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Mar. 29th, 2007 05:33 pmYesterday and today, I read some articles in the San Francisco Chronicle about a respected blogger who has been receiving death threats and threats of sexual violence. I'd never heard of Kathy Sierra before this post, and I'm not familiar at all with the communities where she and her colleagues write.
The communities in which I participate as a blogger, are either relatively gender-balanced (like the medievalist blogosphere) or disproportionately female (like book and media fandom on LiveJournal), and while it's true that I've seen occasional petty quarrels and bursts of ad hominem/feminam insults, I've never encountered anything like cyberbullying on the scale that Kathy Sierra has seen it. (Thank God.) Does it exist here, and am I just too blind to notice? Let me know.
By the way, the more I read about the Kathy Sierra case, the more I realize I have no idea what exactly is going on with it. Sierra's post (beware before clicking -- she's posted the explicit threats she received) not only describes her rage and terror, it also names people Sierra believes to be behind the attacks. These people have all denied the accusations -- in fact, one of them was in the hospital at the time. Another has claimed that someone else hacked into his accounts and used them to threaten Sierra. See also AKMA's discussion of how Internet anonymity not only permits the perpetrators to attack Sierra, it also permits Sierra to make apparently unfounded accusations.
Online anonymous threats are certainly not acceptable or appropriate, ever. That said, it seems like the appropriate response here isn't to blackball the people Sierra's post named. Everything I've found online about this situation is effectively unproven rumor.
I'm beginning to think about the blogosphere as a massive, massive clearinghouse of gossip... but that's a different post.
The communities in which I participate as a blogger, are either relatively gender-balanced (like the medievalist blogosphere) or disproportionately female (like book and media fandom on LiveJournal), and while it's true that I've seen occasional petty quarrels and bursts of ad hominem/feminam insults, I've never encountered anything like cyberbullying on the scale that Kathy Sierra has seen it. (Thank God.) Does it exist here, and am I just too blind to notice? Let me know.
By the way, the more I read about the Kathy Sierra case, the more I realize I have no idea what exactly is going on with it. Sierra's post (beware before clicking -- she's posted the explicit threats she received) not only describes her rage and terror, it also names people Sierra believes to be behind the attacks. These people have all denied the accusations -- in fact, one of them was in the hospital at the time. Another has claimed that someone else hacked into his accounts and used them to threaten Sierra. See also AKMA's discussion of how Internet anonymity not only permits the perpetrators to attack Sierra, it also permits Sierra to make apparently unfounded accusations.
Online anonymous threats are certainly not acceptable or appropriate, ever. That said, it seems like the appropriate response here isn't to blackball the people Sierra's post named. Everything I've found online about this situation is effectively unproven rumor.
I'm beginning to think about the blogosphere as a massive, massive clearinghouse of gossip... but that's a different post.
