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FBI didn’t prosecute gamergate death threats, even with confessions
- api 9y agoI don't think they took them seriously because video games, and because the entire thing appeared so unbelievably silly from the outside. I wonder if they might take them more seriously now?
- hurint 9y agoYou are talking about anonymous twitter accounts and 4chan posts. For all we know the 'victims' could have made them themself to get fools like you to give them Patreon bucks.
- belorn 9y agoI recall that the systemd package maintainer for Debian got death threats. From outside, hearing about death threats related to volunteer work to package software that is given out for free is something I strongly suspect sound unbelievably odd. This happened after gamergate and I doubt anyone got arrested for it. I recall a few months ago during the days of meeto here in Sweden, children of accused parent got threatened thus resulting in the family leaving the country for a while. No investigation was mentioned in the news article. From what I see, now is not better than before. Death threats made online/sms/phone is not taken serious unless there is contributing reasons to take it serious.
- base698 9y agohttps://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html Her article seems to be about what could be done to stop anonymous trolls from terrorizing and threatening women. How about prosecuting them, since terroristic threats is already a crime? Unfortunately, as Hess discovers, the police don't care much about online stalking, which is consistent since they don't care about IRL stalking either.
- wildmusings 9y agoThe Supreme Court has ruled that only specific and credible threats can be prosecuted. Other threats, distasteful and disgusting as they are, are protected as free speech. It's gonna be very hard to prove that an online troll mouthing off constitutes a specific and credible threat. And the Justice Department is usually not interested in borderline cases, both for efficiency and out of fear of creating unfavorable precedent. This is a country where you're allowed to burn someone in effigy and call for their execution, protest soldiers' funerals and celebrate their death as punishment for America tolerating gays, call for the overthrow of the US government, hold up a mock severed-head of the President, publicly hope for his assassination, etc. We take a rather expansive and absolutist view of free speech.
- arkona 9y ago> They used 4chan and 8chan — websites linked to the distribution of child pornography — to organise their movement, the FBI says. What? 4chan is linked to child pornography? This paragraph alone is casting serious doubts on the journalist’s objectivity and seriousness.
- aluhut 9y agoIt's not? Since when?
- arkona 9y agoSince when is it? If there is one thing that will get you banned from 4chan it is posting or requesting child pornography. I am not a fan of much of the content on that website, but linking them to child pornography looks like a smear job.
- hyperpape 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Arrests_for_child_pornography_and_cyberbullying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Arrests_for_child_pornog...
- aceofspad4s 9y agoHow many arrests have happened because of CP posted on, say, Facebook? Or on Reddit? Is there any proof that CP is more likely to be posted on the 4chan imageboard than anywhere else on the Internet? Do you think the owners of 4chan somehow encourage the posting of CP?
- hyperpape 9y agoLiterally the first discussion I had with a friend who used 4chan, a decade or so ago, was about how people posted lots of child porn on /b/, but it typically got removed. It doesn’t matter who encourages what. The mods obviously don’t like it, but somehow 4chan spent years attracting tons of people who love to post child porn.
- spamlord 9y ago"victims of Gamergate" LOL
- nanistheonlyist 9y agoThat's because majority of the "threats" in GG were cooked up by the "victims" themselves. It is not illegal to make a threat against yourself.
- briandear 9y agoOff topic but, is it me or does Business Insider hijack the back button on mobile? And why do websites forward to a country domain and not the actual domain you are trying to visit? What’s with this terrible web?
- wildmusings 9y agoCan you imagine if the feds prosecuted every idiot who made a death threat online? They have criteria for identifying particularly egregious cases worthy of prosecution. One of the criteria, mandated by the Supreme Court of the United States, is that the threat must be credible and specific. That's gonna be impossible to prove for online trolls mouthing off. When people play the “I’m getting death threats” card, put on your skeptic’s hat and realize that every person who arouses any controversy gets death threats online. It’s awful but it’s inevitable. Ask yourself if they’re just trying to deflect from whatever controversial thing they did in the first place.
- hurint 9y agoThey didn't prosecute the ones made against GamerGate supporters either. Just because fake news pretended they didn't exist, doesn't make them less real. https://archive.fo/pNDY9 https://archive.fo/pNDY9
- nkrisc 9y agoThose are probably faked, right? Or it's only fake when it doesn't support the narrative you choose to believe? It's quite clear: the victims of the "GamerGate" movement received death threats, so GamerGate supporters faked receiving death threats to make the other side also look bad. See? It's easy to manufacture an unverifiable tale to advance an agenda.
- hurint 9y agoOr maybe Wu should go to the cops instead of the press. https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/blog/2015/05/gamergate-in-columbus-threat-reports-initially.html https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/blog/2015/05/gamergate-... "Since Wednesday concerned people have been calling and emailing the prosecutor’s office in response to an online essay by Wu saying O’Brien had not acted on explicit rape and death threats originating from the 614 area code. However, no criminal complaint had been filed in Columbus or with the county, O’Brien told me via email. Wu had never contacted him, and the office had received no recordings or phone number to investigate."
- nkrisc 9y agoYes, because as we've seen, law enforcement often takes anonymous death threats seriously. What's your point?
- dragonwriter 9y agoThe FBI doesn't prosecute anything; it investigates, and the various US Attorney's offices prosecute.
- JdeBP 9y agoAnd the article at hand, as opposed to the headline here, names the one of those U.S. Attorney's Offices that decided not to prosecute.