UK's Chief Troll Hunter Targets Doxxing, Virtual Mobbing, and Nasty Images (arstechnica.co.uk) 100
Some bad news for trollers on the internet who use sophisticated techniques to hurl abuses at others. The UK's top prosecutor has warned that they are introducing new regulations to take these matters carefully and punish offenders with jail time. From an ArsTechnica report:New guidelines have been released by the Crown Prosecution Service to help cops in England and Wales determine whether charges -- under part 2, section 44 of the 2007 Serious Crime Act -- should be brought against people who use social media to encourage others to harass folk online. Over the past four years the CPS has repeatedly tweaked its guidelines on offensive behaviour on social media sites. The latest overhaul, among other things, addresses doxxing, where a person's personal information such as bank details or home address are published online; violence against women and girls such as "baiting" -- which labels someone as sexually promiscuous and can include the use of humiliating photoshopped images; and online harassment campaigns that encourage the use of derogatory hashtags. "Social media can be used to educate, entertain, and enlighten but there are also people who use it to bully, intimidate, and harass," said director of public prosecutions Alison Saunders. "Ignorance is not a defence and perceived anonymity is not an escape. Those who commit these acts, or encourage others to do the same, can and will be prosecuted."
Will they extradite Donald Trump? (Score:1)
Just wondering
Some people just have nothing better to do... (Score:1)
And this guy's living proof...
Re:Some people just have nothing better to do... (Score:5, Insightful)
violence against women and girls such as "baiting" -- which labels someone as sexually promiscuous and can include the use of humiliating photoshopped images;
Wow, so now the definition of "violence" includes mean tweets? Having been through actual violence, from beatings to robbery, I'll take mean tweets any day.
"Violence" is not a thing that can happen through the internet. Oh, sure, you can incite it, but that's already a crime, no special "on a computer" law needed. I can see the point in making "doxxing" explicitly a kind of harassment, but really, don't these people have any real crime to chase? You know, the kind that leaves people with actual injury?
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It's a shitty summary that does not accurately describe the law. Obviously, baiting is not violence. However, photoshopping someone into porn and distributing it on social media as part of a campaign of harassment is illegal in the UK. For men as well as women.
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You people are so overreacting to this. All he's saying is that anyone who harasses SJW's by openly disagreeing with them or challenging them in any way will face jail time for it. Perfectly reasonable stuff.
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It's so simple really:
"WHITE MEN ARE EVIL! BURN ALL THEM MOTHERFUCKERS DOWN!" = free speech
Actually, yes it is.
Now, is it a PROTECTED form of free speech?
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>violence against women and girls
Uh, isn't spreading slut rumors a pretty common girl-on-girl "violence"? They've been doing it without the intertubes for a few years now. Decades. Centuries.
Whatever, have fun chasing down every bugger that spawns goaste bots.
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The really crazy thing about all this, the underlying reality, the more it happens, the less impact it has, it becomes the norm and becomes mostly ignored. Of course inflating the impact, making it seem more and more severe, actually hugely increases the perception of harm and resultant psychological harm.
So the real truth of what they are doing because they know they will be making it worse, screw the majority, this is all about a tiny minority being able to censor the entire internet from any negative m
Selective enforcement (Score:4, Insightful)
Gotta punish that wrongthink. How much you want to bet they'll vigorously prosecute those who say mean things about immigrants or women, but gosh just never find the time to investigate someone who bashes white people or men...
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http://www.express.co.uk/news/... [express.co.uk]
"Another girl, going under the pseudonym Lizzie, said: "I know a few girls who have come forward recently and been told they are being racist and I know a lot that won't come forward and to be fair I can't blame them."
This is what is still going on in Rotherham. Government can't or won't fix the atrocious situations occurring because of the utter failure of multiculturalism (it's success is mandated by the holiest laws in existence today, Human Rights, thus for them there ca
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What's with all the alt-right troll headlines on Slashdot lately?
I submitted the same story without the trolling. It's not nearly as bad as this makes it. The threshold is very high. Grossly offensive has a specific meaning in British law. If you want to discuss the facts of the issue feel free, but I'm pretty sure you aren't familiar with them.
I'm not really happy about it either, by the way, because the CPS is incompetent, but that's not what the summary or you address.
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Can someone explain to me the difference between the right and the alt-right?
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http://www.theatlantic.com/mag... [theatlantic.com]
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That said nothing about the "alt-right." Is the "alt-right" just anything on the right that isn't the neocon GOP establishment? Given the origins of neoconservatism is ex-trotskyites, doesn't that just make the alt-right the actual right?
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Right = They will generally still call multiculturalism a failure, but they will not allow any measures to be taken to fix it. There must be total freedom of religion for instance and no discrimination against immigrants based on it.
Alt-right = fuck Islam.
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That doesn't really fit with AniMoJo's comment, though. Nobody on the right, alt or not, likes government censorship of politically incorrect opinions. The thought police are a left-wing thing. So I don't see the point of calling objections to this "alt-right," as it seems like an "all right" objection.
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Can someone explain to me the difference between the right and the alt-right?
Anything the Left doesn't like
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It always cracks me up how leftists who scream like little girls when someone dares label them with "SJW" are the first to label any post they disagree with as "alt-right."
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I don't think anyone called me an SJW today, but I don't read all the -1 comments so...
The alt-right is an actual thing though, a real political movement that people voluntarily identify with. They like to separate themselves from normal conservatives, or "cuckservatives" as they often say, who they don't regard as hardcore enough.
It's not an insult, it's just the name of the their political movement, they one they themselves use. Head over to Breitbart, it's used as a badge of honour.
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The alt-right is an actual thing though
So are SJW's. And they too have separated themselves from traditional liberals, adopting a much more radical agenda. Just ask Bernie Sanders, an old-school liberal who ran head-long [nbcnews.com] into the SJW movement during his campaign.
The sad thing is that Sanders would have made for a much better President than either of the two ass-clowns who got the nominations. But these days only the most shrill voices dominate. And as a straight white male who wasn't able to tout his victimhood and label all his opponents as sex
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SJW is an insult applied to people, the alt-right is something people happy identify with and consider to be their representative political movement.
My point was really that it's not an insult, I'm not insulting people when I identify their allegiance to or politics as alt-right. So you can't really say it's equivalent to calling someone an SJW.
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It's a half and half situation.
While there are a decently sized group of people that entitles themselves alt-right, people been grouping several groups that aren't alt-rights into the same neat package to beat down the whole thing at once.
Re: Selective enforcement (Score:1)
Bullshit. SJW is a label that progressives themselves invented. Like all such labels, given the hateful nature of progressive politics and ideology, it has taken on negative connotations, but that's not the fault of people who use it to talk about your ideology.
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It's not nearly as bad as this makes it. The threshold is very high.
I don't give a shit where the threshold is. Any law that has the principle that "offensive hashtags" might, under any circumstances, deserve jail time is an abomination.
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What're they gonna do, storm Parliament with their spoons?
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it is (mostly) well intentioned.. (Score:2, Interesting)
but more than just a little bit difficult to enforce.
harassment is already illegal.... so just add some bits to include "...on the internet" and call it a day. the law will be there for when its needed.
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Harrassment is illegal, yes. But is popularizing an offensive hashtag a "Serious Crime" as the name of the act suggests it's meant to address?
Re:it is (mostly) well intentioned.. (Score:4, Interesting)
The hashtag would have to be part of a harassment campaign for it to matter.
This reminds me of the story about a court deciding that unfriending someone on Facebook was harassment. Of course they didn't, the Facebook thing was just one small part of a pattern of behaviour both online and offline.
Re:To Mr. Saunders, aka Mr. Fucktard... (Score:5, Informative)
There are some kinds of speech that can be criminalized, or at least made into civil matters. Shout fire in a crowded theater, urge on a violent mob, or, on the civil side, call your neighbor a pedophile because he dog craps on your lawn, and you'll find out awfully fast that freedom of speech is not limitless, and that like any liberty, there are edges.
Re:To Mr. Saunders, aka Mr. Fucktard... (Score:4, Insightful)
Brandenburg v. Ohio gives the police and prosecutors the power to charge someone if their speech leads to imminent danger. In other words, you incite a riot, you'll be charged.
And if you call your neighbor a pedophile because his dog shits on your lawn, he'll likely own your law after the civil trial is over. Ever heard of slander?
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I haven't seen a law yet that explicitly states that it is illegal to yell "fire" in a theater. So you can toss that out. Common sense says not to do it, but there are no laws prohibiting it.
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Maybe, maybe not. I don't know all the laws in the US, so I can't say for sure. What I can say for sure is that falsely yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre is not protected speech under the 1st amendment, so if you do that you're likely to be prosecuted for something.
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Until recently? Did they change the law or something?
Re:i.e. speech I don't like is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens if the Internet troll is threatening to rape or kill you?
Believe it or not, it has never been acceptable to threaten bodily harm against people, and "on a computer" is not a defense.
That's already criminal behavior (Score:3)
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If you can't express your feelings without calling for someone's rape, then you have a serious problem.
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What if someone's done something so terrible that even though you legally have no viable recourse (e.g. Tony Blair taking the UK into an illegal war) you want to express your desire for them to come to personal harm?
I don't want to rape Tony Blair, I don't want anybody else to rape him, but I don't think it should be (or is) illegal for me to point out that he deserves to die in anal agony.
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I will repeat, if you can't express your feelings without wanting to personal physical harm to someone, then you have a serious emotional problem.
It's one thing to call for Blair's arrest and trial. It's implausible to imagine it happening, but that's the kind of discourse one should have in a civilized society. Bullies, brutes and morons are the kinds of people who can only express their agitation in the form threats of physical violence.
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Well, yes. But applying that code to online interactions is a challenging interpretation so for consistency it would be useful for some national guidelines to be established.
Perhaps the people charged with prosecuting criminal acts might be a good source of guidelines, as they have to choose what to prosecute.
Oh. That's the CPS. Who have published guidelines. Looks like we're good then, yes?
Get in the basket (Score:3)
I predict the Anonymous Cowards aren't going to like this one bit, no sir. Not one bit.
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This well comes pre-poisoned, my friend.
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That's what a lot of Republicans are asking themselves this morning.
Don't misunderestimate me.
Alisons lying, that's not legal (Score:1)
Part 2, section 44 of the 2007 Serious Crime Act :
"Intentionally encouraging or assisting an offence (1)A person commits an offence if— (a)he does an act capable of encouraging or assisting the commission of an offence; and (b)he intends to encourage or assist its commission. (2)But he is not to be taken to have intended to encourage or assist the commission of an offence merely because such encouragement or assistance was a foreseeable consequence of his act."
It's not a crime to label someone with a
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OK, that's one section of the act. What do the other 43 sections say?
People misunderstand the term (Score:1)
When these people talk about "trolls," they're not talking about your garden-variety asshole that stirs up trouble for his own amusement. They're talking about the other kind of troll, the one that hides inside the term and uses the harmless ones for cover. These people are a menace. Stalking and harassment are just the appetizers for these psychos -- swatting is more their style. [nytimes.com] They want to hurt people and the internet exports that misery all over the world.
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So what?.. bad laws are bad laws.. you don't burn down a forest to kill a tiger
Putting 12-year-olds in prison (Score:3)
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Bought a house? Your name, address, and price paid are on a list for advertisers and lenders to swoop in on.
Recently looked into buying a car? Your name and address are put on a list for lenders and dealers to send crap to.
Anything else involving a credit check? Yup. Your name is on a list for credit card companies to send crap to.
Oddly enough, even if you explicitly opt-out of this advertising, you will still get a ton of garbage. I bought a house earlier th
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They'll also find that a lot of these trolls are actually bots or alt accounts used by big twitter names to harass themselves to start a conversation about bullying.
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Business opportunity. (Score:2)
Sounds like a great time to start an American VPN company. Let's see them try to extradite for enabling free speech.
Our police state will know everything about everything said using it, but doesn't care. They think the masses should be allowed to vent, knowing it has as much meaning as the squeals of puppies in a box. It's a little surprising the UK doesn't seem to understand how effective the 2 Minute Hate is considering it was invented by a British author. Perhaps they think undirected hate undermines
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Political parties, gov workers, well funded NGO's, faith groups, cults, lawyers will push for the identification of anyone who talks about political parties party or gov policy.
The most easy way is just to use a politician, celebrity account with open comments as bait and see who comments, then discover the UK ip's.
To escape that UK isp discovery use a VPN away from the E
FU (Score:1)
and a very sophisticated fuck you to you too
got to watch the unsupervised 60yrlds as well