dagblog - Comments for "Trial by Twitter"

A coverup and damage control

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 08:01:00 +0000

A coverup and damage control is still a coverup and damage control by any other name.

10 or 20 kids sitting around watching this and tweeting/instagramming it up deserves some shaming.

I doubt there is much

EmmaZahn — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 02:39:39 +0000

In reply to I read the article. Her son

I doubt there is much community left in Steubenville. That's the real punishment (and justice) for what happened there. The vigilantes may have accelerated the dissolution but that is all they can claim.

Mobbing is ugly whether it is drunk teenagers taking pictures and uploading them or self-appointed vigilantes deciding for themselves where guilt lies. A lynch mob by any other name is still a lynch mob.

I read the article. Her son

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 01:26:19 +0000

In reply to Did you read the article or

I read the article. Her son was on the football team, she was head of the school board until 2011, had good incentives to make sure as few boys got charged as possible.

Seems police had trouble getting anyone to come forward. Seems some pressure from Anonymous helped. Last year everyone was sure some guys throwing peanuts at a convention should be shamed, but now a bunch of teammates who raped a girl and filmed it to joke about it/shame her on the internet - shouldn't be shamed themselves? Yeah, like maybe the photos/video isn't pretty - but there's also the issue that these 2 guys went into the trial saying nothing happened, the girl wanted it, she gave consent even though smashed to the gills. I can't imagine how this case went to trial without a guilty plea. No pressure?

While maybe not all the hactivist stuff was useful, I think the criticism of all of it is pretty pissy. Guys who were involved weren't even suspended from sports for months. The police didn't even check for Rohypnol/GHB, claiming it couldn't be detected (gee, will remember that before my next drug test... oh wait, that test claims they can detect it for days). Seems the community did a pretty good job of pulling together for the guys. mini-Penn State I guess.

I remember thinking when the

EmmaZahn — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 22:40:57 +0000

In reply to Yeah, in olden times the girl

I remember thinking when the story first surfaced how those pictures were themselves a kind of rape and republishing them just compounded it. They were definitely a violation of her privacy. So much for those vaunted Anon privacy advocates whose principles faded quick when tempted by a sex scandal.

Did you read the article or

EmmaZahn — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 22:31:03 +0000

In reply to Hacktivist faces 10 years

Did you read the article or just what I excerpted? If you did, you must have missed the part about the boys having already been arrested and the local prosecutor having already turned the case over to state attorneys because the accused were classmates of her son BEFORE hacktivists were even aware of the story.

Hacktivist faces 10 years

PeraclesPlease — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 21:19:15 +0000

In reply to Thanks. I mostly avoided

Hacktivist faces 10 years under Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for revealing details about football rapes. Guess he could have raped the girl and posted photos and gotten away with 2 years.

Of course they have to raid the hacktivist with a 12-man SWAT team pointing guns at his head - because everything about this says hacking is worse than rape.

Yeah, in olden times the girl

PeraclesPlease — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 20:52:42 +0000

In reply to Thanks. I mostly avoided

Yeah, in olden times the girl would have just stayed at home so no one would know. It's not very nice of hacktivists to take internet pictures and publish them on the internet.

Thanks. I mostly avoided

EmmaZahn — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 17:19:40 +0000

In reply to Trial by Twitter

Thanks.

I mostly avoided reading about Steubenville during the media frenzy and hoped someone would write a narrative of events after the dust settled. This is it. A really sad story where everyone loses.

Some excerpts I want to think more about:

The Internet is uniquely qualified as a venue for public shaming; it is a town square big enough to put all the world’s sinners in the stocks.

...while the police commandeered phones, interviewed witnesses, and collected physical evidence from the crime scene, readers online relied on collaborative deduction. The story they produced felt archetypally right. The “hacktivists” of Anonymous were modern-day Peter Parkers—computer nerds who put on a costume and were transformed into superhero vigilantes.

Goddard told me, “At the end of the day, nobody’s a winner. Their lives have been ruined across the board, and it started from the very moment those kids made that decision—they became those kids from that school in that town. They can’t ever change that.”

She [Hanlin] said that Goddard had done damage “particularly from a feminist point of view, because, but for her, that young girl would not have endured nearly the exposure that happened throughout the country. What the bloggers did was make sure that five hundred million people saw those pictures of her. I wouldn’t want that picture to be seen by one person.”