So some shits wanted to think up a new way to harass people and they thought of a brilliant plan: to spam a college’s online anonymous sexual assault reporting system with sarcastic fake reports. Hilarious. Right? Yes. Hilarious.
“Late Monday, the 16th we started seeing a stream of what we would call suspicious reports that were being submitted” to Occidental’s Google-based assault reporting form, said Jim Tranquada, director of communications for the Los Angeles college, which has faced scrutiny in recent months for underreporting sex assaults involving its students.
That’s about the same time that commenters on Reddit’s r/MensRights subreddit began discussing plans to spam the college’s reporting system with phony accusations.
Haha. Hahaha. Because how dare a college try to do anything about sexual assault on its campus? It should mind its own business, right?
That system received about 400 separate assault allegations in 36 hours. “That’s far more than we have ever received in the past,” Tranquada said. “The sheer number of reports was suspicious.”
“What we found suggests that these report were the work of an off campus group of trolls who are involved” on the politically incorrect forums of 4chan and Reddit, Tranquada said.
That’s not the right term for them. That’s a trivializing term. Sexism and misogyny aren’t just “politically incorrect” any more than they’re just “rowdy” or “sweary” or “high-spirited.”
Shitstains on the boxers of life.
Do they mean that 4chan and reddit have politically incorrect forums, or that 4chan and reddit are politically incorrect forums? Given what I know about the structure of both sites, either interpretation could apply. Sloppy writing, even without the diction problem Ophelia mentioned.
@Robert B.
The sentence structure clearly implies the former, which I would agree with. To ascribe the latter to it is to assume it was poorly written.
Even a casual survey of subreddits would show that many are very well moderated, providing great forums for productive discussion of their favourite topics – r/askhistorians is probably the most well known example of a strictly moderated subreddit, while r/sex has moderators who provide a very sex positive environment for discussion of sensitive topics.
So not only does the latter interpretation rely on assuming poor writing, it is also wrong in the case of reddit (I’m not going to venture an opinion on 4chan).
There’s a particular horribleness about this that leaves my skin crawling all over my body. These fucktangles are attacking a safe place where women can – or could – receive help when they need it.
What’s this telling us? That it’s totally OK for women to be attacked. That if women complain about being attacked, there’s something wrong with them, not the people who did the attacking. And above all, that women shouldn’t complain about being attacked. All such complaints are trivial because.
I have a lot of rage in me, but not enough for this.
@latsot, not just that, it’s a service for men, genderqueer, agender, *anyone* to report rape… So they are “mens” rights activists hurting men with this as well.
Well, now we know why MRAs think false rape reports are so common, they’re the ones making them.
The analogy is obvious: it’s a denial-of-service attack.
Surely this is illegal?
Obstruction of justice, wasting police time something like that?
Wring. Not hilarious at all – but they should send the police around and make some arrests anyway – not just the ones teh trolls suggested. Might make ’em reconsider their “humour”.
The entire movement makes a lot more sense if you understand every time they say “men”, they mean “rapists”.
DaveL: Exactly! MRM –> RRM !
StevoR @ 8 –
This service was only for gathering statistics on sexual assault on campus, not for opening actual criminal investigations (they wouldn’t be able to do that with the form submitters being anonymous), so they wouldn’t be able to get them on obstruction of justice. Disgustingly, though, as Dave Futrelle reports, many of them thought the service was actually for opening investigations and really did think they would able to have women on campus investigated for false rape charges.
Well, now we know why MRAs think false rape reports are so common, they’re the ones making them.
And they’ll be the ones discounting ALL rape reports because of all the ones they “know” are false. Then telling the real victims to blame other women for filing so many false reports.
As for legality, it is illegal to file a false report to police — but if these aren’t formal reports, and/or are not directed to actual police, then they probably skate past that charge. One may be able to nail them on some sort of malware charge though…
These are the people who claim they’re being denied custody because of sexism in family courts, right? They’d otherwise be great dads if it weren’t for those feminists on the bench?
I weep for all the kids deprived of quality time with Daddy “I’m sorely tempted to write a script to bombard it with spurious, nonsensical complaints” and his like. How will they ever learn to stay up all night with a 2 litre of Coke and write hate scripts to fuck with victim survey tools like real men?
And of course the braveheroes at Reddit are now blaming the whole affair on ‘trolls’. Remember, nobody’s really a slymepitter, even if they’re wearing the T-shirt.