So #GamerGate is outraged at auto-blocking software. There are several blockers out there; a lot of people are finding them useful. I think they’re fine…and I’d say that even if my name were on any of them. I simply do not understand the attitude that it is somehow a violation of a person’s right to free speech if a mechanism is provided to make it easy for other to exercise their right to not listen.
Another twist on the excuses, though, is that they’re objecting to the categorization of names on block bots.
Why is it necessary for these blockbots to label its lists as lists of horrible people who are bigots, harassers, or otherwise “bad people?”
Well, if the description fits…
But OK, let’s imagine a list with a blanket condemnation of its members — say, an autoblock list that the creator labels “Fat ugly evil people”, and I’m on it. Would this bother me? Not in the least. If you feel it’s unjust, then it says more about the creator than the people on it. Or I might feel like it’s a fair cop.
It’s rather ironic, though, that #gamergaters, who are so ready to dismiss other people’s reactions to insults, are so delicate that they find being on a list labeled “harassers” traumatic.
Come on, people. These are voluntary lists. They don’t prevent anyone from expressing themselves. They do let people avoid others they don’t like. It seems like a good idea to me.
Honestly? I’m not at all baffled. When you thrive on harassment, you’re naturally opposed to anything that impedes you from harassing. The block bots? They are a barrier to the people the harassers want to harass. That’s bad.
I love the block bots and such. I use Oolon’s, myself. I’m also starting to think it’s time that one was implemented for the vaping community, because I have now twice been told by skeptic bloggers I love that they refuse to blog about vaping (e-cigarettes, that is) because the one time they did, from their skeptical point of view, vapors harassed them into silence. Being a vapor myself, this pisses me off in the extreme. If this is how the vaping community hopes to make vaping socially acceptable, then we deserve to have it legally prohibited.
Anyways… sorry for the derail, but I’ve been fuming about that all day, and I still am…
So they’re worried that a few of the 7.3 billion in the world might not hear their words, whereas before, presumably, all 7.3 billion were glued to them?
Honestly, if GG try to sue Randi Harper I’ll be the first to give him $100.
Opps, should be her.
Nothing bothers bullies more than having their threats and coercion dismissed as fuckwittery. How dare their “victims” ignore them….
Obviously, they prefer their Freeze Peach to not come in blocks. Only crushed Freeze Peach, not Freeze Peach cubes!!! You heretics.
If the main objection is to classification, I’ve got news for the whiners. I’m one of over 100 people listed on a Twitter list called “@sentinel058/libtard-troll-douchebags”. This is a list publicly hosted and supported by the Twitter website itself. And you know what? It’s a perfectly fine list occasionally carrying entertaining commentary (by Twitter standards, at least).
Wait… These are the same people who call Anita Sarkeesian a professional victim for posting page after page of harassment she’s subjected to, which includes being called horrible names? So her being called all those names is something she should just shut up and take it and not tell anybody, but being categorized in a name that hurts their feelings is the height of injustice they must share with the world. Man, English really needs a name for that thing where someone claims to have a belief about how others should behave, but can’t even live up to it themselves, even when the situation isn’t even on the same scale. Oh, the inadequacies of language.
It’s entitled fuckwits all the way down. Today is not making me a fan of H. s. sapiens.
Self awareness has not been one of the defining GG traits. At pretty much every stage of this mess it has been possible to find a big block of gators doing something that demonstrates this. I don’t know if it is just a blind spot, that they are unable to look at themselves with a critical eye and realize they are doing the same things they complain about, or if in the end they just don’t believe what they are saying.
Let us not forget that they are absolutely fine with boycotts in principle, demonstrated by their own use of same to get to companies such as Intel. Just so long as they are never the ones boycotted, anyway.
Like all ideologues, they cannot contemplate the possibility of themselves ever being wrong, and they know it’s their Duty to tell everyone else how wrong they are. How dare people refuse to listen to them.
it is so irrational it hurts my head to even think about it.
the worst thing is that it not very rare to find that level of fucked up thinking
uncle frogy
Remember, it’s all about ethics in gaming journalism.
How about a “lead mirror“?
“Another ‘lead mirror’ showed up on the freeway the other day. They flipped me off and yelled at me for cutting them off, the proceeded to cut off a bunch of other cars. SMH”
Although I am completely for blockbots, unfortunately I think that the GGautoblocker is an extremely bad solution. It blocks way too many people, determined mostly by submissions by other users and follow lists. There are too many game devs and journalists that are on the block list just because they follow and research gamergate abusers.
Also, using something created by Randi Harper, who is a different yet equal kind of abuser to the gamergaters does not seem to be the right solution
Um, no, it is only from follow lists – or at least the public code and announcements say that. @TheBlockBot is entirely from real moderators adding people to the lists. I am inclined to agree the block bot way is better for some reason :)
Oh fuck off, even though I’m a famous fence sitter here, even I at my worst would never have made that comparison! Being snarky on Twitter is “different yet equal” to what GamerGate do? Are you serious?
THEN DON’T USE IT.
Really, some people might want a broad solution — they have no interest in anything about gamergate or video games, and a list that happens to include game devs might be considered a feature, not a bug. For them, it’s perfect.
Other people might want a fine-tuned solution that blocks a subset. They wouldn’t use any generic blocker at all. And that’s fine.
Have you noticed yet that none of the blockbots are mandatory?
But PZ, not being able to force your opinions on everyone is oppression! I’m surprised that the GG-ers aren’t complaining yet about the people who don’t use Twitter – after all, not having a Twitter account must be the ultimate in blocking, and therefore even more oppressive, right?
Seems kinda related so I’ll put this here. Jonny Scaramanga on bad religious T-shirt puns.
Oops sorry. Meant that for the MRA ‘poetry’ thread.
There’s got to be a good “beta-blocker” joke to be made here, somewhere.
It is kind of a telling overlap with MRA talking points ain’t it? Yet another blustering group, pretending to have an agenda other than harassment, that just happens to disproportionately hate and confuses freedom of speech with mandatory listening.
It is not just GGers who are whining about block lists. MRAs and TERFs have also threatened legal action.
As for the lists that people make up on their own homepages, it is easy enough to get off of them if you want to. All you have to do is block the person who made the list and you are automatically removed. I do that every time some adds me to their personal list of “stupid liberals or “whiny trans”.
I am personally honoured to be sued by Cathy Brennan, as the bot has defamed her and damaged her stellar reputation! Although she is insisting on sending a process server to my office to serve her “claim” as she cannot email me it for reasons… Almost like she is taking a leaf out the GamerGate book and trying to get me sacked. Actually she may have a prior claim over them there given she’s been doing that to trans ppl for years!
I am looking forward to learning how I’ve been instrumental in making her reputation online even worse than it already is. I think I’m being given way too much credit there. Also her friend @VABVOX/ Victoria Brownworth is saying much the same, but she hasn’t actually sent me anything. I’m guessing she has a direct line to Cathy and thinks there really is a case for defamation.
As someone who has never been tempted to have anything to do with Twitter, I find it kind of amazing that something like this isn’t built in. Harassers really have ways of forcing you to get messages that you don’t want? Really? And people voluntarily subscribe to this “service”?
Bruce Gee, all I will say it this, you do not know what you are talking about.
brucegee, it’s almost like people who are not you might have different priorities than you do. Pretty fucked up, huh?
Sun Tzu says that to defeat your enemy you must defeat their strategy, and all else follows. And, with noisy bullies whose only real weapon is their noise, not hearing them defeats their strategy. Of course they don’t like it.
That’s why it’s so awesome.
Another way of framing my remark is this: If your strategy is the same as adopted by telemarketers and advertisers, your audience is reluctant to listen to you which may mean you suck.
I wonder if the gamergaters that are complaining about block-bots are OK with filtering out annoying ads and email spam. Because if they think filtering spam out is OK they ought to realize that they are spam to the rest of us.
I think that a good feature for a blockbot would not just block someone but redirect them to an automated site that would analyze their ‘message’ and return the appropriate snark. For every JAQoff there would be a FAQoff.
I think that goes a little too far. It’s reasonable for people to be upset about being insulted or vilified (which gamergaters only seem to accept as applied to them). And such a list could be defamation that could be rightly punished. Of course, gamergates get a lot closer to defamation (accusations of fraud) than their opponents (who opine about their misogyny based on disclosed facts). On the other hand, celebrities can apparently sue someone for calling them racist in the UK and win. In that and other anti-free speech jurisdictions, criticism of such lists might be legally correct for all I know.
Janine & CaitieCat:
Feel free to disagree all you want, but you do know that the “service” brucegee1962 finds unappealing is ***twitter itself***, not the blocker.
Your comments still make sense if you realized that, but it seemed like you were taking BruceGee’s admission of ignorance about twitter as some sort of criticism of twitter users rather than just an explanation of brucegee1962’s ingorance/surprise there isn’t a built-in block feature.
@qwints:
Fucking gamergaters threatening Western Civilization. I’m sure they know a thing or two about real defamation. Not like trannies and queers and communists (oh my)!
Or, y’know, black men who cause all the violence.
Black women who, like Eve, abominably lead men into temptation that will destroy the human race.
Or Jews, who, y’know, actually cause good, Christian white men to get erections at interracial porn, and even make it difficult for them to spell “black” causing them to use the racist, exoticizing “ebony”.*1
Or schiksas, who, …aw, fuckit.
Gamergaters, the most oppressed and disparaged minority in the history of history’s oppression and disparagement.
*1 serious article, though the broader site is NSFW and you might not want that URL showing up in your history.
@32 CD, there definitely felt like a strong, perhaps even contemptuous disapproval of people stupid enough to keep using a service which doesn’t fit brucegee’s needs, yes, alongside the “Twitter is stupid” message you’re noting. Never mind that those of us who do use it have a different calculus, having other goals: maybe to promote causes we believe in, or our blogs, or any number of other useful things. No, it is non-credible that someone could want to use it despite brucegee’s opinion of its flaws.
@CaitieCat, #35
Hey, I respond just as strongly to that.
I just thought its presence in brucegee1962’s comment was merely arguable.
I’m sorry, let me walk that back.
I totally get where you’re seeing it. The implication is quite apparent there.
I guess what’s really going on is I was tone trolling without even realize I was doing it. With something that implies something but, reasonably arguably, has a plausible other meaning than the one that comes most easily to mind, I’m inclined to ask a clarifying question of a regular just to give the benefit of the doubt to people who may be unfortunately fallible even if not nearly as fallible as I am.
Sorry, I didn’t quite realize what was going on in my own head. I agree that your interpretation is the most reasonable interp of that comment on its face.
Weird. Really? Because for some reason, even though I don’t use a block bot, my email inbox is a daily vomitorium of insults and vilification; Twitter, likewise. I can’t put anything on youtube with comments enabled without it getting flooded by rage and slime.
And I’m supposed to fucking sympathize with these fucking morons who get put on a fucking list that means people who they don’t like won’t interact with them anymore? Because the title is a little too fucking rude for them?
Fucking wilting little flowers, they are. Put them in Anita Sarkeesian’s shoes, or Rebecca Watson’s, or even mine, and maybe they’d acquire a little perspective.
Maybe you should spent a little time in my position. Getting bathed in non-stop hatred from diverse gangs of wanking loonies who spend all their time inventing lies about you might make you think differently.
@oolon, #17
Damn, Read back my comment from this morning. That different yet equal was a really bad thing to say, and is a huge oversimplification of my thoughts. Sorry to all who had to read that.
I don’t know.
I guess if your sensibilities were so delicate that you simply couldn’t bear the idea of people having opinions you don’t agree with, or, if the abuse was so so ever present or overwhelming in volume that that it might be traumatic automated protection might make sense. Generally I read what comes in but back inn the Usenet days I was was quite skilled in scanning posts from some people and quickly jumping to the next entry once it was clear their post was just more of their usual collection of profanity and inanity.
I don’t do it much, but I haven’t forgotten how. When reading the main aggregation page I simply skip posts by Comradde PhysioProffe. No need to download them. Nothing personal, I’m sure he is a fine fellow and I wish him no harm, but after over a year of reading everything he posted I concluded he wasn’t saying anything new or interesting to me. It isn’t even a matter of disagreeing. The posts strike me as empty. Just out of curiosity I still check out an occasional post when things are slow and I have time to spare but so far I haven’t opened one and felt good about the time or bandwidth spent.
That isn’t to say that I would block those posts from appearing. Making the dismissal a manual process keeps me conscious of what I’m doing. I would like to make sure that I’m not cloistered or deceiving myself thinking more people, anyone, agrees with me. More people agreeing with me would be worrying.
Keeping things manual forces me to reconsider the issue. Who knows, I may suffer a change of mind and suddenly find those I disagree with to be the holders of the right and reason. Dismissing people too quickly or easily seems foolhardy and outside the tradition of open discourse and liberal openness that I happen to like.
Oh, you won’t dismiss proven bullies, liars, and bullshitters? I pity you. I don’t have time to deal with that trash.
Take a random sample of the twitter users listed. Take a random sample of the comments of each, say the first 30 after a time = X:00:00 o’clock where X = the result of a 12-sided die roll and an additional roll or coin flip for am/pm.
Mark each twitter user, “someone with whom I wouldn’t like to converse” and “someone with whom I wouldn’t like to converse” or a small number of other discrete, relevant categories chosen by you. Perform a t test. Presto. You have reason to trust or not trust the block of their comments.
Of course, you could also just recognize that you make decisions on the basis of 2nd or 3rd hand info all the time: Your best friend tells you that the book store was out of the book you want just yesterday and won’t have more til a week from monday. Do you or do you not have reason to call first/not go before a week from monday?
That reason is just as good a reason as trusting the testimony of literally thousands of people who believe the gg blocker is sufficiently effective at its intended purpose and sufficiently cautious of false positives to be worth it.
How likely do you think it is that you’ll have a good reason to reconsider an idea like “bigoted straight white conservative dudes aren’t superior to everyone else”? And if a fuckload of such assholes on twitter are flinging their shit in your direction, you think that’s how you’re probably going to obtain “knowledge” like that which might change your mind? I suppose they could infect you, so you could literally “suffer a change of mind,” but why would anybody want that?
consciousness razor @ 44:
CR -“How likely do you think it is that you’ll have a good reason to reconsider … ”
Slim to none, but, stranger things have happened, not to me , but generally.
CR – … “you think that’s how you’re probably going to obtain “knowledge” like that which might change your mind? ”
You overlook the chance of brain damage. A blood clot in the wrong place and … suddenly I’m joining the MRA . At which time I fully expect some responsible person to mercifully put a bullet in my head.
I also point out that I don’t say there are not good reasons to use automation… “if the abuse was so so ever present or overwhelming in volume that that it might be traumatic automated protection might make sense”.
I really recommend you switch your spellchecker off. :-)
Stranger things like what, for example? Pick one thing that’s stranger than having a good reason to believe that bigoted straight white conservative dudes are superior to everyone else. Because that’s something which has never happened, and I don’t know if I can even imagine what it would be like. So, since you say you have a concrete example already which has happened, go right ahead and share it with us. Or just shut the fuck up with this evasive, content-free bullshit.
First, what is there to overlook? Secondly, for fuck’s sake, I even literally said “literally ‘suffer a change of mind,’ as in literally suffer, so I didn’t overlook that, and it should be taken as a gesture in the vague direction of all sorts of things like that which you don’t want.
But your sage advice, which nobody asked for, about how to sort the social media content they’re actually interested in from the stuff they’re not interested in, is that we ought to be open to such things. Such things as brain damage, apparently. Or such potential things as discovering (from assclowns on fucking twitter somehow) the fact that bigoted straight white conservative dudes are superior to everyone else. After all, you say we wouldn’t want to deprive ourselves of such valuable opportunities, like “learning” that bullshit.
David Marjanović @ #46
Yeah. Sorry ’bout that. Vapo(u)r is what a vaper produces when xi vapes. My bad.
Also, I’m really sorry for going on that completely off topic rant as the very first post here. That was, and still is, something that is royally pissing me off… inspiring a (slow-going, unfortunately) blog post, in fact.
lorn
Personally, if I thought there was even a “slim to none” possibility I’d suddenly start rethinking the idea that “bigoted straight white conservative dudes aren’t superior to everyone else” by listening to them, I might be even more inclined to block them because I’d prefer not to start on a path that leads to horrible personhood. Also, if there was some amazingly convincing reason to believe straight white dudes are superior, you better believe there would be many more sources to inform me than Twitter GamerGaters. It’d be on all the tv channels, all the news sites, probably skywritten. The day would probably be a national holiday as well. So even then, the blocker wouldn’t have really been an issue.
lorn #41:
Are you under the impression that speech is such a rare resource that blocking a handful of people will lead to a sudden cessation of discourse?
lorn:
“Well I guess if you were a total wimp, or if you were being regularly beat up, anti-bullying policies make sense”
Seriously, what the fuck is this?
So you are a firm advocate of “just don’t read it” then, eh? Because that’s you personally how do it, and it worked on usenet.
Stellar.
Truly, you are a moral exemplar, for skimming article titles and consciously choosing to not read them, instead of blocking them from appearing altogether.
I am sure you are against spam filters as well. Because how dare some robot decide to hide e-mails from you, when it is your fucking moral and intellectual duty to read every headline about Viagra and Nigerian Princes and consciously ignore it by yourself. No automation allowed.
Then don’t personally use the block bot. I’m sure you love being on your high horse, but, really, it’s Twitter. And these are Gamergaters. Your high minded shit is grand and all, but the only words that come to mind are “Serious Business”.
ALSO at 45:
Ableist. Possibly implicit death threat (implied: MRAs deserve to be shot).
Watch the rhetoric.
lorn@41:
Lovely sentiment. Of course, the weasel wording is in the “too quickly or easily” part of the statement. First of all, it implies that blocking gamergaters is “too quick and easy” despite more than a year now of torrential, abusive, sexist, lying, boycotting, rape- and life-threatening bullshit. Secondly, why do you get to criticise other people decisions about what’s “too quick and easy”?
lorn:
These people are not being dismissed “too quickly”. They are being added to a block service after enormous volumes of death and rape threats.
Furthermore, harassment is fairly effective at silencing people. Which makes it the polar opposite of “open discourse and liberal openness” . Giving people the ability to block harassment enables open discourse.
far be it for me to tell anyone else what to do or what not to do here is the but.
I personally do not read or use twitter or face book or any of the “social media” outlets. The only comments I regularly read are on a few blogs and some times I read the comments on the You-tube music posts none of the others I watch. I can understand some of the comments here that seem to have fired up a bunch of defensive replies.
My choice is a personal one I make today. Do I sacrifice a lot of contact that I might like or even benefit from? probably.
Do keep things simpler by keeping my inbox comparatively empty np question. I do not sign up all over I was very reluctant to sign up here even but took a chance so far so good thanks for running a clean blog.
I do not like spam which I get very little of. I can not seem to get off of the call lists for stupid telephone sales calls
I have a very low tolerance for crap I can barely stand what PZ posts about here.
I have learned when someone tells me something like what happened here that i could take to mean I should do something I do not agree with I can take it to mean that that is what they do which is different than what I do I can say nothing or I can say as I some times do and say thanks for sharing. I certainly do not have to get all defensive and “up in their face” and challenge them that would be for me a waste of my time and energy most of the time.
I am kind of surprised that they are just coming out with software tools that could presort things like twitter and such.
If you like wading through acres of muck to get “the good stuff” then go for it and if you find anything truly memorable there are those on the shore who will appreciate hearing about it but I ain’t going to wade through all that myself.
uncle frogy
@ PZ Myers
I think I was unclear. Calling someone fat and ugly is wrong. It’s okay to be upset that someone called you fat and ugly. The horrific threats against Rebecca Watson, Anita Sarkeesian and other women are wrong. The “non-stop hatred” you receive is wrong. No wrong thing justifies another wrong thing, despite the fact that some, like rape threats, are more harmful than others.
@ lorn
Lose the ableism please.
Come on, everyone. The important point here is that lorn is superior to both abusers and those who use block bots. Let’s not lose sight of that.
Does twitter not have applications that hides tweets using certain hastags/words like Tumblr Savior or XKit? I mean, I’m safely ensconced in the financial services/justice sector of twitter, so I don’t see a lot of mean and feel-bad tweets (unless you’re really emotionally invested in credit-default swaps and Ocwen), but I can imagine that you should be able to hide people without blocking them right? And that would be an acceptable solution to the “you’re a coward if you just block us out of hand and don’t look at what we have to say first” problem. Or is blocking the actual end goal?
Dawkins also objects, and rises to the defense of Breitbart. The link is to the Reddit forum Gamerghazi, which does an excellent job tracking and mocking Gamergate activities and related topics – in this case, anyone else griping about blockbots and their freeze peaches.
Chrislawson says:
It should also be noted that “too quickly and too easily” is like “modesty”: It’s always defined as “one step mor than you took”. There is no clear line, except that you cannot reach it.
Too quickly? Foolhardy? Open discourse? Liberal tradition? Are you fucking kidding me? You’re going to tell me how long I have to listen to abuse, kookery and vicious lies? “Open discourse” is not being called a c*nt everyday for years. It isn’t letting stalkers badger and terrorize you. Get a fucking grip on your privilege. You aren’t just supporting the equivalent of street preachers. The people aren’t on the streets. This hate is coming straight into people’s homes and workplaces. There is no rational defense for that. People do not have to endure abuse and terrorism because it makes you feel all quibbly to allow (mostly) women a tool to protect themselves against the terrorists and stalkers.
If this were antivaxxers and The Phelps cult terrorizing people this way mainstream atheists and “skeptics” would tell them to STFU and GTFO. But it isn’t. This abuse is primarily coming from openly anti-social justice, bigoted, white, male atheists. That’s why you are ignoring how disgusting what they are doing is and how wrong you are to punch down instead of up with this bullshit about “discourse”.
Foolhardy? FFS. I cannot believe I am still reading this kind of crap. Years. This has been going on for years.
lorn @41: if you were really around “back in the Usenet days”, then you would recall that we had bozo filters and blocking and readers filters and all other kinds of mechanisms to ignore loud assholes online then, too. And yes, there were people like you who insisted that it was some kind of Mark of Manly Character to eschew those things, and to read every fucking post that passed across one’s screen, because that was in the service of the great marketplace of ideas.
It was bullshit then, and bullshit now. I’m guessing you certainly don’t devote your time to carefully engaging each and every Jehovah’s Witness who rings your doorbell, every street proselytizer, every passer-by trying to sell you on something; like every other human being, you filter your interactions. Sneering at people who filter differently than you – and possibly because they receive harassment and noise you don’t – is pathetic. Nobody cares if your life is so leisurely and slow-paced that you have the energy and interest in engaging with every fuckwit shitting on the floor for attention.
Does the term “killfile” ring any bells?
NateHevens @ 1
I see what you did there …
lorn @ 41
Gosh, I wish I had this amazing ability to determine what near- and complete strangers find traumatic!
And always the strawman of “they just don’t want to hear from people who disagree with them.” Possibly some people do that — not that having to hear from people who merely disagree with you needs to be the price of using Twitter — but I’m willing to bet many if not most people reserve automated blocking for the outright abusive. Though technically someone who thinks I should be subjected to violence does disagree with me on that point.
I’m not going to say lorn‘s argument is a demonstration of privilege*, but it functions similarly, in the sense that zie doesn’t see the abuse happening (I will charitably assume) and therefore doesn’t really believe it exists.
*Though I’m not going to say it isn’t.
anteprepro @ 52
And an automated blocker is essentially, as mentioned, a killfile, just for Twitter rather than Usenet. So why should someone who plonked proudly be down on automated blocking?