New York Times: Trump Attacked Me. Then Musk Did. It Wasn’t an Accident.. “This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or ‘cancel culture.’ It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.”
The Hill: FBI launches national ‘swatting’ database amid rising incidents. “The FBI is tracking ‘swatting’ incidents in a national database as the dangerous form of prank call becomes more common, the bureau revealed Thursday. Swatting incidents take place when a person calls the police claiming there is a dangerous person, kidnapping or a mass shooting at a house, hoping for police to respond in force.’
The Root: Is Tasha K About to Get Sued by Cardi B…Again?. “If aversion to the phrase ‘don’t write a check with your mouth that your butt can’t cash’ was a person, it would be YouTuber Tasha K. Why? Because even after a long, litigious battle with Cardi B., that’s resulted in her having to pay the rapper over $4 million, she still hasn’t learned to keep her mouth shut. I’ll explain.”
Indy Week: Local Boards of Elections Face Harassment, Influx of Public Records Requests, Spread of Disinformation. “For the past few years, local boards of elections have also been under heightened scrutiny. Some election workers have received threats, while others have been assaulted by so-called poll watchers. Gary Sims, who has served as the director of the Wake County Board of Elections for eight years and is set to retire at the end of this month, can attest to the phenomenon personally.”
The Register: Deplatforming hate forums doesn’t work, British boffins warn. “In a recently released preprint paper, Anh Vu, Alice Hutchings, and Ross Anderson, from the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh, examine efforts to disrupt harassment forum Kiwi Farms and find that community and industry interventions have been largely ineffective. Their study, undertaken as lawmakers around the world are considering policies that aspire to moderate unlawful or undesirable online behavior, reveals that deplatforming has only a modest impact and those running harmful sites remain free to carry on harassing people through other services.”
Rolling Stone: Why Some Taylor Swift Stans Are Ganging Up On ‘Gaylors’: Report. “Researchers from the social media firm Graphika found that harassment runs amok in the fan community — and it can teach us a lot about how people behave online.”
Motherboard: ‘You Feel So Violated’: Streamer QTCinderella Is Speaking Out Against Deepfake Porn Harassment. “Two weeks ago, Twitch streamer Brandon Ewing, who goes by Atrioc online, inadvertently showed his open browser tabs while doing a live stream in front of some of his 318,000 followers, revealing that he visited a website selling deepfakes—AI-generated, non-consensual pornographic videos—of fellow streamers.”
Atlanta Business Journal: Atlanta homebuilding giant PulteGroup fires incoming COO for alleged Twitter bots. “The founding family of the Atlanta-based homebuilder (NYSE:PHM) filed a civil complaint against Brandon Jones for ‘interfering, stalking, harassing, and defaming the company’s founder, William J. Pulte, his grandson Bill Pulte, and his family,’ according to a news release Friday. The complaint alleges Jones, who was set to succeed executive vice president and chief operating officer John Chadwick on Jan. 1, creating fraudulent Twitter profiles.”
WIRED: The Internet Is at Risk of Driving Women Away. “It isn’t just famous or highly visible women who are facing enough online abuse to consider leaving social media. A YouGov poll commissioned by the dating app Bumble showed that almost half of women age 18 to 24 received unsolicited sexual images within the past year. UK Member of Parliament Alex Davies-Jones put the phrase ‘dick pic’ into the historical record during the debate on the UK Online Safety Bill when she asked a male fellow MP if he had ever received one. It is not, as she said, a rhetorical question for most women.”
George Washington University: The National Science Foundation Awards $5 Million to IDDP Team to Continue Work Assisting Journalists Facing Online Harassment. “As part of the 2021 cohort of the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator, a team led by Rebekah Tromble, director of the George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics, received a grant award to develop a rapid response system that will aid experts facing coordinated campaigns of online harassment.”
News@Northeastern: States Are Starting To Crack Down On Cyberflashing, But It Might Not Be Enough. “California’s Forbid Lewd Activity and Sexual Harassment, or FLASH, Act gives people who have electronically received unsolicited, explicit material the ability to pursue up to $30,000 in civil damages. Ari Waldman, a Northeastern professor of law and computer science, says the FLASH Act is another move in the right direction, but he argues more needs to be done at the state and federal level to get online platforms actively involved.”
Daily Beast: Internet Trolls Have Tormented This Sci-Fi Writer for Years—and He Can’t Stop Them. “Four years ago, Patrick Tomlinson tweeted out that he never found Saturday Night Live legend Norm Macdonald funny. That largely innocuous hot take has since resulted in a yearslong mass harassment campaign, culminating in the sci-fi author receiving countless death threats and being on the receiving end of multiple ‘swatting’ attempts—hoaxing a serious law-enforcement emergency at a target’s home—the last of which was just days ago. Worse yet, his anonymous tormentors are protected by the law.”
Rolling Stone: New Report Claims YouTube Is Cashing in on Misogyny, Racism, and Targeted Harassment . “In an exclusive interview, Bot Sentinel founder Christopher Bouzy tells Rolling Stone that the report uncovered a pattern of unchecked hate speech, misogyny, racism, and targeted harassment singularly focused on famous and identifiable women. The most mentioned women in the channels were Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and actress Amber Heard, both of whom have remained extremely vocal about the long-term mental and emotional effects of targeted harassment.”
News@Northeastern: Now Banned By Tiktok And Others, Andrew Tate Rode Wave Of Online Misogyny, Says Northeastern Expert. “Tate, a British-American social media influencer, is well known for making misogynistic comments in his videos, which have been removed from TikTok but at one point had billions of views. In the videos, Tate referred to women as property, described how he would attack a woman who accused him of cheating, and said he doesn’t believe that depression is real (Tate says his comments were taken out of context). Following a public outcry, last week he was banned from YouTube, TikTok and Facebook. But experts say that Tate is not acting in a silo; in fact, online misogyny has been on the rise for years, and social media platforms are not built to handle it.”
Variety: Amazon’s Delay for ‘The Rings of Power’ Reviews on Prime Video Part of New Initiative to Filter Out Trolls (EXCLUSIVE). “Starting around the time of the launch of the distaff baseball dramedy ‘A League of Their Own,’ which premiered its full first season on Aug. 12, Amazon Prime Video quietly introduced a new 72-hour delay for all user reviews posted to Prime Video, a representative for the streamer confirmed to Variety. Each critique is then evaluated to determine whether it’s genuine or a forgery created by a bot, troll or other breed of digital goblin.”
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