Inside the Business of Online Reputation Spin 126
The Guardian has a long, thought-provoking piece (it's an excerpt from an upcoming book) on the way that online PR works, when individuals or organizations pay online spin doctors to change the way they're perceived online. Embarrassing photos, ill-considered social media posts, even quips that have ended up geting the speaker into hot water, can all be crowded out, even if not actually expunged, by injecting lots of innocuous information, photos, and other bits of information. That crowding out seems to be the reputation managers' prime tactic. Besides a brush of his own with identity theft (or at least unwanted borrowing), the author spoke at length with both Adria Richards and "Hank"; both of whom ended up losing their jobs in the aftermath of what became known as Donglegate, after Richards tweeted about jokes that she overheard Hank and another developer share at PyCon 2013.
Works for privacy too... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Works for privacy too... (Score:1)
Republicans aren't the problem. It's the dems who are trying to push net neutrality to ruin the internet.
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No. Net Neutrality is a good thing. We need more government control of the Internet.
I'm sure the government is well aware of that necessity. The NSA has been carefully monitoring the situation for some time now.
Defending Yourself with Trolls! (Score:1)
Making believable bad information go away is hard. You could fix your problems by doing the reputation.com approach of posting lots of credible good information (which can help some), or you could drown it out in non-credible bad stuff. You don't want the real *chan crowd mad at you, but enough posts from known 7chan trolls about your mother being a hamster and your father smelling like elderberries and photoshopped pictures of you doing evil things with hamsters and elderberries can make it hard to find
Do they ( PR) have enough numbers (Score:2)
Doesn't matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia carries a great deal of bad and misleading information, as well as attacks and cover-ups. The editing (by which I mean arbitrary, supervision-free, largely random and often outright wrong top-down meddling with content) is nothing short of terrible. What keeps Wikipedia going is the users. What keeps setting it back is the meddling from above. Nothing has ever managed to keep misinformation out of it -- in either direction. That said, Wikipedia has long since mutated from its optimum form -- actually open -- into a pseudo-intellectual grandstand for its operators, replete with locked pages carrying their opinions to the masses.
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Don't trust wikipedia for any controversial subjects. As always seek lots of different information and make up your own mind.
Use wikipedia for the footnotes. Ignore the article.
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and yet it's superior to any alternative you might suggest, because any traditional top down organization is obviously far more biased and with an agenda
we're human beings. we're all biased. if you want your media to be free of bias, you will never read anything ever again
having said that, a nonprofit group of random individuals is about as bias free as you will ever get
there is a big difference between obviously biased and attempting to smear, and trying as hard as possible to being unbiased and a smatteri
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we're human beings. we're all biased. if you want your media to be free of bias, you will never read anything ever again
That would be indeed more of a solution than a problem.
But in reality, people who want their media to be free of bias rather tend to consider media, that shares their own bias as bias free.
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people who want their media to be free of bias rather tend to consider media, that shares their own bias as bias free.
that's restating the problem in terms of immaturity
"only media which conforms to my prejudices is 'bias free'" is a statement of ignorance
"everything has bias, some of it residual and unintentional, some of it purposeful and by design" is a statement of maturity and education
and then you choose the media where the bias is residual and unintentional. or even better, you choose many media sources, from different countries, even including those with bias, and see the truth through the spectrum of interpretatio
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you can't tell the difference between obvious propaganda and a news organization which tries hard to be impartial?
Of course I can do that. That's easy. The problem starts where you have to tell the difference between non-obvious propaganda and sloppy journalism due to budget reasons.
Yes, your course of action (reading and comparing multiple sources) would help, but boils down to do your own research and become your own expert, just to recognize bad newspaper articles.
And if that wouldn't be hard enough, you would have to be self-reflecting enough to recognize your own bias. Which is harder than you think, because to yo
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well said, i agree with everything, except
And it takes a really scientific mindest to accept that what you know may be completly wrong.
no, it's a character issue, not a knowledge issue
it's called humility
the dumbest moron in the world, who has an open mind and is willing to learn, is a better person than the scientific genius who is smugly certain in his knowledge and sneers off all challenges
ignorance isn't really the problem in this world
we're all ignorant, about something
the problem is *prideful* ignorance
the idea that "i know all i need to know and don't need to consider new evidence" is perhap
adria richards (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:adria richards (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, the interview doesn't exactly paint her in any better of a light than people already hold her in. In her own words she basically states she's racist and sexist with a possible religious bias:
“Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him.
(emphasis mine). The way that's phrased, to me, states that she was not offended, but chose to manufacture offense via the photo & tweets, and that resulted in real world damage to peoples lives. Not just to the two men, but their families, as well.
While I do think that a lot of the stuff that was done and said to her after this incident are despicable, it doesn't make her any less of a hurtful, spiteful, vindictive, hypocritical, hateful excuse of a human being. Additionally, her comment about Downs Syndrome is just...disturbing.
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While I do think that a lot of the stuff that was done and said to her after this incident are despicable, it doesn't make her any less of a hurtful, spiteful, vindictive, hypocritical, hateful excuse of a human being. Additionally, her comment about Downs Syndrome is just...disturbing.
agreed. people took it too far, with the death threats and whatnot. but it is really hard to feel bad for her when she makes comments like these https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I didn't watch more than a few seconds of the video because I'm at work, but do you really think a video posted by anonymous is likely to show her comments in context? Maybe she does think that way, but don't you think you should find a more reliable source before making up your mind?
I note that the GP didn't like to the article they quoted either. If I were not so generous I'd assume that was to prevent people getting the complete context in which it was said. For the benefit of the discussion, here is a l
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Ten months later, I was sitting opposite Adria Richards in a cafe at San Francisco airport. She seemed introverted and delicate, just the way Hank had come across over Google Hangout. She told me about the moment she overheard the comment about the big dongle. “Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?” she asked me.
“You felt fear?” I asked.
“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”
Which was why, she said, even though she’d never before complained about sexual harassment, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took three photos”. She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said. Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third tweet was the [conference’s] code of conduct.”
“You talked about danger,” I said. “What were you imagining might?”
“Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she replied. “So. Yeah.”
'He’s a white male,' Adria said. 'I’m a black Jewish female. He said things that could be inferred as offensive to me' I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been at a tech conference with 2,000 bystanders.
“Sure,” she replied. “And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.”
This woman clearly has not learned a thing in the past 2 years. Which would explain why hank (the guy she got fired) got a job the next day, and she still has no job
Re:adria richards (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we be clear on one thing? Adria Richards did not get Hank Whoeveritis fired. The faceless Internet mob got them both fired.
I don't know if she correctly remembers what she felt in the moment. However, the incident will, for her, always be associated with actual rape and death threats. Why the hell wouldn't the overwhelming memory from the whole incident be "unsafe"?
What she has learned in the past two years is that the faceless Internet mob will do its best to make every stereotype (about how women and people with lots of melanin get treated in the tech industry) a reality. Whether or not her actions were justified in the moment is irrelevant; the subsequent shitstorm proved her right.
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I think I'm saying that 4chan is (or should I say "was") exceedingly easy to troll into a stereotypical over-reaction, especially by accident.
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Now, out of those factors, you conclude that the 'black, female' attributes are the cause of the shitstorm?
I'm saying that if a white dude (whether Jew or Gentile) had done the same thing, the shitstorm wouldn't have happened.
There are guys call out brogrammer culture all the time. Those stories don't make Slashdot as often, because it it bleeds, it leads.
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So she heard something, figured it's a sex-related joke, deemed it sexist, got outraged, snapped a pic and posted a snarky comment on twitter.
Yes, it snowballed, but someone had to get that snowball rolling down the hill to begin with, and that was someone was Adria Richards.
If you read the interview in the article, she claims to have empathy towards "Hank", but her past and present actions reek of her being a sociopath. Even her own remarks insinuate that she wasn't offended, but she made a shit-storm because they could appear to be offensive to her. In her mind, and she states this in the interview, that because she is a black Jewish woman, and
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she picked two people having a private conversation
Part of why you have code of conducts is that nothing is private at a conference, I can hear what you are saying two rows in front of you.
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You are implying that her fear was unjustified, but the reaction seen in the days after the event suggest was it was fully justified. It turns out that there are a lot of violent asshats out there who are willing to threaten rape and injury. Who knows if they will carry them out, but no-one should be required to find out before starting to worry.
If you don't want to be associated with the people who do that sort of thing don't act like them. Stick the conference rules, which are there for the precise reason
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You are implying that her fear was unjustified, but the reaction seen in the days after the event suggest was it was fully justified.
Im not sure this is even logical. Because event B caused fear, , then fear was justified prior and during to event A, which was simple overhearing someone elses conversation that had nothing to do with the person claiming "fear"
yeah, I am fearful everytime i walk in public because others are talking to each other....
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She assumed that most of the people there were fine, until some of them started acting like the ones who are abusive.
Re:adria richards (Score:4, Insightful)
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You have cherry picked one small quote from the article in order to misrepresent her position. You then make various unfounded assumptions based on that quote, basically doing the same thing that you accuse her of.
In context she was saying that the speaker should have been aware that he might cause offence to the person in front of him. In that situation a reasonable person would have realized that what they were saying could offend the listener. I'm sure someone will start complaining about free speech and
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She's the Problem, no one else.
Anonymous people on the internet is the problem, what Hank and Adria did was not important.
Re:adria richards (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, these people make good money going that through very specific crowd on Patreon. It's their business model.
That is why they are called "professional victims".
Sexism, Too (Score:5, Informative)
http://media.tumblr.com/ed5aea... [tumblr.com]
I personally don't consider any of the jokes sexist, but they absolutely make her a hypocrite.
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You can't tell the difference between making a tame joke on Twitter and a run-on joke at a professional conference that is specifically against the conference code of conduct and also happens to be at a talk about helping young people and especially young girls into coding?
There is a time and a place for dick jokes. A PyCon talk is neither.
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A private comment to your friend during a presentation by someone else is completely harmless.
Still can't believe how SJWs will defend hypocrisy to the death.
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A private comment to your friend
Common power tactic, I'm sure they thought it was really funny and wanted everyone to hear.
racist/sexist/ist/ist/etc. (Score:2)
Interview has wrecked work of reputation.com (Score:2)
A google search of Lindsey Stone shows the images that she wanted to suppress, and lots of stories about her experience with her bad reputation.
It looks like anything done by reputation.com has been washed away by the more recent stories about her.
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Let's not give her another 15 minutes...
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Well at least the "incident" has a better context unless you're the sort to do a pure image search? Now the internet knows she's just another plain jane who did something stupid.
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A google search of Lindsey Stone shows the images that she wanted to suppress,
Was it the middle finger pic from the Tomb of the Unknowns?
You just never know what will rile up the Internet Mob these days.
the reputation management didn't work in the case (Score:1)
Re: Feminism HURTS families (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't the men beating their wives, raping them and so on?
That was never as socially acceptable in this country as the dogma would have you believe. Going back to the 17th century (before there even was a "this country"), the colonies were making laws against wife-beating. I can't find the link now, but there are images of newspaper announcements of men being publicly whipped for doing so.
The people, usually men, abusing their children or stepchildren?
Actually, according to "Child Maltreatment 2012 [hhs.gov]" (US Dept. of Health and Human Services - PDF Warning), the numbers pretty strongly indicate that the opposite is true: among biological parents, mothers are about 2x as likely as fathers to be perpetrators of child abuse, and among non-parents, categories that are separated by gender go to females as well. "Partner of Parent (Male)" does beat "Partner of Parent (Female)", though, at 2.3% vs 0.3%, so if you're limiting the population to just children abused by stepfathers, what you said is not exactly false.
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That was never as socially acceptable in this country as the dogma would have you believe.
As long as it's still going on, and still being gotten away with, it's more socially acceptable than you think it is.
Re: Feminism HURTS families (Score:5, Informative)
It's still going on in both directions. Domestic violence is instigated by both sexes at Similar Rates [saveservices.org] (PDF warning again. SAVE handout that contains citations). Enforcement, however, is not, thanks to the broken-by-design Deluth Model, sexually biased "primary aggressor policies", and social pressure against men reporting being hit.
Woman-on-Man and Girl-on-Boy violence, though, enjoys a great deal of public acceptance. Usually "played for laughs."
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Woman-on-Man and Girl-on-Boy violence, though, enjoys a great deal of public acceptance. Usually "played for laughs."
Sure, I agree with that. But again, where does it come from? How do you compare it with the typically much more serious abuse perpetrated by males against females? Obviously, it's comparable, but you can't just consider numbers. And while I don't believe that abuse only exists when it's pervasive (I've had it up to my ears with that bullshit about how it's only sexism when it's men doing it) I also believe that it is fundamentally different.
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HOW is it fundamentally different? What's the magic element that makes one "not as bad" as the other?
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HOW is it fundamentally different? What's the magic element that makes one "not as bad" as the other?
The magic element that's missing from your understanding of what I'm saying is reading comprehension. I said that when the abuse is pervasive, it takes on a different character. Try calming your knee before reading, it may help.
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My knee is not jerking, and I honestly expect better from you than that (normally I don't bother engaging on the internet anymore). I'm not misreading what you're saying, I'm inquiring about your reasoning.
You say that abuse being "pervasive" is the problem, but that you "can't look at just the numbers." How else are you measuring pervasiveness? The incidents occur at similar rates, and one of them *is* socially acceptable, but it's the opposite of your original implication.
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My knee is not jerking,
Then what prevents you from reading what I clearly wrote? Just refusing to do so?
You say that abuse being "pervasive" is the problem, but that you "can't look at just the numbers." How else are you measuring pervasiveness?
It's not only physical abuse, it's being treated as lesser. It's the "culture of abuse" that gets pooh-poohed all the time. Except, of course, it's true. It's about how women are systematically treated as less than men by most societies worldwide. And it's about how when a man assaults a woman, the results are usually more severe than vice-versa.
As I said, it's about classic overcorrection. People lash out. It's not rational.
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It's not rational.
That's true, you looked at the numbers and either ignored them, or drew the opposite conclusion.
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Then what prevents you from reading what I clearly wrote? Just refusing to do so?
The fact that you didn't write the relevant bit, so that I had to ask for more information.
It's not only physical abuse, it's being treated as lesser.
Since you've moved the goalposts from "physical abuse" to "systemically treated as lesser" without providing any examples of the latter, I'm going to limit the context of my response to the former.
In what sense? In the sense that they are unable to make decisions on whether or not to strike someone physically stronger than they are ("primary aggressor" policies), less capable of defending themselves and thus need stro
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You're probably right. I'm just disappointed that I gave him/her too much credit.
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Just out of curiosity, what talk shows have so many women who disfigured a man and got away with it that you can make meaningful statistics about such appearances?
Also, while "slapping someone around" is not as serious as a fisthfight as far
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It's not a fight between equals, it's some douchebag asserting their power - their ownership - over someone else.
Other than the "ownership" hyperbole, you're right, regardless of the posterior plumbing of the douchebag.
Because you don't slap someone who might punch back, precisely because it does nothing but anger the target, but only someone who you think is incapable of fighting back either physically or even legally
Except the numbers show that, obviously, people do just that. And when a stronger target DOES hit back, the attacker takes more hurt than gives.
People engaging in such bullying absolutely should be made examples of, and deserve no one's sympathy when they are. Goddamn overgrown schoolyard bullies.
I used to agree with this just as vehemently as you seem to. When the bullies started coming up without a Y-chromosome, though, I'm sexist enough to content myself with discrediting them.
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Sometimes, the only way to deal with a stubborn, intractable person who refuses to see reason is to just say "shut up, you stupid bitch".
So, is that how you deal with women?
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The whole point of slapping - or other low-intensity violence - is to show the victim's very body is perpetrator's possession, to do with as they please. Please explain how describing this as ownership is hyperbolical?
Half of population are below median intell
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The whole point of slapping - or other low-intensity violence - is to show the victim's very body is perpetrator's possession, to do with as they please. Please explain how describing this as ownership is hyperbolical?
You actually need to show that "the whole point of [low-intensity violence] is to show the victim's body is the perpetrator's possession" first. Once you manage to establish that as something other than bullshit, then I'll take the onus from there. Good luck.
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Woman-on-Man and Girl-on-Boy violence, though, enjoys a great deal of public acceptance. Usually "played for laughs."
That certainly is a problem, and needs to be dealt with. The problem is that it is impossible to have any kind of dialogue because even though both sides basically agree about this point (yes, feminists are against female on male violence as well) they are do far apart it's like ships passing in the night and screaming at each other.
Feminists think that sexism is an issue and should be called out. Men's Rights groups think that calling out sexism is trying to censor perfectly acceptable behaviour and is in
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If the Men's Rights people really want to help deal with issues like this one they need to do what feminists did and start a dialogue that isn't dominated by such extreme rhetoric and reactionary outbursts.
I disagree. It *is* an example of women wanting special treatment, and it is them getting it. Feminism (as opposed to feminists, who can't seem to agree on a damn thing) doesn't want to solve this issue, and MRAs certainly aren't interested in being told condescendingly to "sit down, shut up, and do what feminism tells you," as you're doing. Whatever the solution to the incongruity may be, I have a hard time believing feminism has anything to contribute to it, since its own flawed premises created the probl
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It makes sense, when you apply a moment of rational thought. Removing the genders from the equation will probably make that easier for most:
Starting a brawl with someone bigger and stronger than you means it's going to hurt you more when they hit you back. Doesn't mean you didn't start the fight, and should probably be considered when deciding whether or not it's a good idea in the first place (it usually isn't).
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Nope, the expectation of proportionality is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Once violence is initiated, the original victim has the legal right (in all civilized countries) to defend oneself by stopping the threat violence. That always requires an escalation.
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How does that always require an escalation? A person can threaten you with a knife while you're out around the BBQ and you can run inside and lock them out of the house, for example.
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Oh yes, we can always just run away and let the bully have everything they want. Or, we can stand up for ourselves which requires an escalation.
I'll rephrase... Winning always requires an escalation. Losing just requires submission to bullies.
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but in reality women do it just as much
Bullshit. Both the victims and perpetrators of random violence are overwhelmingly male. However, domestic violence is not random violence, victims of domestic violence are overwhelmingly female. The sexes are NOT equal in physical strength, the average male has 1.5X the upper body strength of a similar sized female and twice the strength of grip in their hands, it's almost always the unarmed female who ends up in hospital when push turns to shove.
Re: Feminism HURTS families (Score:4, Insightful)
However, domestic violence is not random violence, victims of domestic violence are overwhelmingly female. The sexes are NOT equal in physical strength, the average male has 1.5X the upper body strength of a similar sized female and twice the strength of grip in their hands, it's almost always the unarmed female who ends up in hospital when push turns to shove.
That's using a very carefully crafted definition of "victim," and even if it wasn't, you're still wrong. Even removing cases of bi-directional violence, female instigators are at near-parity to male.