The latest story out of the hothouse of stupidity that is 4chan/8chan is that they’re targeting tumblr users for harassment — with the specific intent of identifying troubled young people who have admitted to self-harm, and then goading them to commit suicide.
The trolls also wrote that they plan to post gore and self-harm photos in popular social justice and fandom Tumblr tags, as well as target individual users with anonymous messages, in an effort to pressure them into committing suicide.
One of their targets is any fan of some show called Supernatural, which I have not seen (although now I’m putting it on my list of shows to check out). There may be a hint of pathological skepticism here — people who like shows about supernatural phenomena must be subhuman, and therefore are acceptable victims.
I wonder if their use of gore is why I’ve been getting a sudden rush of email with links to or photos of gore-drenched crime scenes. Just so you know…I’m a biologist. While the tragedy of these incidents can disturb me, blood and body parts just slide right off, and I’m not likely to melt down at an image. They’ll have to find a better tactic.
But many people are far more sensitive to that sort of thing, and making the internet a firehose spewing repellent words and images at people is a good way to simply drive some people offline, or worse. And the people doing this harassment know this, and consider it a triumph if they can make someone feel so terrible that they kill themselves. That is appalling. It requires a practically criminal desensitization of empathy to get people to gleefully commit to hounding strangers to death.
So I wonder…is it that 4chan/8chan attract psychopaths, or that the culture there creates psychopaths? I suspect it’s a bit of both, but the troubling bit is that we know perfectly normal people can easily be tipped over into destructive behavior — see the Stanford prison guard experiment — and it seems to me that that site, and a few others, have become training grounds for pathologically vicious behavior. When obsessive harassment with the goal of personal destruction is your endgame, then there’s something wrong with you.
In Portugal it’s a crime to actively push someone towards suicide. I seriously hope this is the case in the US or wherever these idiots happen to spew their hate, and that they are prosecuted as the sociopaths they are.
I’m so glad to have escaped that shithole. It does change you. Desensitizes you at the least to things which should be considered horrible. Part of the human experience? Yes, but that doesn’t mean it needs a megaphone.
Hmmm…Supernatural is available on Netflix, and it’s been on for NINE YEARS without me noticing. I guess it must have been a little bit popular.
Pushing someone towards suicide should at least be grounds for the household losing its Internet connection.
I wish for these people to be struck by a tiny bit of conscience so they would fully see what they are doing. but since that’s highly improbable, them being struck by meteors would be a start.
Within the gene pool of any population, there are genes that are coding for what eventually is manifested as anti-social behaviours & pro-social behaviours. The distribution of such genes within the population would be in the form of the bell curve. Some individuals come in at the tail ends of the Bell curve. Some of those that have the highest proportion of anti-social genes & the lowest proportion of pro-social genes frequent that site & seek to do harm. (We here all know that. Does the general public share that understanding to any significant extent?)
Genes aren’t everything – environment plays a role too, as we all know. They need help in improving their ethical understanding, & increasing their empathy. Wouldn’t philosophy classes for kids have helped more than religion?
Supernatural is known in my sci-fi/fantasy/fandom circles mostly for its passionate fanbase of teenage girls. Targeting Supernatural fans isn’t about the show’s subject matter, it’s misogyny.
Um, does anyone still have that old porcupine that trolls were invited to use on their persons? I need it for reasons.
daemonios @1: A Dutch man who was involved in the harassment of Amanda Todd (and others) was arrested last year, and also charged in Canada. The Dutch charges include indecent assault, and the Canadian charges include criminal harassment.
#7, movac, is right on the $$ there. And it’s for that reason (the teenage girl fanbase that Supernatural is aimed at) that I’m incredibly amused by the thought of PZ marathoning the show. Once you get to season four you’ll have to decide your position on “Destiel.” ;)
(To be clear, I find it amusing but I’m not making fun of the fans, being one myself.)
Yeah, but this kind of thing existed pre-Internet. Obviously it was a lot harder for people who wanted to drive people to suicide to meet each other, but it was also a lot easier for them to fall under the radar. If anything I think it’s easier for a half a dozen guys who meet in the basement to convince each other this is acceptable behavior than a hundred guys on 4chan. The guys on 4chan are going to see this blog for one thing.
I demand that PZ watch a marathon of Supernatural and liveblog his opinions of it.
Demand it I say!
^Well that was my attempt at lightening up this depressing thread. On a serious note from what little I’ve seen 4chan and other places that thrive on anonymity are awful because of this cycle:
1. Being anonymous let’s people expose their true awful selves without fear of repercussion.
Which leads to 2. Those people tend to be very vocal and will gleefully pile on anyone who shows a shred of decency. People either go along with the awfulness or get chased out by the flames. Those who weren’t awful to begin with become so because it’s the only way to fit in.
Which causes 3. The more people 2 drags into this awful echo chamber the louder it becomes, which makes 1 feel more secure in behaving more awfully, which causes 2 to sink under and even lower bar to be accepted as ‘one of us’, which leads to 3 where the new low bar of awful makes people comfortable sinking even farther under it, in a vicious cycle that leads to people thinking behavior like this twisted campaign is appropriate.
That’s my theory at least.
Oh, let’s go and gaslight somebody to death …
FFS these people are not human they are duck shit; sticky, stinky and full of disease.
I always though Supernatural was like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer but with dudes. But then I’ve only seen three or four episodes. Amused at PZ feeling obligated to watch it in an enemy of my enemy sort of way.
A volunteer Stanford Prison Guard experiment seems the most accurate and likely explanation.
Movac @7 hit it dead-on with the reason for the targeting. Supernatural is beloved by young women, and thus must either be hated with ridiculous ferocity (boy bands, cosplay, etc.) or co-opted (My Little Pony, etc.).
PZ mentioned their “endgame,” and I think “game” is a key term here. It’s not just in how the Gamergaters & adjacent hate groups consistently use video game terminology to describe themselves and their opponents, it’s in how the entire culture has gamified and incentivized hate, harassment, and abuse. Members get kudos for going farther, crossing the line ever more egregiously, and opening up new vistas of disgusting behavior. That kind of “do something bad for initiation, do something horrible for recognition” culture is common across all these groups, from the Chan crowd to GamerGate to atheism’s very own SlymePit, which looks positively tame by comparison. Or would if there weren’t so much overlap.
Intaglio (#13):
Oh you poor, noob.
Everyone else:
Please wait. I’ve just started the popcorn.
@15
Hated because ‘eww girly’? Yes. Co-opted? No, that’s just ridiculous. Have you considered the possibility that those ‘co-opting’ My Little Pony may actually be fans?
I don’t believe you, Intaglio. Humans are the only organisms known to use Omegle.
My little kids love Supernatural. They marathon watched it yesterday morning. We enjoy watching it together. That and Albert Hitchcock Presents are our jam right now. It is delightfully cheesy and the writers and actors know it. If you have not watched their blooper reels, I encourage you to do so.
I don’t think the kids know it’s cheesy.My youngest unironically thought Sharknado 2 was the best movie ever made and that the ending (spoilers) was romantic.
Misha Collins (Cas) also has Youtube videos called Cooking Fast and Fresh with West in which he lets his young son “cook” anything he wants. He also organizes fundraisers and the Gishwhes competition. Basically, he’s awesome.
The show has plenty of problematic elements. I actually used this shows use of the word “b*tch” to explain to the kids why that was not an OK cuss word to use.
Currently this is my wallpaper:
http://blog.chron.com/tubular/files/2014/11/tumblr_ndhr0c2hKJ1s6x70yo1_500.jpg
My husband likes to put funny wallpapers on my page when I’m out just to hear me crack up when I sit down at the computer. I kept this one.
I’m not surprised that people who support pederasty also support killing kids for being fans of a show that is pretty much a mash up of the Hardy Boys and Buffy.
I think this is a good example of what can happen with “group think.” I don’t think it’s that different from religious or corporate group think. It seems that people feel it is easier to justify doing bad things when they are supported by others who think in a similar fashion. These depraved actions are made even easier when you don’t ever have to see or really interact with your victim.
As for watching Supernatural. Often times a shows start become better in later seasons; so, you may need to sit through the first season or two to get tot the episodes that are really good. I’ve watched a couple of the first episodes of supernatural and they were okay, but I got the feeling that it would become better once they worked out the characters’ personalities.
Misogynist assholes love to target Superwholock fans (who are often girls) and Homestuckers for their pro feminist / LGBT attitudes.
…and they say we’re trying to ruin their hobbies.
There’s another angle to the 4chan mindset: members on 4chan are actively trying to purge themselves of all emotion, of any kind of involuntary response, to achieve total control over their own minds. It’s like a prolonged, nastier and more harmful version of the Vulcan ritual of Kohlinar.
On 4chan, even something as innocuous as “sharing funny pictures” becomes an emotional competition: “you laugh, you lose”. Members try to force others to laugh against their will, while trying not to laugh themselves. It’s all part of one definition of trolling: provoking a specific reaction out of people. A 4channer’s goal is never to be trolled, because they have absolute control over their feelings and nothing can “offend” them (offence being, in their eyes, an example of involuntary emotional reflex, and therefore something to be controlled I’m oneself, exploited in others until they learn to control it too).
The end goal of this programming would be to reach a perverse sort of desensitised “enlightenment”, where nobody has emotional reflexes any more.
I’m a proud fan of SPN, and in fact am working (fitfully) on a progressive rewatch at my blog (fullmetalfeminist.wordpress.com). Definitely the hatred of the fans is because of misogyny, like Twilight fans or anything else with a majority-women audience.
It’s a fun show, does not take itself too seriously at all, and I enjoy it quite a lot.
If you want some of the best individual episodes, I recommend:
S6, E4, Weekend at Bobby’s;
S3, E3, Bad Day at Black Rock;
S4, E5, Monster Movie;
S4, E6, Yellow Fever (and definitely wait until after the credits!);
S4, E8, Wishful Thinking;
S5, E9, The Real Ghostbusters.
Not coincidentally, these are among the funniest episodes the show has had. And yes, I’ve left out plenty of good ones.
Be aware, you will want to put away your scientifically literate self; it’s not Doctor Who bad about it, but when the lads talk about needing a knife of ‘pure brass’, just smile and nod and move on. On the up side, I’ve learned a shed-load about Christian mythology from the show (spoiler: it doesn’t make any sense here either).
It gets worse–there’s a plan to target suicide hotlines for trans* people now–EXTREME TRIGGER WARNING for transphobia:
https://www.anonimg.com/img/c5bc75d9d913da27d6ce4c2f6b805bcb.jpeg
Jebus. And they’re pinin’ for the good old ays of the Third Reich, when they could just call in a “tranny” and have them sent to the ovens.
But it’s all about ethics in gaming journalism!
I don’t think it should be a crime to “push someone towards suicide”. Otherwise anyone who cooperates, facilitates or advises someone to end their life will be charged.
Yes there are nasty people like these – William Melchert-Dinkel springs to mind, but he was convicted using laws specifically designed to prevent assisted suicide – which was then reversed by the Minnesota Supreme Court as merely verbally encouraging someone to suicide was protected Free Speech
The challenge is to legally differentiate between helping someone ‘end their life with dignity’ out of love and empathy and encouraging a temporarily disturbed person to suicide for perverted personal gratification. I don’t think it’s really possible to do that objectively.
My preference is to err on the side of self autonomy. If I want to end my life for any reason I should be able to do so and if I solicit advice on how to do it then anyone should be free to provide such advice.
Just nuke the whole thing from orbit, I’m giving up.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 4chan.
@12: I agree with this theory. It becomes a competition among the people, in the echo chamber, to see who can do and say the worse thing. To see just how low any of them can go.
I’m a huge fan of Supernatural, btw. I often blog about the show and have a Tumblr page linked to it, which I rarely frequent. The primary and most vocal part of the show’s fandom is female, so I do believe that theory that it’s about misogyny. I’m not sure how much success, they’ll have with their tactics, though. Supernatural is a pretty gory show in which people and creatures are regularly stabbed ,shot, decapitated, burned alive, and on one memorable occasion, two human beings actually cannibalized each other while having sex. It’s one of the goriest shows on TV and that’s saying something. The kind of fans who can sit through some of the imagery from this show aren’t going to have the lives horribly upheaved too much by yet more gore. The ones who are sensitive will probably just be driven from Tumblr or internet. (It’s still a pretty shitty thing to do regardless of what effect it will have on those targeted. )
I’m sure there’s a certain element of vulnerable women in the fandom but I also think, once again, that these massive stains, have stereotyped a bunch of women as being a particular way and trying to target that. They’ve heard about the show and heard that most of its fans are young women. Since they don’t seem to know anything about how actual women are or what this fandom is like, I don’t think their tactics will have the effect they think it will.
@23 Caitiecat: those episodes listed are some of my most favorite episodes ever! You have excellent taste, as I prefer the funnier episodes ,too. I just finished the rewatch of Yellow Fever. (And yes,PZ, please stay for the credits on that one and then go watch the bloopers for that episode, as well.) I will be visiting your blog, too. I love to meet other fans.
#20 congaboy; “I think this is a good example of what can happen with “group think.” I don’t think it’s that different from religious or corporate group think.”
I have to disagree. The group think you mention usually involves people convincing themselves they are doing to write thing, even the evidence would show otherwise.
These bastards know what they’re doing is shitty, and they’re trying to one up each other for points. They go in as bastards, and compete to show who the biggest bastard is.
PZ blogging about SPN? It will be like Mark Watches SPN, but with more rage at the sexism.
#31 Weatherwax: I see your point; these people are criminal–I sit corrected, thank you.
May Sarek rise from his grave and smite them all.
@26 quidam
I think that a distinction can be made between actively driving someone to suicide, (which, in Canada, can qualify as First Degree Murder[1]), and simply being involved in the decision/act.
[1] Given what we have seen the channers say here, if they target a Canadian I hope that they face Attempted Murder charges as the intent is 100% clear.
I heard this program on the radio yesterday and like it here because it seems timely.
Trolls seem all too human to me and I would guess that the ones who find it necessary to harass people to suicide are themselves staring the black pit a death themselves.
https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-12-31/theres-push-sweden-deal-internet-trolls
uncle frogy
@Holms #17:
I’m not talking about the fans, I’m talking about the ones whose main interactions with the material are inappropriate cartoon porn and clopfic, the ones who bring rape jokes and harassment to conventions, and who actively make events hostile for the intended audience. I’m not talking about the fans, I’m talking about the creepy dudes who want to co-opt something that’s not for them, because for some reason, some dudes see 90% of media aimed precisely in their direction and decide “yeah, but that other 10% has to be for & about me too.”
Murder.
Every single one of these people must be prosecuted for attempted murder.
^ This is what I sound like when I’m probably angrier than I’ve been throughout the past year.
That’s the next best option.
That would surprise me. Many trolls are sociopaths.
PZ:
If you want to get a feel for Supernatural through a social justice lens, you ought to check out reviews of some of the episodes over at CaitieCat’s blog.
Before the internet they wrote poison pen letters, nothing is new under the sun.
Stay safe, peoples.
Intaglio:
Despite their reprehensible actions, these people are fully human. Sadly, we humans have the capacity for a broad range of actions, from the compassionate and generous to the bigoted and abhorrent.
This article at boing boing discussing chan culture and gamergate. http://boingboing.net/2014/12/31/how-imageboard-culture-shaped.html It discusses the way the lack of any names or handles creates strange consensuses, and talks about how everything offensive is treated as “ironic” humor. The article goes in a slightly different direction from the comments here, but are consistant with The very model of a modern armchair general’s description of the experience being a twisted version of Vulcan Kohlinar.
The very model of a modern armchair general #22
Why the hell would anyone want that? Some control over one’s emotions is a good thing but to never be surprised into laughter? To never be moved to sorrow, or rage, or joy, or longing by the shock of a vast and complex world? That sounds like death to me.
Trigger warning: I’m going to do some reasoned speculation as a person relevant with ugly crap filling their head for their whole life.
Full disclosure: I spent years staring at 4chan’s /b/ board. The one they called the “asshole of the internet” and the one where if you tried to troll there you were told to “stop pissing in the ocean of piss”. I was born (maybe) desensitized to this stuff. I have an instinctual (not intellectual, that came later) fascination with social activity that involves violence, aggression, dominance, and sexualization. I think it’s partially some sort of need to understand potential threats. Those are instincts and some of us will get more of that than others for different reasons. I always have to look and understand as much as I can just in case I need it. It’s not pleasant, but I hope I can make it useful. I get a lot of this from all of you too after all.
There are layers to this one.
Where did the behavior come from?
What is keeping it going?
How much of it is affected by the environment.
Who is engaging in the behavior?
Are the ones instigating the same group as the one keeping it going?
How much is 4chan, family culture, national culture, religious culture, and more?
What is this? This is truly awful harassment of people (mostly women/girls that like Supernatural, my fellow fans and humans) vulnerable to suicide. But it’s also more.
Harassment is dominance behavior. It feels like fun to the people doing it because that’s how nature makes the pluming work (so you get the excuses that appeal to “jokes”, “just having fun…”). All harassment that I have seen has a goal and the most general goal that I can think of is to force a person or group of people to do something. They are hyper-stimulating on something and it has rules that make it more predictable. I think that some people can be acculturated into enjoying this, but the instigators (a “behavioral nexus”) are probably personalities with family and national cultures that emphasize and teach dominance and aggression are acceptable for social behavior (or at least you can resort to it easily). There may be abuse, or lots of xenophobia and military heritage, or competitive business libertarian-types, they all matter. They got role-modeled and are role models.
4chan has effects on group psychology, and the /b/ board is the one with the most profound effect. It streamlines and brings out aspects of our behavior good and bad. It’s not a universal thing for everyone but the patterns are there. You don’t have to be anonymous but I think that being anonymous can involve certain implications depending on the person’s psychology and that can actually make observing them more simple. How do you get attention if you are a blip of near-nothingness? You use emotional extremes. You use swarming tactics with similar blips. You use identity as a weapon against people and more. This will rub off on people with identities. I have seen anonymous people try to bully people with identities, “tripcodes”, into being anonymous. It’s a genuine cultural conflict on image boards.
Is it these tumblr users in particular who are the “target”? Yes and no. You don’t engage in a group social dominance display if the message will have no audience whose behavior that you want to control. As awful as this sort of question is, If every one of the people targeted actually committed suicide who would the message be aimed at? The is behavior is meaningful to them. Objects connect to meanings and I think that at the core of it this is about what they speak of as objects.
Who is targeted? That list of tags in the original article is the most meaningful thing here. I’m going to transcribe and sort them later, for now I see these themes as the biggest.
*Social Justice
*Tumblr
*Gender
*Sex
*Mental health
*Attraction to same or other non-traditional sex/gender
*Fat people
*Fandoms (There is more here, and related to why they pick Supernatural but I need to think about it)
*Psychological triggering
What does this tell us? Those have lots of elements and some are more specific than others. I see some behaviors as a “dominance maintenance” that society uses just to keep in practice. Some maintenance behaviors are features that apply to all people and gender in a more universal sense and can change over time. Traditionally the mentally ill, physically handicapped or deformed, non-normative appearance, and many other “deviations” from the dominant culture could all be targeted in each culture. Fat people are in this category today and have been seen differently at different places and times but get treated badly today. Other maintenance behaviors are things played off as “harmless fun” or “jokes” like sexist and racist language. They matter.
A chunk of that list is a general desire to lash out at any attempt to get people to alter their behavior. Many dominant aggressive types fight every little attempt (the “boomerang effect” has some interesting similar issues here) to have them change some behavior, and they fight to be able to express the things they use to maintain social dominance. Many don’t think much past “they want to control me, I’ll show them!”, but many are self-aware enough to know about the dominance rules and their role in that. I think that the disrespect to psychological triggers is part of that because many of them likely have triggers of their own. They want their triggers respected (see zero-sum game below).
Another chunk of that list is the specific focus on these issues having to do with gender. Our gender/sex connections are social tools that many of these people use to understand and manipulate the world. If relationships are all about conflict to someone and they are a dominant aggressive type it starts to show and these people are potential role-models like everyone else. I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for these folks but it’s strategically useful to keep in mind the reasons why they are polarized about it.
Another chunk of it is a zero-sum approach to social problems. From their point of view their social problems are actual problems. Everything else is “social justice”. If they are not depressed they will not care about depression (ironically they may actually be depressed, but only want attention to what makes them depressed if they know what that is). This combines with the above in people who treat social relationships like conflicts. There is a sense in which an aggressive person wants to maintain the simplest set of symbols for controlling society possible. If it gets too complicated they can’t act fast and decisively.
A related chunk to “zero-sum social justice”, is universal and polarized thinking. “All women a
re gold-diggers”, “all depressed people are attention whores”, “all rape claims are false”, “all black people are criminals”. It’s a conceptual zero-sum game. It’s easier to manipulate society in a group when it’s all-or-nothing in attention and characterization of the people you want to compete against. It’s lost on these people that there is no reason they would not treat one another this way if their imagined enemies were not an issue. People acting predatory will prey on one another at some point.
Controversial: This is a place where we should not shy from thinking about mental conditions (that may be perfectly natural kinds of human instinct and psychology). We don’t casually apply professional labels to individuals, but when you have hundreds or thousands? That is good reason to talk about the effects and synergy of different psychologies. Psychopaths, sociopaths, and people like me. Sure we don’t really know about the actual proportions but I’m sure there are some in there with other things. If you get a “human character sheet”, the ways that sheet is shaped will get used for analysis. It’s literally not personal unless directed at your person.
@ Tom Foss 15
Let me be clear here. I’m not defending any Brony who has acted like an abusive asshole. Some have indeed co-opted MLP in harmful ways and I say bash away. I won’t argue about details.
But you might find it interesting that when MLP first became popular on 4chan the /b/ board reacted against it very strongly and Bronies were in fact banned from 4chan at one point (I guess you can piss in the ocean of piss after all). Quite a bit of that was gender issues. There are interesting contrasts and other features in there that I’m hoping can be useful somehow. I’m still mulling it over.
For example while I was involved in the serious discussion board on a Brony image board I often had to point out to people that Lauren Faust based the show on explicitly feminist ideas. It was a really good education in how people can become so sensitive to a word and focus on their own meanings for it. As well as just how utterly unaware some people can be of the media and culture they participate in. I had to be savage over there often.
@24
…ye gods. I cannot tell what’s satire and what’s real in there. That extended rant on “being a degenerate is also non-White” is one of the most egregiously sociopathic, and crazy, pieces of cross-eyed badger spit i’ve ever come across…
This makes me yet again happy that I don’t frequent 4chan.
Supernatural it is pretty much Buffy level entertainment. My wife and I occasionally watch for some light fun. Most of the fanbase is younger women, though I know some adult women who are superfans. I would guess that #7 and others are correct that the reason for the targeting is the fanbase. I hope these people whose idea of fun is trying to emotionally harm young women are outed. I hope everyone around them learns what horrible people they are and they get a taste of their own medicine. I’m generally against stealing anonymity from online communities, but these assholes deserve that and so much more.
The only problem I have with the show itself is that torture is the go to method of gathering information in most episodes. Sure the ones being tortured are usually demons, but the demons are inhabiting the bodies of humans that remember what happens to them when possessed. This normalization of torture on the show can get creepy.
Any distinctions can and have been ignored by courts. The difference is one of motivation (the thoughts) of the accused and courts are not good at determining the thoughts of accused people
In Canada:
So in Canada at least, actively driving someone to suicide and simply being involved in the decision/act are not adequately distinguished and many doctors and family members have been charged and convicted.
That is almost cartoonishly evil. It is hard to credit that so many people can be so unbelieveably vile, and yet despite the incredulity of decent human beings, the ethical cesspool that is 4Chan continues to stubbornly exist.
I am with Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- @ 27 – I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. Its the only way to be sure.
Now, if only we could get all the transphobic arsehats from 4Chan to go to one location all at the same time…*
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
* For those chronically incapable of recognising bitter, angry humour; no, I am not actually advocating the mass murder of 4Chan bigots by means of a thermonuclear strike.
You might like Supernatural, PZ. It’s a lighthearted romp, but the writers seems to be SJWs; for example, in one episode, the heroes visit Heaven, and learn that Heaven is custom-made for each individual. They are ushered into a log hunting cabin with a huge American flag on the wall, and so one of the heroes asks, “Whose idea of Heaven is this?”_
Angel: “Kenneth Lay”
Sam: “But he was a crook!”
Angel (reprovingly): “He was devout. That trumps everything.”
And then in a later episode, the Earthbound angel Castiel walks into a church where the pastor is raging against the evils of homosexuality. He yells out, “That’s not true! God doesn’t care who you love!”
Then he pauses a moment like he’s reading the priest’s mind, and adds, “Why don’t you tell your flock where YOUR genitals have been!”_
But then they have form. In an early episode of Smallville, the same writers have the young Lex Luthor tell Clark Kent that his billionaire father “thinks that poor is a synonym for lazy”.
Enjoy!
And your point is???? I don’t see one, other than you have problems…..
@Brony, #45:
I’m not really surprised, given the general gynophobia that we’ve seen from the channers for years (remember Rule 37: “there are no girls on the Internet”), and the way they (and similar boards) made furries a target for so long. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some of the more egregious MLP stuff online were from Chan trolls, fulfilling Rule 34.
But the presence of toxic people and attitudes in the Brony community, even if it was/is largely separate from 4chan, is really just evidence that the problem isn’t 4chan or asshole Bronies or Gamergaters or shitty comic book fans or Slymepitters or whatever. If it’s an Internet subculture, particularly (for whatever reason) a subculture with a nerdy bent, it’s apparently going to have its contingent of utterly vile, vocal, hateful mostly-dudes.
Which leads me to believe that the underlying problem isn’t the Internet or trolls or anonymity or mental illness, but toxic kyriarchy. This is how entitled dudes with some degree of tech savviness and a persecution complex get their power trips.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls @51
I don’t think you were being charitable with your reading of Kimpatsu.
@ Nerd of Redhead #51
I didn’t read #50 as being critical. Was it the “but” in the second sentence? Maybe I’m missing something but I read that as “it’s light entertainment but there’s a more serious side”. The examples given make me like the writers.
I didn’t recognize the name Kimpatsu so I Googled to see if I could find anything troll-like. The few comments I read seemed fine. Maybe there’s some history I’m unaware of.
@52
I don’t think any of those are necessarily THE underlying problem, rather they exacerbate an underlying set of problems. Anonymity allows for bad behavior with no consequences coming back on the person who behaves badly. The internet allows people that wouldn’t normally find community to find community and while that is often good it can also be bad. Now every conspiracy freak can find at least hundreds of like minded conspiracy freaks and every asshole can find thousands of like minded assholes. When those assholes get together free of outside social consequences the result is a lot of bad behavior and escalation of that bad behavior. Picture the Stanford experiment or the Milgram experiments with no supervisors to call an end to them and each participant free of any potential consequences after their actions.
Now more on-topic…
I really believe this level of harassment should be considered criminal and actively prosecuted. This goes way beyond simple trolling. The only problem is how to do it without hurting the positive freedom of expression and association that comes from the internet.
At the very least, we need to offer our support to targets to let them know they’re not in this alone. {goes off in search of the targets listed in the OP}… Just sent a note to flameprincesswithboobs and saw this on her main page:
Kindness is more powerful than hate. (although, sadly, it’s not always enough)
@CaitieCat: I always like “swan song” from season 5: of course, they’d found their storyline by that time but still…
Kimpatsu:
Sorry to contribute to the random tangent here, and possibly make it worse, but it is very much related to our culture being “sick”: I noticed recently that in Supernatural, they tend to use torture. A lot. And it works. And somehow they managed to do it in such a way (they are just “interrogating” demons after all) that it snuck under my radar for four or five seasons. Talk about 24 and the like glorifying torture in more realistic settings, but I wonder how many shows out there are doing similar things in fantastical settings and thus don’t get as much as attention for essentially contributing to a culture of bloodthirsty torture apologists.
@54 Golgafrinchan
Thanks for the great idea. I’ll be joining you. It’s nice to be able to counter this crap at least in some small way.
@48 quidam
That laws can be crafted to make such a distinction is a different question from whether or not they make such a distinction as they stand. Not that there is no such distinction up here: No one has been convicted of first degree murder for simply talking to someone about their desire to kill themselves and helping them come to a decision, people have for harassing someone to the point of suicide.
I must also point out the the “counselling” portion of that particular crime is typically applied to strangers encouraging someone to kill themselves rather than to friends and family, (when it is applied at all).
I’m sure it isn’t in the US. Freeze Peach and all.
Not this shit again.
I own the first seven seasons of Supernatural on DVD. The current season is appointment television for me, and it’s the only show I watch live at all these days. I say that so that hopefully you will believe I have some idea what I’m talking about when I say,
Prof. Myers, you will hate this show.
I’m not saying “don’t watch;” I’m not the boss of you. Just… given your stated opinions, I do not expect you to like it enough to watch a second hour.
You could try reading the whole thing as economic allegory? Our heroes are the working class, monsters are the ordinary vicissitudes of life, demons are corporate capitalism, and angels are Big Government. (See Julia M. Wright’s Latchkey Hero for a better analysis.)
@caitiecat: Wishful Thinking? In which the one person who ‘doesn’t remember’ any of it is the rape victim? That’s a *really* problematic episode to recommend for a newbie.
And/or anyone who has somehow found a way to the conclusion that, in the face of grandiosely petty fucking evil, hypervigilant policing of the exact phrasing of ethically functional humans’ expressions of disgust at said evil is the top priority….
Wow, this isn’t just disgusting harassment. This has to be criminal, trying to employ psycho-terror to drive vulnerable people to suicide. I’m pretty sure that without the cloak of internet anonymity, such people would face significant punishments. Now, the internet isn’t fully anonymous (even on such boards IP adresses are still recorded and whatnot), so please… get these fuckers. What a lowly piece of human filth must one be to pick on those most vulnerable with the intention of getting them killed? I’m always looking for justifications somehow, even for such people, so I wonder what sorts of abuse or personal disasters they experienced to become so warped and, frankly, evil. I have to admit it wouldn’t surprise me, though, if they did not suffer thus. Plenty of people enjoy to cause suffering just “4 teh lulz”.
—
Also, what? Supernatural fans specifically? Why in the world…? I love that show, so let me gush a little.
Although I prefer the monster-of-the-week episodes over the overarching storyline which is getting weirder and weirder, both are interesting in their own way if you don’t take them too seriously.
Basically, the setup is that two brothers hunt monsters, ghosts, demons, Lovecraftian horrors, angels and gods and so on all across the USA. Yes, Pagan gods exist. The Abrahamic god does, too, but isn’t available: Heaven’s angels have been doing their own thing for a long while and aren’t exactly the best friends of humanity. The show borrows from a lot of mythologies and mashes everything together for its own purposes.
Sometimes there’s a murder mystery (although like in X-Files the solution to the mystery is something monstrous rather than just a killer; the first season episode “Dead in the Water” is a pretty good example of that) or a kidnapping or strange happenings or it’s about the greater events like the war between Heaven and Hell or the different factions within those two and so on.
As an Atheist who is fascinated by religion, loves ghost stories and the Cthulhu Mythos, this is a pretty great if somewhat cheesy show. It also introduced me to a lot of classic rock artists and I like that they don’t take themselves too seriously/break the fourth wall/make fun of “shipping”/fanfic) and so on.
Not enjoying the show? Sure. But targeting people who do enjoy it? I just don’t get that.
One post claims to be by a member of Jobbik (Hungary), two others by a member or two of Golden Dawn (Greece). The first two openly call for organized mass murder (which they expect to begin any day now), the second longs for gas chambers, and the third talks about and says .
Welp, I thank them for their honesty.
It’s nirvana.
Training yourself hard to get to such a state in this life is apparently a huge thing in the upper reaches of Tibetan buddhism.
I don’t see a reason to think any of it is satire. It’s obvious to me that most of the people in that thread are fully convinced Nazis.
I don’t think it should be a crime to “push someone towards suicide”. Otherwise anyone who cooperates, facilitates or advises someone to end their life will be charged.
Are you kidding me? The distinction between those two things is so fucking obvious, even the law can see it. Seriously, it’s not at all hard to write a law that criminalizes the former but not the latter. (And why do you lump cooperation and facilitation with advising? Those aren’t the same thing by a long shot, and lumping them together is either stupid or dishonest. There are plenty of people in the assisted-suicide movement who tell people how they can kill themselves — but how many of them actually tell people “you SHOULD kill yourself”?)
Having read some of the other comments regarding Supernatural, I think you’re right:
The show does have issues with torture and others as well. What bothers me in particular about more recent episodes is that trying to save the “meatsuits” (term for humans possessed by demons or angels) has taken a complete backseat to the efficiency of killing the adversaries (along with the civilians). Same goes for torture.
Where before they would torture a demon to both gain information and make it leave, often they now simply gather the information and then kill it (rather than just send it back to Hell). You could argue about that, I guess, them being demons and all, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that their preferred method of killing the demons also kills the people they inhabit.
They don’t just do this in situations of immediate danger (while actually fighting them for example), either. It’s not just killing during a fight or battle. They end up murdering people quite often rather than driving the creature out, especially in the later seasons.
There are some token efforts to condemn needless killing or cruelty here and there, but considering how focused they were on saving people at the start of the series and how callous they often act now (not just when they’re lacking a soul at the moment or whatever), well, it’s not enough. They’re not complete, clean good guys, never have been, but they have been better.
Er, no. The law frequently doesn’t see it very well and often charges people for the former when they committed the latter. Things that may seem obvious are seldom so when you get into the details, which is why there are very few laws that are simple and unambiguous.
Because people who have advised others on ways to commit suicide have been charged. People who provide equipment for suicide have been charged.
Do you find false dichotomies like “either stupid or dishonest” useful when trying to have a discussion on a difficult subject? Anyone who does that must be either a wanker or a necrophiliac.
***
@Tom Foss, Grewgills
I think that both psychology as it relates to anonymity matters, and psychology in groups acting in concert with purpose. Kyriarchy suggests adding the psychology of dominance to that list. These situations, instigating individuals and exacerbating cultures have multiple facets involving behavior that matter. I think that those instincts used for awful purpose need to be analyzed by their manifestations wile keeping a more general universally applicable model in the back of your head that anyone could fit into. You can’t find the useful underlying patterns and use them later when the cultural makeup evolves otherwise.
The entitled dudes feeling persecuted are in both Bronies and 4chan, as well as the gamergaters, the slymepit, furries and many others. There is more than one bad behavior as well. Lining the awful people in each of the groups and looking at the common denominators of their actions, words, and characteristics is very useful.
The presence of toxic people is good enough until proportion becomes relevant. I certainly don’t need the awful behavior separated from Bronies or anyone else so there is no need to qualify anything as separate from 4chan. Cultural make-up and evolution can’t really be accurately analyzed if those distinctions are made without reason*. I won’t pretend to know how much of the Brony community is toxic people.
*Very much on my mind anyway because I have been asked to come back to the image board I used to frequent. I was a moderator there. There is opportunity here but I need to think about this carefully. There are many that I like there and there is more than one effective way of being who I am and challenging bullshit. I need a toolkit for many occasions.
@David Marjanović 66
It’s also complete bullshit. I bet it’s been bullshit in buddhism this whole time in many ways too. Of course it’s often nicer if you can’t feel some things. Life often sucks. But some of that feeling is empathy, sympathy…
Everything they do is an emotional reaction to something. They are motivated by emotional feelings towards the groups they target. They are motivated by emotions that lead them to see these people as things that need to be targeted. They feed on the emotions generated by their actions and accomplishments. The shallow bullshit in the justifications is amazing.
It’s also amazing how like the responses to criticism of Dawkins, Harris et al that is. They are not being emotional no, their actions are all “logical” and “rational”. It’s those other people who are emotional. There are common patterns in this garbage that can be very useful.
I watched a couple of episodes of “Supernatural” back when it started. Didn’t seem awful, but it didn’t grab me. From what I gather of how the show has been since, it at least has very nice pretty people to look at, whether you’re into men or women. Or both, for that matter.
Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) @ 64;
A good point, well made.
Having watched almost the entire series of SPN but having no connection to their fanbase, I was actually a wee bit surprised to learn in this thread that the fanbase is predominantly female and may be geared toward teen girls. I really enjoyed watching the series, but it’s full of ‘dudebro’ humor and other problematic elements. I’d highly disagree with you, Kimpatsu in #50, that the writers seem at all interested in social justice.
Off the top of my head, some problematic themes: two women in refrigerators in episode 1 alone, damsel of the week theme in most of the early episodes, prevalence of homophobic and misogynistic jokes/language, in one episode one of the main characters actually describes his lifestyle as “dissing chicks,” torture (as noted above by anteprepro), the two main characters frequently talk to each other about how they are emotionally dealing with their life circumstances and these conversations must always either begin or end with a comment about how they are afraid they’ll turn into girls if they keep talking about their feelings, and the cast in most episodes is very white.
To be fair, most mainstream television is full of casual racism, misogyny, and homophobia, so it’s probably not especially problematic given that context, but it’s certainly not a social justice oriented show. It’s a really fun watch if you don’t take it too seriously because, like others have said, it doesn’t take itself very seriously. It’s full of jokes poking fun at genres (which I love) and at its characters, and I agree with others above that the funny episodes are the best episodes.
********
As for the topic of the OP, I really hope the targets of the harassment will be able to find help if they need it. The harassers’ intent is clearly criminal, and we need to start taking cyber criminals more seriously.
Damn, gotta add one more thing to the Supernatural tangent: Almost every single black character on the show, rare as they are, are villains. Even the ones that weren’t were usually portrayed as immoral, even more anti-hero than the two white main characters. I started noticing that early on. Also noticed that, especially in the Monster of the Week early episodes, every town they went to had a new woman around their age to act as eye candy and a potential love interest/one night stand.
As for 4chan and 8chan: I wonder how much this overlaps with the Gamergaters?
@74:
Perhaps, but there is Rufus Turner, one of their more admirable characters, I would think.
@anteprepro
I would not know how to responsibly do that comparison (many cultural, media, and other variables I’m not familiar with). But I’m looking at nearly identical threads on 8chan and the image board that I am re-familiarizing myself with having to do with autism controversies. I’m nerding out in a way that is nearly impossible be casual and and entertaining with.
From what I know 4chan had to bow to political realities and has been expelling some gamergate related people and topics. So the betrayal related drama puts an interesting spin on things for example. I’ve seen drama from 4chan expelling people and topics for many reasons in the past: the (temporary) furry expulsion and the birth of 7chan (big trigger warnings on that place, I was a spectator only), the (temporary) Brony expulsion and birth of Ponychan so there are patterns. I’m just a little paranoid about generalizing there without some digging and research. Social drama and serious social conflict is like heroin to me.
Ugh, I think I know why Supernatural is being targeted. I’m a fan of the show, so I poked around a little online and found that its online fandom is mostly teen girls. This makes perfect sense, as the #1 reason this completely ridiculous but entertaining show works is that the actors are handsome and charismatic and funny. Plus, for the ‘shippers, the two leads basically never have romantic relationships that last more than a night, making it even easier to fantasize about them for teen girls.
If you’re an angry young misogynist who hates women because they seem to be attracted to hunky men instead of Nice Guys like you imagine yourself to be (though, of course, the utter lack of empathy for women suggests a not-niceness), then hating this fandom seems like an obvious thing to do. They’re probably threatened that geeky teenage girls are fantasizing about sex with Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles. Of course, if they bothered to use even a teeny bit of common sense, they’d realize that just because girls have sexual fantasies about handsome actors doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be open to dating someone a little more attainable. Oh no, that would require empathy and realizing that girls are human just like they are. So instead they get angry and act like total assholes.
Well, it’s nice to see that Canadian law has the right of it: Trying to get someone to kill themselves should be a first-degree charge.
This is almost certainly a hoax. Much as I despise and would be happy to blame the Chans, this seems to be a continuation of events that began last week in the Supernatural fandom. provides a pretty thorough rundown of events. In summary,
1. A small number of well-known fans received anonymous hate messages (likely sent by themselves) and faked suicide. Later, they claimed to have been hacked.
2. Others imitated them. Someone started #affectedbyhate to show support.
3. A rumor started that the Chans were responsible, which quickly became “known fact”.
4. After people started using Omegle to offer support, rumors spread that that channers were also using it to plan out their attacks. So then SPN fans started going there as “spies”, offering their own blogs as targets. Because of the anonymity of Omegle, no one could know that thee “spies” were just talking to each other.
5. Having spread enough blame around to get the attention of channers, most likely some of the most recent hate has come from them (although I think the largest anti-Tumblr communities are on Reddit).
While I wouldn’t argue with anyone who said that Supernatural fandom is a special form of bizarre, fake harrassment and pseuicides have been around as long as the internet, especially in fandom.
All of this might be amusing were it not for the people who truly suffered distress because of the manipulation from their so-called friends. Stunts like this also make people more skeptical and less likely to reach out to people who truly do need help, as well as creating opportunities for the less scrupulous to find victims to manipulate and abuse in the guise of offering support (such as Andy Blake, mentioned in the above link, a notorious scam artist among other things).
*checks FiMfiction account*
Okay… 3/10 of the fics I’ve written are clopfics. Yay, it’s not my main thing! Pretty sure my NSFW Tumblr is a lot smaller than my SFW Tumblr, too. Whew.
Seriously, though, there’s some messed up R34 out there. Since I decided to say buck it and produce the occasional clopfic or clopart I’ve tried to be responsible and portray proper consent and females as sexual subjects. Browse derpiboo.ru for a couple pages without filters, though, and you’d be forgiven for thinking all bronies must be pretty sick in the head. Funny thing is that the MLP:FiM fandom is probably one of the best and most progressive things to come out of 4chan.
@ lumi 79
Actually those are terrible arguments.
This,
…is utter crap.
Other people are happy to get one person’s attention and therefore this situation involving multiple people and many linked images from chan boardsis all a hoax?
No. If you want to show something is a hoax you have to demonstrate that something specific is not true.
@ Michael Brew 80
I have wondering how to address that one too. I take the same general approach that if you can talk about objectification and other problems in comic books, you can talk about them in cartoon porn. Convincing people that pedofoalia is a problem is not too hard. But arguing against Molestia was a heck of a lot harder. I think I am much better prepared now.
@Brony
Yeah, I only saw the later Ask Molestia comics, which seemed more like BDSM-like games as well as plain old consensual sexy times, so it seemed a little weird to me at first that there were campaigns to take it down completely. Apparently the older strips did glorify actual sexual assault for laughs, though.
Funny enough, since I ship Sparity, I end up having to explain what isn’t foalcon. The age ambiguity (whether Spike is a toddler like some people assume due to the “baby dragon” term or a young teen due to his very puberty-like growth into adulthood in a single day and whether the Mane6 are older teens or as old as their mid-30s) makes a big difference, and some people don’t accept that characters can age (especially since there’s a prevalent headcanon that Spike will age so slowly that he won’t hit adulthood until everypony else is dead, which was made up out of thin air but still treated as undisputable canon). I have had to have discussions with Pia-sama about her occasional desire to depict a clearly too young Spike with a clearly very adult Rarity, though. She’s a bit ideological about her ship, though, if you’ve ever seen her talk about it at all, and she mostly gets into those moods when someone talks smack about her ship being pedophillic even when she depicts Spike as clearly an adult and she wants to do it as a “f*** you.” Understandable feeling, but not something I agree with, obviously.
Brony @81
Every single claimed suicide was later blamed on “hackers” while showing all the earmarks of fakery. It’s obvious to anyone who has long experience in LJ/DW/Tumblr fandom. You also seem to be unaware of the close connections among the “victims”.
I am not defending the channers, especially now that I hear they’ve been doxxing trans women who are active on twitter, I would never defend those people. They are toxic. But this one thing was not their fault.
@lumi 84
Then present the evidence you are talking about. I don’t have to believe a damn thing because you say so. As far as I know you are as experienced with this as any other collection of text I encounter on the net.
When you come in here presenting a page like the one you did as evidence I’m not going to think very much of your opinion on this issue. Seriously! Why the hell should I be convinced by someone that makes arguments based irrelevant bullshit?
That five pointed list at the beginning? That is the evidence list. Showing that someone likes attention is so general a behavior that much more is needed. You are here getting attention after all, maybe I should just assume that you are part of a 4chan misinformation group?
@lumi 84
And by “evidence list” I mean that they need to flesh that out some more. Even if it is shown that one person has faked something that’s not enough, they are claiming a conspiracy.
On top of that NOTHING you post takes anything from the evidence of people that are trying to get people to commit suicide. Not only do you need to prove your conspiracy, you need to show why that article in the OP is wrong. What you have is ridiculously insufficient. Especially to someone like me who has personally witnessed people on the /b/ board try to harass people into suicide. The situation in the OP is very very believable.
So the alternative to 4chan/8chan harassing depressed and suicidal people is some conspiracy where these people are all “slandering” 4chan/8chan by making up the harassment? And this is more credible than the original story, because some random forum post says It Is Obvious, and lumi agrees? Uh huh.
You know, funny thing about “skeptics” in arenas like this: They always tend to be “skeptical” of the story as people understand it and instead leap onto a much more convoluted alternative, often a conspiracy theory, based on even less evidence than the original understanding, because they just prefer the alternative story. They hyperskeptic themselves all the way into ridiculously credulous conspiracy theorizing. It is entertaining if not a little depressing in its illustration of just how bad at Logic and Reason even purported paragons of Logic and Reason happen to be.
Well, yes.
Why the story as presented in the OP is entirely plausible:
4chan on Suicide:
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/4chan-users-suicide-attempt
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/an-hero
http://4chandata.org/adv/Best-easiest-suicide-methods-a319519
http://i.imgur.com/W91cN.jpg
4chan’s other honorable activities:
http://www.transadvocate.com/4chan-plans-genocide-against-transgender-women_n_14746.htm
http://www.dailydot.com/news/4chan-death-threats-gallagher/
http://gawker.com/5590166/11-year-old-viral-video-star-placed-under-police-protection-after-death-threats
And that’s ignoring all the death threats and harassment of women in recent years, especially re: Gamerghazi.
Shit. Links in above comment should probably all come with a Trigger Warning. Not sure if that was obvious or not.