with the author, inasmuch as I sympathize with anyone who is finding themselves under attack (regardless of the reasons), but with such a clear bias to the author's position, she needs to do an even stronger job of presenting facts as facts, and not presenting insufficient data as undebatable conclusions.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 03:56 pm (UTC)If a man abandons his family to be with someone else, making a public website asking strangers to submit letters is the last thing his family should do. It is, in fact, mean. It allows the website creator to craft the situation with whatever information they wish and associate it with the man's real name. Naomi's misinformation, at least, had no names attached. I look at that website and I agree that it is a mean website. If this dude did all this stuff, why the fuck did his family not take him to court? Why didn't they use his communities to contact him, then resort to legal action? It makes no sense to encourage internet strangers to harass your sister-in-law's estranged husband. Way way sketchy.
And it only took a cursory look at Salty Droid's response to Naomi's post to see disgusting, misogynistic language. The website is clearly designed to harass, and it does not matter whether it's targeting multiple victims or one.
I understand where the anger here is coming from. The thing that worries me is this:
Even if someone is not a model victim, they may still be a victim. See the DSK case.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 03:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 04:07 pm (UTC)Being open minded that there are more than one possibilities for the truth, including the possibility that the story as presented is accurate, and reserving judgement until the facts are known, is something I don't see enough of in the blogosphere.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 04:17 pm (UTC)...
Probably.
I disagree with your assessment of "Mean Site 1". Referring to it as such is not overly harsh. I mean, I personally would have called it: Passive Aggressive Drama-llama Wank Generator Supreme, but that doesn't really roll off the tongue as easily as "Mean Site 1."
I'll fully own up to my own biases here, and say that this site lost all credibility for me by claiming that "Dave" had a duty to god to return to his family. Automatically my mind has placed the creators and maintainers of this site in the box labelled: Charismatic Cult Members. Good for Dave for getting out of something like that.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 04:37 pm (UTC)The "model victim" thing was on my mind a lot as I wrote this, and I tried to make it clear that if there were threats made against her person they are Not OK and should be treated as such. The thing is, there's letting whether someone is a model victim or not get in the way of the plain fact that she was wronged, or allowing one's self to say "well, she deserved it", and then there's a situation wherein scrutiny of the allegations themselves calls them into question.
In the article there are two things she cites as threats. One was, if Salty Droid is not making up his version, an email that was edited to make it seem like a threat when (at least IMO) there seemed to be none intended, and the other was a public blog comment taken out of context-- (the "we're coming for you" comment, at least as I read it, was the admin of the anti-scamming site saying that he was as glad to call out female scammers on his site as as male ones). And if she can be shown to have done that with the two most specific allegations in her post, what are we to make of the more vague ones?
Now, don't get me wrong, I completely agree with your assessment of "sketch coming from all directions". One of the most frustrating things here is that what I see is a bunch of sketchy people treating each other poorly, with no one in the fray for whom I'd particularly want to root. But that's just it. I see a lot of sketch, but sketch doesn't always equate to the kind of harassment she alleges, if it's harassment at all, at least IMO.
Is Dave Navarro being called out by his family harassment? If so, it's of him and not her, though she never so much as mentioned him in the post. The main person who has a beef with her appears to be Salty Droid, whose only direct communication with her that I've seen was an email that amounts to "What you're doing is cool, oh wait it's not. LOL CUL8R". Is that harassment? Are his posts on his anti-scam blog alleging that she's a flim-flam artist (and, looking through some of the stuff on her site, I have to say I see why one might at least allege that), using the whole Dave Navarro thing as extra evidence that she's not the most scrupulous person to be doing business with harassment, and if he did so without being foul-mouthed and mysoginistic, would they not be? Is P.Z. Meyers ruthlessly mocking creationists on his blog harassment?
To be clear, these are meant as honest questions. I think perhaps part of the problem here is an inconsistent definition of harassment.
The bottom line, for me, is that I see in her post evidence that she's intentionally trying to use the sympathy that would be due someone who was actually subjected to sexual threats and harassment (and even if you feel that the other behaviors constitute harassment, they're not the behaviors she alleges), and aside from that seeming disgustingly cynical and selfish to me, I'm not the only person who will see through it, and every time something like this happens, it makes it harder for real victims to be heard, which I think we can agree is already far more of a problem than it should be.
I admit that I'm really angry about what she appears to have done, and I admit that my feelings come from the implications about the larger situation as much as the particulars of this case, so maybe I'm not being fair to her (I did tweet her a link to this post so she can respond if she wants), but the way I see it, to whatever extent she is being dishonest in her allegations, that kind of behavior has to be called out and stopped. This kind of thing is too important to cry wolf about.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 04:40 pm (UTC)No! I'm glad I'm not the only one. When I first loaded the site I was like, "damn, that man has not aged well at all...". ;)
And sure. At first I bought the "he's not answering calls! this is the only way we can try to reach him!" thing, but seriously, that's when you call law enforcement on his deadbeat ass.
I don't think it alters my feelings about the original post much, but suffice to say, I like your title for the "Letters" site much better.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 04:51 pm (UTC)I really, really hope that's not the case (assuming you're talking about my post, as opposed to hers), as I tried to make it very clear that the reason I'm calling her post out is because I fear it will have exactly the effect you're describing, and the more it's not called out, the more others might take license to do the same, and the more ammo those who want to disbelieve all victims on principle will have. (so... maybe you were referring to her post? Sorry, it's unclear to me from context).
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 06:44 pm (UTC)Because, I see no evidence of that in her original post and according to some rudimentary research on her, she is happily married with children.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 06:50 pm (UTC)Salty Droid seems actually LESS likely to constitute actual harassment, as it is talking about people without literally telling people to harass them (libel, on the other hand, is more likely, and harassment by readers a highly likely possibility). LtDN is actively encouraging harassment. It is telling people that Dave Navarro should be harassed.
These considerations are true independent of Naomi's actions and should be considered independent of them.
But on that topic, I need to call out:
every time something like this happens, it makes it harder for real victims to be heard, which I think we can agree is already far more of a problem than it should be.
I am a little troubled by this statement in light of your post.
You are saying that this woman is doing damage to harassment enforcement by being publicly manipulative in the name of women's rights and safety. Perhaps she isn't being harassed at all; since she lied about one thing she may have lied about being threatened.
So you call her out on the carpet and ask your friends to distribute this as widely as possible in media with character limits. You want the truth, so everyone should know that she lied. Since there isn't space to write out the whole nuanced issue, most possible headlines boil down to "Woman lies about being harassed" or "This headline I RT'd yesterday is wrong." It's hard not to read it like you feel the need to widely advertise that a woman lied about being harassed.
Do you see what I'm getting at?
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 07:04 pm (UTC)Why is it unreasonable to try to publicize a partial falsification of a widely publicized article? "This headline I RT'd yesterday is wrong" seems to be a perfectly legit tweet, assuming it comes with a link to the post providing a longer explanation.
I'm frankly irritated by all of the concern about how this *looks*. It is what it is. If someone lies when their words have been well spread-around, the calling-on-the-carpet should be well spread-around too.
Let me be crystal clear: if the women's rights movement needs to hide and shelter lies in order to survive, I've got a problem with it.
And I know far more intimately than most people reading this post that crime victims don't always come in pretty packages. Conversely, I know well that sometimes liars come in very pretty ones. But regardless, when you lie, it damages your credibility. Does it make it impossible that anything you've said is true? Of course not. That's just silly. But whether someone has lied about part of their account raises real and valid concerns about whether they were untruthful or misleading in other parts of it.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 07:28 pm (UTC)Sorry to irritate you.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 09:15 pm (UTC)http://ittybiz.com/sometimes-the-bad-guys-win/
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 10:42 pm (UTC)That said, my point was not to make an assertion about the nature of her relationships with anyone, but rather to say that her suggestion that the owner of the site's motivation was simply because she is a successful woman is misleading, and that I would have been less inclined to raise an eyebrow about the rest of the things she said if she had described said motivations more accurately. She did this in her follow-up post (see the update to my post), which leaves me wondering why she made the "successful woman" claim in the first place.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 10:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-02 03:52 am (UTC)That having been said; it's the internet. People lie. Everybody lies.
I was pretty blase about this and was going to mention only quasi-sarcastically how there's no actual justice in the US, and the best any of us can do is carry concealed weapons and gosh why hadn't I gotten licensed to carry a handgun already...
and then I read zombie_dog at 31-Aug-2011, 9:15pm, and was all like, oh. Or that.
A relevant email thread
Date: 2011-09-02 02:02 pm (UTC)It starts with us mostly quibbling and clarifying things with regard to my intent in making the post, but the most important thing the thread brings, IMO, is in the last of X's messages that I'll quote. There is the best summary I've seen of the motivations of those who argued against propogating this meme (and of course there is an assumption here that X's motivations mirrors those of
It was helpful to me, not so much because I agree with it 100%, but because I understand it. I have to admit, seeing so many of my friends saying they wouldn't RT or link this, not because they disagreed with my analysis, but because of what advertising the information could "mean" was very troubling to me, in part because I just couldn't grok that perspective. "If someone was accusing me of something and had a questionable story, would my friends question it?" is a difficult question to have to ask one's self.
It's a tough thing. On the one hand, I agree very strongly with
I think the main take-away for me is not that certain facts should be suppressed, but that when dealing with them, one has to be very, very careful about message. More careful than I was, re-reading my post in light of the subsequent discussion and a lot of
frettingthinking on the subject.I can't bring myself to regret pointing out when someone's story is fishy. I think that's important not just for the victims-centric reasons I've already described above and elsewhere, but from my perspective as someone who, as X rightly points out, can more easily see himself as the accused than the victim in situations like this.
But.
If there's one thing I've learned from this (and some of my other unexpectedly-controversial post), it's that once you put a message out there, you relinquish a lot of control over how that message is interpreted and what meaning is taken from it. Facts may be facts, but facts are not the message (more's the pity), and in retrospect I was so concerned with facts, and so motivated by a combination of indignation (see comments about honesty above) and fear (see comments about being accused above) that the message I was sending was not as much at the forefront of my mind as it should have been.
Maybe what I should have written was a post about the problems of dealing with fishy victim claims, that both emphasized my belief that the majority of people are not crying wolf, and talked about the question of how to avoid turning a blind eye to dishonesty without overshadowing the "being the accuser is no cakewalk and there is usually something to it" thesis.
That was my intent, but it's not what happened. Some people felt that my post read as "HEY EVERYBODY, CHECK IT OUT, THIS LADY IS LYING FULL STOP" and, honestly, I can see why. My hope is that I now have a clearer idea how to avoid that, while remaining true to my conscience.
Anyway, I didn't intend for this preamble to be so long. Here, without further comment, are the salient portions of my email thread with X.
FROM X TO ME
Date: 2011-09-02 02:04 pm (UTC)1) I didn't repost the initial link myself because I didn't feel like it was particularly well-written or convincing, and she doesn't follow up at all on her initial assertion that death threats against women on the internet are on the rise, which was the post I was expecting to read based on the title. But while those are the reasons I didn't repost it, I'm not going to contribute to attacks against her by saying so publicly, given that she's already undergoing siege.
2) Maybe it's just me, but I felt like your post ended up sounding a lot more like "Guys! guys! the online harassment campaign against this woman is WAY more justified than she made it sound." I know that's not at all what you meant because I know you and because you say explicitly that you don't think that, yet it ends up sounding that way anyway, because it's posted publicly and gives a lot of airtime to her harassers' grievances against her. Personally, after checking them out, I don't see why her RL status as "the other woman" ought to be considered relevant to her complaint of harassment; nor why her characterizations of the sites that are harassing her as "mean site 1 and 2" are supposedly misleading.
3) I wonder if some of your take on it might be male privilege talking -- particularly the assertion that the "juvenile vitriol" of Mean Site 2 is the same whether directed at men or women. All the "shut up, you fat cow" comments in the one post I did read struck me as classically gendered: women are supposed to be silent, judged based on appearance, dumb, and animal-like. Their voices are not valued the way that men's are. Sometimes even the exact same insult has different import based on who it's aimed at, because of the cultural and historical context of that insult. Telling a man to shut up is different from telling a woman to shut up because men are socially trained to speak and women are socially trained to be silent.
I'd like to close with this, if you haven't read it already:
http://kateharding.net/2007/04/14/on-being-a-no-name-blogger-using-her-real-name/
You framed your post as doing a service for truth. I don't at all disagree that there are issues with the original post and I'm not convinced it deserves airtime. But I seriously question the response of giving her harassers airtime to make up for having given her post airtime. It is not an even trade-off. In the end, I wonder if posts like yours, from well-meaning guys, are, nevertheless, inadvertently making the internet a less safe space for women's voices.
FROM ME TO X (1/2)
Date: 2011-09-02 02:05 pm (UTC)that talking about privilege, etc with friends can be difficult and
requires both trust and bravery. The effort is appreciated.
> 1) I didn't repost the initial link myself because I didn't feel like it was particularly well-written or convincing, and she doesn't follow up at all on her initial assertion that death threats against women on the internet are on the rise, which was the post I was expecting to read based on the title. But while those are the reasons I didn't repost it, I'm not going to contribute to attacks against her by saying so publicly, given that she's already undergoing siege.
I think I respond to this best in my comments at the end of the email,
so read on.
> 2) Maybe it's just me, but I felt like your post ended up sounding a lot more like "Guys! guys! the online harassment campaign against this woman is WAY more justified than she made it sound." I know that's not at all what you meant because I know you and because you say explicitly that you don't think that, yet it ends up sounding that way anyway, because it's posted publicly and gives a lot of airtime to her harassers' grievances against her. Personally, after checking them out, I don't see why her RL status as "the other woman" ought to be considered relevant to her complaint of harassment; nor why her characterizations of the sites that are harassing her as "mean site 1 and 2" are supposedly misleading.
Wow, I'm really sorry for coming across that way, and appreciative
that you gave me the benefit of the doubt.
My intent in talking about "mean site 1" was certainly not to say that
she deserved abuse, nor to imply that either site couldn't be deemed
"mean", but to illustrate what seemed to me an intentional
mischaracterization of the motivations behind the person who runs it.
Saying "He's a hyper-religious psycho who thinks I'm sleeping with his
brother" is one thing, but implying that "mean site 1" is a site run
by some guy who randomly has it in for her because she's a successful
woman, and using that to leverage outrage and support, is another.
Even with that, if that was all she was doing, I'd have been much less
likely to say anything because threats are threats and no one
"deserves" them. But when the specific instances of harassment that
she cites also suffer under scrutiny, I'm left with the impression of
someone who is crying wolf about something I feel very strongly that
one should never, ever cry wolf.
FROM ME TO X (2/2)
Date: 2011-09-02 02:05 pm (UTC)The most uncomfortable thing about writing my post was coming within
100 miles of appearing to support someone like Salty Droid. My comment
about him going after men and women was not meant to suggest that his
treatment of women didn't have higher stakes than his treatment of
men, but to take issue with the term "hate blogger", the only
descriptor of him that she provided. At least to me, and I suspect to
most people, this evokes images of neo nazis, or at least a blog the
main subject of which is anti-woman. While hateful, a self-styled
James Randi of online business who accuses her of scamming and throws
around mysoginistic epithets in the process is not what "hate blogger"
evokes to me, and I can't help but think that the term was chosen
knowing that. Again, misleading.
> I'd like to close with this, if you haven't read it already:
> http://kateharding.net/2007/04/14/on-being-a-no-name-blogger-using-her-real-name/
I have to run to rehearsal, but thank you for sending it. I promise I
will read it at my next opportunity. (EDIT: Just for the record, I did)
> You framed your post as doing a service for truth. I don't at all disagree that there are issues with the original post and I'm not convinced it deserves airtime. But I seriously question the response of giving her harassers airtime to make up for having given her post airtime. It is not an even trade-off. In the end, I wonder if posts like yours, from well-meaning guys, are, nevertheless, inadvertently making the internet a less safe space for women's voices.
For whatever it's worth, my intention was never to give her critics
air time per se (if I even painted them as sympathetic it was by
mistake-- one of the most frustrating things here is that everyone
involved seems to be one flavor of asshole or another), but to
question the questionable things in her post, and take a stand on
something I think is very important. I wasn't saying "this person was
crying wolf, feel free to make inferences about victims in general", I
was saying "Damn it, you do NOT cry wolf, and if do you deserve to be
taken to task by the same community that supports true victims,
because allowing you to get away with this propagates behavior that
/does/ give ammo to those who would say that all victims are just
crying wolf". It didn't take a lot of research to find out what I did,
and I'm sure I'm not the only one who did that research. To use an IT
metaphor, I feel a bit like a security researcher who finds a security
hole in a program, and then gets more flak for pointing it out than
those who put the hole there in the first place.
Can you give me an option that is neither contributing to the problem,
nor standing by and not questioning questionable claims just because
those claims are rallying support behind something I care about? I
want to make the internet a less safe place (not in terms of physical
safety, of course, but in terms of not being called on it) for people
who distort and cry wolf. How does one do that without making it
unsafe for women in general?
FROM X TO ME (1/3)
Date: 2011-09-02 02:06 pm (UTC)So, I had different subjective responses about the implied meaning of the term "hate blogger" and to the overall characterization of her attackers, and thus had a much less strong sense than you that she might be crying wolf. Admittedly, I didn't do the research that you did, and my feeling that she wasn't necessarily being all THAT hyperbolic might or might not be sustained if I had. I haven't yet been convinced that she outright *lied*, but she certainly seems to have exaggerated (with the post title if nothing else) and oversimplified to the point of mischaracterizing the motivation of her harassers (as going after her SIMPLY for being a successful woman blogger, when there seems to be rather more to the story than that!).
This is kind of an aside, but during the discussion I found myself wondering to what degree something like an internet version of a Rape Shield Law might be relevant in her decision not to reveal a lot of that contextualizing information -- the law that says certain kinds of evidence (like the victim's sexual history) is off-limits during rape trials. Of course, this isn't a trial, or it shouldn't be. Because we don't have the evidence. While there's some evidence that can be fact-checked -- and you did it well -- the most important pieces of evidence, the harassing e-mails and death threats she claims to have received, are not available to us, which means we can't say definitively whether she's actually crying wolf or not.
But truly, all that said, I'm not sure that this part of our disagreement is really all that important. Yes, we objected to parts of her post to different degrees for different reasons, and we could quibble about them all night, but we do both agree that her post was to some degree exaggerated and misleading, that it to some degree relied on emotional manipulation, that in any case it was not well-supported with evidence nor persuasively argued.
The thing is, I don't care all that much whether she was really crying wolf or not. Not because I think crying wolf is not a big deal -- I absolutely agree that it makes things harder for everybody, particularly other victims. But I have limited energy, and debunking the wolf-criers is just not my priority, for reasons I'll explain.
FROM X TO ME (2/3)
Date: 2011-09-02 02:07 pm (UTC)> Can you give me an option that is neither contributing to the problem, nor standing by and not questioning questionable claims just because those claims are rallying support behind something I care about? I want to make the internet a less safe place (not in terms of physical safety, of course, but in terms of not being called on it) for people who distort and cry wolf. How does one do that without making it unsafe for women in general?
Because I think my answer is no, I can't. There isn't one. I think trying to make the internet a less safe place for women who are accused of "crying wolf" inevitably also makes it a less safe place for all women, because the default assumption of a sexist culture is already that women are likely to cry wolf about sexual harassment. And the internet is most definitely not a place where people can easily tell the difference between the women who are crying wolf and the ones who aren't. I don't think it would be possible to name a single clear-cut case. I don't find this particular one as clear-cut as you do; and even Kathy Sierra was accused of crying wolf.
I respect the desire to clear the way for the people who are *truly* being victimized. But I think that casting doubt on people who speak up ends up harming other victims more than it helps them. And while I don't think what I'm going to say next applies to *you*, I think that generally, a pattern of worrying about certain kinds of problems -- the problem of women "crying wolf about sexual harassment," the problem of "false rape accusations," the problem of "innocent motivations being mistaken for racism/discrimination" -- focusing on these types of problems is a pattern of privileged thinking, of people who are "informed by a perspective that finds it easier to imagine being accused of prejudice than being a victim of it" (I got that quote from here: http://prospect.org/csnc/blogs/adam_serwer_archive?month=06&year=2011&base_name=scalias_antiantisexism ).
I just don't believe that there is a tidal wave of internet support for women who complain about harassment, which this woman is selfishly taking advantage of. That's not the internet I live in. There's a feminist corner of the internet, and yeah, it's likely to rally behind something like this post, because we see what we expect to see. And it's unfortunate when it means we are taken in. But the feminist corner is TINY compared the majority of the internet, which is dominated by privilege and sexism. False accusations of rape and harassment are a problem and yes, they make the situation worse for real victims, but while they receive disproportionate attention, in sheer numbers they are dwarfed by *real* accusations by real victims -- because there's really not that much to be gained from making false accusations. Accusing people of sexual harassment or assault rarely results in much in the way of benefit for even the most sympathetic victims, partly because of "second assault" ( http://www.musc.edu/vawprevention/research/victimrape.shtml ) -- a backlash which relies on the societal assumption that all accusers are suspect.
So my feeling is, in order to combat the "second assault" phenomenon, why not give other victims the support and airtime they're not currently getting, instead of devoting one's limited energies to the tiny proportion of dubious ones?
FROM X TO ME (3/3)
Date: 2011-09-02 02:08 pm (UTC)But that's me, not you. What do I think you should do? I still don't know. It is difficult territory for anyone to negotiate. And it's not that anything you wrote was especially unmerited or unfair; subject to quibbling, sure (and I definitely quibble!), but that's all. But the larger point for me is that I don't know how productive a post like that is, if what you want is to make the internet a safer space for women/people who want to speak up about their victimization. And I personally think that your energies as an ally (which is how I'd identify you) could be better directed.
A larger theoretical question might be, is there a place, on the internet, for the debunking of wolf-criers by people who want to be allies, instead of leaving that task entirely to the sexists and misogynists? I don't know. You have to answer that question for yourself. My own feeling is that if we could know THE TRUTH for sure, maybe there would be. But the problem seems to be that we pretty much can't know THE TRUTH FOR SURE -- and as long as the default assumption is that victims are lying, I'll keep giving even the most dubious victims as much benefit of the doubt as is reasonably possible, because somebody has to.
But while I appreciate your giving me the chance to explain why I feel that way, you don't have to do what I would do in order to maintain my respect/friendship. I'm just glad that you're willing to listen.
I hope that's helpful and more clear. I am sorry for going on at such length.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-06 07:29 pm (UTC)I gave the dude $5. I think he'll need it.