55,000 Sign Twitter Abuse Petition After Jane Austen Campaigner Threats 421
AlistairCharlton writes "A petition campaigning for Twitter to improve its measures against online abuse has received more than 55,000 signatures in two days. The petition was set up in support of feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, who faced a torrent of abusive tweets, including threats to rape and kill her, after successfully campaigning for a woman's picture to appear on a banknote; Jane Austen will appear on £10 notes from 2017."
Re:In fairness (Score:5, Informative)
In even more fairness, 90% of everything is crap.
Boo hoo (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Problem is always the same. (Score:5, Informative)
As if most of us haven't been on the receiving end of "abuse" online? Haven't been "attacked" or even threatened?
The law is fairly clear. If you make a specific threat against someone and it isn't clearly a joke then it doesn't matter if you intended to carry it out, if you had the means to or if the person felt threatened. To be absolutely clear feeling threatened or offended is not enough, there has to be a specific and seemingly serious threat.
Yeah, it was harassment and bullying, but we also acknowledge that words don't directly force you to harm yourself.
I doubt very much those people chose to harm themselves. They were clearly driven to it by mental anguish due to bullying. Some of us may be able to shrug that stuff off like a Vulcan but the effect of sustained psychological abuse on normal people is quite well documented. Some of the most effective torture doesn't involve any physical harm to the victim.
For years now there has been a campaign to recognize mental illness as being the same as physical illness. It's not a sign of weakness or a feeble mind, it's the way the human brain works. Apparently they still have a long way to go convincing people.
Re:Zimmerman? (Score:4, Informative)
The issue with the Criado-Perez mob is a bit different. You can't argue that you were nasty in the heat of the moment because it is very hard to show that you were that passionate about Austen making in on a 20 quid note. And it is quite, quite easy to show that their threats were made out of sheer spite and malice. This is not as easy to show in the Zimmerman mob.
After a couple of beers AND a lot of teary "documentaries" I might have joined the Zimmerman mob myself. I think that highly unlikely due to my self-restraint but definitely not impossible. But no matter how shit-faced drunk I were I would NEVER resort to threaten a woman no matter who or why with rape and murder. The line which I don't cross is quite a bit away from that.
So while both cases are similar and both cases are wrong, the culpability is a bit different. Which is why we need to remember to put "mens rea" back into our laws(even the stupid knee-jerk ones) because the spirit in which the offense was done in should reflect the punitive action.(See that kid who has been in jail for 6 months over threatening a killing spree "lol jk" before he even got his day in court)
Also a little bit of critical thinking would help to find where the different nuances in those cases. One-liners only win discussions in Hollywood. Which makes Twitter so especially pointless.
Re:Zimmerman? (Score:5, Informative)
The national media didnt "imply" his guilt by doing anything other than report the sequence of events
... while fudging them, by e.g. omitting the question from the 911 operator asking for Trayvon's race, but broadcasting Zimmerman's answer ("he looks black"), to make him look like a racist. And don't even get me started on how they plastered the front pages with a photo of Trayvon as a kid, implying that it's what he looked like when he died. Ironically, we have found out that it actually skewed the witnesses' testimony, since when one of them said that Zimmerman was on top of Martin, and defense asked how she knew, she said that "big guy was on top" - and then, after getting grilled about it, it came up that her assessment of which guy was big was based on that kid photo of Martin (in reality, he was the bigger one).
So yeah, it was totally unbiased reporting all around.