FBI didn’t prosecute gamergate death threats, even with confessions | Hacker News Reader

FBI didn’t prosecute gamergate death threats, even with confessions

businessinsider.com

42 pointsempath7529 comments

I don't think they took them seriously because video games, and because the entire thing appeared so unbelievably silly from the outside. I wonder if they might take them more seriously now?

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html

Her article seems to be about what could be done to stop anonymous trolls from terrorizing and threatening women. How about prosecuting them, since terroristic threats is already a crime? Unfortunately, as Hess discovers, the police don't care much about online stalking, which is consistent since they don't care about IRL stalking either.

The Supreme Court has ruled that only specific and credible threats can be prosecuted. Other threats, distasteful and disgusting as they are, are protected as free speech. It's gonna be very hard to prove that an online troll mouthing off constitutes a specific and credible threat. And the Justice Department is usually not interested in borderline cases, both for efficiency and out of fear of creating unfavorable precedent.

This is a country where you're allowed to burn someone in effigy and call for their execution, protest soldiers' funerals and celebrate their death as punishment for America tolerating gays, call for the overthrow of the US government, hold up a mock severed-head of the President, publicly hope for his assassination, etc. We take a rather expansive and absolutist view of free speech.

Does ringing a wonan’s Phone number and threatening rape, torture and murder count as a death threat?

What about turning up on her doorstep and threatening her in person? At what point does a threat become specific and credible?

It varies on a case by case basis.

I recall that the systemd package maintainer for Debian got death threats. From outside, hearing about death threats related to volunteer work to package software that is given out for free is something I strongly suspect sound unbelievably odd. This happened after gamergate and I doubt anyone got arrested for it.

I recall a few months ago during the days of meeto here in Sweden, children of accused parent got threatened thus resulting in the family leaving the country for a while. No investigation was mentioned in the news article.

From what I see, now is not better than before. Death threats made online/sms/phone is not taken serious unless there is contributing reasons to take it serious.

The FBI doesn't prosecute anything; it investigates, and the various US Attorney's offices prosecute.

And the article at hand, as opposed to the headline here, names the one of those U.S. Attorney's Offices that decided not to prosecute.

Off topic but, is it me or does Business Insider hijack the back button on mobile? And why do websites forward to a country domain and not the actual domain you are trying to visit?

What’s with this terrible web?

> They used 4chan and 8chan — websites linked to the distribution of child pornography — to organise their movement, the FBI says.

What? 4chan is linked to child pornography? This paragraph alone is casting serious doubts on the journalist’s objectivity and seriousness.

It's not? Since when?

That's like saying the internet is associated with illegal drug distribution because sometimes people buy drugs over it. It's true, but not representative. That's not how most reasonable people would summarize it.

  That's not how most reasonable people would summarize it.

Only because a reasonable person would choose a more subjective statement, to convey the full breadth of depravity a visitor could expect to find on 4chan.

I mean, you've also got the gore pics, the incitements to racial and political violence, the fucked-up hentai, the homophobia, the raids on children's games, and the incessant insistence that everyone kill themselves.

Or they might not take it so seriously, and describe it mostly as a bunch of bored immature people trying to blow off steam and entertain themselves and each other. And they take it too far somewhat frequently.

But maybe people at your middle school were more mature than at mine, and never tried to gross each other out by tricking them into checking out this really cool site called goatse.

Since when is it? If there is one thing that will get you banned from 4chan it is posting or requesting child pornography. I am not a fan of much of the content on that website, but linking them to child pornography looks like a smear job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Arrests_for_child_pornog...

How many arrests have happened because of CP posted on, say, Facebook? Or on Reddit? Is there any proof that CP is more likely to be posted on the 4chan imageboard than anywhere else on the Internet? Do you think the owners of 4chan somehow encourage the posting of CP?

Literally the first discussion I had with a friend who used 4chan, a decade or so ago, was about how people posted lots of child porn on /b/, but it typically got removed.

It doesn’t matter who encourages what. The mods obviously don’t like it, but somehow 4chan spent years attracting tons of people who love to post child porn.

It's just as possible to post CP on any other web forum that allows images to be uploaded. Uploading illegal content has always been a rule on 4chan and has always lead to a rapid ban and report, attempting to pin 4chan as being complicit in spreading CP is a baseless smear.

Can you imagine if the feds prosecuted every idiot who made a death threat online? They have criteria for identifying particularly egregious cases worthy of prosecution. One of the criteria, mandated by the Supreme Court of the United States, is that the threat must be credible and specific. That's gonna be impossible to prove for online trolls mouthing off.

When people play the “I’m getting death threats” card, put on your skeptic’s hat and realize that every person who arouses any controversy gets death threats online. It’s awful but it’s inevitable. Ask yourself if they’re just trying to deflect from whatever controversial thing they did in the first place.

The death threats are sort of like a DDoS attack on someone's life when you get thousands of them. You can go after an individual who sent a single death threat but then they're just an idiot who made a single death threat online, right? Well put a thousand idiots who only made a single death threat online together and you can make someone's life a living hell.

> Can you imagine if the feds prosecuted every idiot who made a death threat online?

I imagine there'd be a lot fewer death threats if there was de facto official tolerance for them.

I imagine fewer people would make death threats if they started prosecuting more people.

> realize that every person who arouses any controversy gets death threats online.

I offer no comment on the rest of your post, but this part mirrors my own experience.

My wife posted on Facebook a year or two ago about her opinion on a mainstream controversial topic, and it went viral seemingly instantaneously. Within 12 hours she'd gotten shared almost 10k times, and received hundreds of private messages. Of those, more than two dozen were direct death threats, some with the names of our children and other personal details.

That’s awful. I am sorry you and your wife had to go through that. Human beings can be depraved creatures.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com