Yesterday, the blogging site Jezebel talked about how their parent company Gawker Media was failing to address the online harassment they were receiving. In their comments sections, people who hate Jezebel (because it is a mostly feminist blog) were posting very graphically violent depictions of rape and hardcore pornography. They were also threatening to rape and kill the writers of the blog, and even some of the commentators. The staff of Jezebel complained to the parent company, but found a lot of resistance. They knew if some other company was doing this to their employees, they would talk about it on the blog. With that in mind, they blew the whistle on their own company.
Today, as some kind of resistance against Jez discussing the harassment, pornographic .gifs began to appear on every blog owned by Gawker. The comments sections had to be shut down in some cases, in others, readers were warned on the main page that things were going haywire. For the first time, many of the various blogs' readers got the first hand experience of what Jezebel's readers and writers have to experience, almost every day.A lot of them were shocked, and they should be. The stuff these people were posting is pretty awful.
This leads me to my main question about the whole thing. Who in the hell DOES this kind of thing? I just can't wrap my mind around who honestly has enough time and attention to go to places on the internet that they do not like and make jackasses of themselves. It baffles me. Why would you do this? Aren't there better hobbies to have? Like, basically any other hobby?
There are places online I don't like. Crazy religious places. Crazy political places. Crazy both places. Michael Bay's site. And if it is a place I do not like . . . my response is to not go there. I don't go there. I don't read articles from those places. I don't look at links from them. I let them live their lives and I live mine. I cannot imagine any situation where I would spend all my time there causing problems and being a little shithead terror to people.
It's like that homophobic dude from Canada who went to one of the Canadian pride parades pretending to be a member of the Pastafarians. They went so far as to set up a website for their church and other things to make them look legit. They spent well over $1000 on condoms with anti-gay messages. Honestly, who goes through that much work just to be an asshole to people? Why would you do that? Why would you spend that much money, spend that much time planning, and dedicate that much of your life just to make other people miserable?
If you are someone who is doing this kind of stuff, just, seriously, stop. You're not getting your message across, whatever the hell it happens to be. You're not doing anything to improve any cause. All you are doing is making people really not like you. I think there are better ways to spend your time. There are tons of hobbies out there that can be fun and practical and constructive, and most of all, they don't have to involve you being awful to other people. You can occupy your mind and your hands. You can learn new things. You can, perhaps, make some friends. You can put some positive energy out there. And most of all, you can entertain yourself in a way that doesn't mess with other people. How nice would that be?
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