violent acrez, jailbait, and real life consequences

viva · 23-10-12 02:09:21

Ok, so most people who follow popular news sources by now have gotten a whiff of the internet's newest pet scandal - Violent Acrez, master internet troll and creator of such savory internet communities as /r/creepshots, /r/picsofdeadkids, and /r/beatingwomen (among many many others) has been outed by Gawker.

Violent Acrez's real name is Michael Brutsch and he is a really boring kind of dude from Texas. Watching him sweat through an interview with CNN's bulldog Drew Griffin would be kind of funny if it weren't so goddamn disturbing.

Technically, nothing he did was illegal - being an asshole is not a crime, compiling images is not a crime, and he was very careful to immediately delete any nudes posted to /r/jailbait. Incidentally, he also deleted scantily clad pictures of women who looked to be over 17.

In light of the recent tragedy of Amanda Todd's suicide(trigger warning, v. sad link), accountability despite the legal grey area is called for - young women have come forth with stories of finding or having others find pictures of them on jailbait and the often fairly serious repercussions thereof.

Which way are we going? Are we heading towards everyones-naked-on-the-web-so-I'll-just-laugh-if-you-try-to-blackmail-me? Or towards a time of diminished security and an entirely new way to molest the vulnerable?

VeronicaF · 24-10-12 00:55:58

Such an interesting topic.

I'm really curious to see what happens in the long term as far as internet legalities go. At the moment it's so hard to get a grasp of what you can and can't legally show because it depends so much on where you're posting from, where you're hosting, what you're posting it for etc. As a result, we spend so much time and anxious energy moderating our own thoughts OR go in whole heartedly & extremely blindly (like ViolentAcrez) and put ourselves and others at great risk.

Really, I don't really know where I sit on the topic because my ideal is so far from reality. I personally like the idea of complete freedom of speech & removal of all rights to privacy because I think that leaves people accountable for their own actions/statements, however it also opens up the floodgates for some pretty awful stuff. I would love to believe that society as a whole would be capable of moderating the nasty to the far corners of the interwebs. Not gone entirely....just lost for lack of interest. But it's not a likely outcome unfortunately.

I think there do need to be changes though. Nation based laws are slowly becoming more and more redundant, the more we situate our lives online, and at the moment there is not a whole lot happening to deal with it.
Why don't we have classes on internet securities in schools yet? Obviously we can't teach kids all of the ins and outs of the interwebs, but why is this not treated as seriously as stranger danger?

HollyWood · 24-10-12 05:11:30

Where is reddit's role in this though? Not only did they not moderate his content, they awarded him for it.. Yes he's a scumbag, but there seems to be alot of support out there for scumbags these days...

HollyWood · 24-10-12 05:13:34

Karma police are on it though

HollyWood · 24-10-12 06:02:14

http://dalethaltongue.wordpress.com/201 … ainst-him/

richard · 24-10-12 06:35:36

VeronicaF wrote:

I personally like the idea of complete freedom of speech & removal of all rights to privacy because I think that leaves people accountable for their own actions/statements, however it also opens up the floodgates for some pretty awful stuff.

Privacy extends way beyond what we say though. Hugh Grant, one of Murdoch's so-called "scumbags", went into the emergency room late one night and by the next morning the papers published whatever it was he was treated for. The papers have moles in those places and pay them for juicy goss.

Same guy, different story - he's hardly the first guy to ever use professional sex services but due to his high profile, it became world news.

We need privacy because there are so many shitheads who would judge us for doing ordinary things like seeking treatment for a mental illness, paying for a blowjob, or even a membership to IFM. Even though the judgers are doing exactly the same things.

But where trolls are concerned, out them, all of them, and hopefully they'll get what they deserve.

VeronicaF · 24-10-12 06:56:01

Like I said my ideal is far from possible. It would require a full reboot of society and that just aint gonna happen.

I think if privacy were gone entirely these things would carry less shame because it would become far more apparent that a) people catch shit and b)people use sex workers. What would you have to be ashamed of if people were finally able to accept that we all have a body that works or doesn't work in similar ways or that most people, y'know, like sex. I think privacy causes problems that I'd be happy to not have.

That said, it's not something that you can gradually introduce because it's not fair to those that are outed first. There are still shitheads out there that would use said information unjustly whilst hiding behind the privacy policies that we'd be working to eliminate. It takes far too long to change the point of view of an entire society.

So unfortunately my dream will have to remain just that. Though cctv in city areas make me happy.

blissed · 24-10-12 14:35:44

VeronicaF wrote:

Like I said my ideal is far from possible. It would require a full reboot of society and that just aint gonna happen..

We just need to get rid of the stupid notion that we can only be respectesd if we wear clothes. That can happen as puiblic opinion is quite flimsey and most people will follow a trend and do what other people are doing, and if you look at the difference between 1962 and 1967 or 1985 and 1990 you can see that big changes can seem to just come out of knowhere.

richard wrote:

Privacy extends way beyond what we say though. Hugh Grant, one of Murdoch's so-called "scumbags", went into the emergency room late one night and by the next morning the papers published whatever it was he was treated for. The papers have moles in those places and pay them for juicy goss.

Sometimes you don't need the press. A few years ago I was in a doctors waiting room and got talking to a lady who, when her husband went in to see the doctor, told me, (and so everyone else in the waiting room) what he'd gone in there for and pretty much his entire recent medical history

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Last edited by blissed (24-10-12 14:39:18)

viva · 25-10-12 00:35:14

The problem with taking away privacy is that it's simply impossible. The more you hold a human being up to scrutiny, the more cleverly (s)he will cover their tracks. For example if a man beats his wife but now all of a sudden all the walls are made of glass, you bet he'll find some way to torture her - pins in her shoes, pepper oil on her toothbrush. Whatever. Humans will always find ways to keep secrets.

Also, the minute some institution takes away privacy, humans will award it to one another. We will avert our eyes, set up imaginary boundaries for what we will perceive as 'my space' or 'her space'. We will pretend not to hear when other people have sex. We value taking down details of Hugh Grant because right now they're tantalizingly private. If everything were to be out in the open, we would protect those little privacies for our elite - probably exchanging it for interest in an deeper kind invasion into their lives and personalities.

Many people do not have STDs or pay for blowjobs. When the lid is blasted off, who will own the hierarchy? Those who are actually squeaky clean, with nothing to hide? or those whose track records are the most sordid and unbelievable?

There are some good sci-fi books in these thoughts.

Last edited by viva (25-10-12 00:43:01)

aven frey · 26-10-12 04:02:27

HollyWood wrote:

Where is reddit's role in this though? Not only did they not moderate his content, they awarded him for it.. Yes he's a scumbag, but there seems to be alot of support out there for scumbags these days...

I'd always been an advocate for free speech believing that in the tyranny of the masses it was the only way to ensure all the voices be heard but the Internet has been wearing my position on this down and I've started to wonder if actually the opposite is happening. Sometimes it feels like free speech on the Internet consists of the textual version of whoever can shout the loudest. As anyone who has tried to have discussions with bosses, brothers, fathers who just talk over the top of you when they disagree with what you're saying because they think their voice deserves more airtime than yours knows how diminishing and frustrating it is if you're just not loud enough to compete. And we all know little girls should be seen not heard. To me that's how this whole saga with reddit, VA, his backers and advocates of reddits free speech, no dox (outing) policies looks.

The massive double standard where some redditors are indignant about their rights to privacy but completely dismiss the rights of young women not to be photographed without their knowledge or consent (creepshots) and posted online for men (an assumption, yes but mostly a safe one yes?) to judge, objectify and sexualise makes me want to vomit. I call bullshit. I also call hate speech. Most civil libertarians agree that free speech has limitations, that it should not impede upon others peoples rights and even though the creepshots or jailbait threads may not be breaking the law the kind of speech reddit is protecting is actually a way to continue to control and subjugate women.

These peeps fill out this idea a bit more, I must insist upon the Rae Langton podcast. Listen, it's way good.

http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-vi … 27d1f.html

http://philosophybites.com/2012/07/rae- … peech.html

blissed · 26-10-12 19:03:24

Surely there must be a case in civil or criminal law to prosecute someone who plays a part in causing distress to someone (allows secretly shot photos without permission) where they're not a public official and there's no public interest.

ISPs and websites are'nt like the mail that delivers private corespondence, they can see what they're carrying, it's published. When proof of distress is provided by suicide I can't think of a stronger case on which to base a change in the law.

I think the offending reddits should be deleted, I can't see any excuse for them. Surely free speech includes common curtousy. I like the parts of Reddit I go to. The front page and technology and science. But even there you do bump into mysoginy occasionally and all you can do is make a comment that you don't like it and down vote the item.

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viva · 29-10-12 00:37:24

I think there's a difference between banning /jailbait and /creepshots, which encourage people to do bad things to other people who are not at all involved in the community, and banning /picsofdeadkids, and /beatingwomen. While I find collating images of both of those categories abhorrent, if we all were to cry out for the deletion of all 'offending things', there would be nothing left on the web except food blogs and cat pictures.

I think deleting communities like those is a western medicine style approach to healing a deeper wound in humanity which exists whether we try and scrub away the evidence or not.

However /creepshots is a different story as the community actively demands the members to take advantage of the innocent public.

blissed · 29-10-12 01:16:11

I'm talking about deleting reddits where there's evidence that they've caused distress, someones suicide being evidence. I'd like Reddit to delete subreddits that have hurt people. People can start their own site if they want to post whatever they like. The internet doesn't seem to be about street like free speech unless you run you own site, If you don't then your comments can be deleted by people who do and that moderaton is subjective.

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Last edited by blissed (29-10-12 01:25:06)

aven frey · 29-10-12 01:25:24

viva wrote:

I think there's a difference between banning /jailbait and /creepshots, which encourage people to do bad things to other people who are not at all involved in the community, and banning /picsofdeadkids, and /beatingwomen. While I find collating images of both of those categories abhorrent, if we all were to cry out for the deletion of all 'offending things', there would be nothing left on the web except food blogs and cat pictures.
I think deleting communities like those is a western medicine style approach to healing a deeper wound in humanity which exists whether we try and scrub away the evidence or not.
However /creepshots is a different story as the community actively demands the members to take advantage of the innocent public.

So what about these being illocutionary speech acts and therefore as Rae Langton suggests they do actually hurt individuals, communities and society? I avoid reddit like I avoid creepy dudes in parks so I actually don't know what goes on in those particular subreddits but the '12 year old slut memes' fb page is also just a collation of images.

I mean is it complicated and fraught to draw lines but I fear evoking tyranny of the masses as a blanket argument (I've said TOTM in both of my posts here, which makes evident my anxiety about such tyranny) actually serves to further disempower those who aren't the masses (and by masses I mean the loudest).

viva · 29-10-12 02:03:56

I don't understand. If people getting together and talking about things other people find distasteful hurts individuals, communities, and society, why is it legal to meet for a kkk potluck?

There is a difference between performing hate crimes and talking about them. There is a difference between killing kids and collecting pictures of dead kids.

Avoiding reddit is more like avoiding the park then avoiding just the creepy dudes - there are other areas of the park that aren't the junkies under the bridge or the homeless dudes wanking in the bushes. r/parenting, r/2xchromosomes, r/seedstock, r/printSF, r/secretsanta... etc etc.

I think this is a really complicated subject.

I enjoy the idea of this brave new world of free expression, in which we police ourselves for limits. The authorities have not quite figured out what to do with the internet and while you can be sure that one day they will, and that avenue of freedom will be repressed eventually, right now we live in the wild west, the pioneer days of this new technology. Yeah it's gross in places - humans are really gross in places so making it all visible means seeing some scars, some pus, and some real evil. But as in the last post, I would never trade this visibility for ignorance. Now we can see it, and that's the only way we can really fight it.

In the end, Violent Acrez didn't get away with it, he was outed and most of the observing folks agree that he got what he deserved. Creepshots and Jailbait no longer exist. I'm a little proud and inspired by how this situation fell out.

What's really insidious? More frighting to me than /beatingwomen? Men's rights communities, and the whole manosphere of simmering, manipulative misogyny. I'm not afraid of some assholes laughing at pics of beat up chicks, those same guys will laugh at amputees, people with down's syndrome, and sponges cut into the shape of a dick and balls. Idiots will always exist, they are not a threat to me.

I'm afraid of cold intellectual men who truly believe that the women are out of line, and need to be put back in their place. Men who have a way with words and a talent of preying on the confused among them - men and women both - and convincing them that their problems are all because of loud mouthed feminists. That's scary

But still I'd rather see those extremist attitudes laid bare and be able to observe the progress they're making, or not making, in mainstream society. Being able to keep tabs on all of it out in the open gives me more power than before, to counteract more cleverly than I might have been able to without seeing all of their moves.

blissed · 29-10-12 02:28:22

I didn't know creepshots and jailbait no longer exist. That's good. Mens rights seem to be much like white supremacy sites, the very notion that they're needed in the 1st place seems to me obviously flawed. Men are victims of patriarchy too and we're all potential victims of gender polarisation so sites that talk about that from a male perspective seem OK to me.

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viva · 29-10-12 02:41:55

blissed wrote:

Men are victims of patriarchy too and we're all potential victims of gender polarisation so sites that talk about that from a male perspective seem OK to me.

For sure, I agree. But the mensrights/manosphere communities are definitely not about that.

blissed · 29-10-12 13:28:28

I know, that's what I've said, they're more like white supremacy sites, blind to their own privilege, hateful and negative. I think hateful and negative sites turn most people off.

I would guess the motivation and negativity in male hate sites comes from those men having a mental approach to sex that already isn't cool, and when they fall in love and have sexual experiences (up to and including having children) they inevitably end badly and they feel very hurt. Emotions tend to blind our common sense, so that's how when someone starts out misguided they can go from bad to worse, developing a completely destructive perspective, and argue it eloquently.

I think the answer is not to hate the haters back but to press the point that we're all victims of patriarchy's expectations of us, that people aren't either pantomime villains or heros, but complex and not perfect, and the same person can on occasion be (as we see it) mean, or good to us, and they can do that regardless of what sex they are. I've found most failures in human relations come from either a real or perceived lack of respect.

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Last edited by blissed (29-10-12 14:58:27)

VeronicaF · 30-10-12 00:24:07

blissed wrote:

Mens rights seem to be much like white supremacy sites, the very notion that they're needed in the 1st place seems to me obviously flawed.
.

First off, when were white supremacy sites ever 'needed'?

Secondly:

blissed wrote:

I would guess the motivation and negativity in male hate sites comes from those men having a mental approach to sex that already isn't cool, and when they fall in love and have sexual experiences (up to and including having children) they inevitably end badly and they feel very hurt. Emotions tend to blind our common sense, so that's how when someone starts out misguided they can go from bad to worse, developing a completely destructive perspective, and argue it eloquently.

I think these sort of excuses are pretty lame. Bad emotional experiences are not an excuse for assholery. I think someone who can recognise that they a)were not raised or had the fortune of living in ideal conditions and/or b)have some form of mental illness and use said knowledge to better themselves are worthy of the greatest respect, because that shit is hard. People who can see this but just accept a horrific point of view just because it was what mummy and daddy taught them are pathetic.

viva · 30-10-12 00:36:32

Yeah I'm a huge sympathy for the devil proponent but in this case I don't find that attitude appropriate, if only because understanding the manosphere with my sensitivity won't help me combat the cold hard rationality they are utilizing to take down everything proponents of gender equality have been working towards.

blissed · 30-10-12 02:04:11

Veronica I don't think white supremacy sites have ever been needed, and I said that the very notion they are is obviously flawed right there in the part you quoted I suppose if you ask the people who run them they would say they're needed, convincing them that they're not would involve curing them of their hatred, which isn't easy but has been done.

Where as excuses seek to pardon behaviour, I'm proposing possible motivations for why people make these sites, because If we can understand why people do, we have a good chance of finding ways of changing their behaviour.

It's kind of like psychlogical counselling. People get accused of sympathising when they propose psychological counselling for prisoners as well. But where as punishment just bashes the outside and strengthens the inside, counselling gets inside and understands the reasons, and when someone is faced with their fundamental failings that are bad enough to land them in jail, that can be very painful. In the TV doc where I saw this happen, it seemed far worse than any punishment, but once through it in the later stages there seemed real progress.

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Last edited by blissed (30-10-12 12:05:59)

aven frey · 30-10-12 02:10:11

viva wrote:

I don't understand. If people getting together and talking about things other people find distasteful hurts individuals, communities, and society, why is it legal to meet for a kkk potluck?

When it becomes hate speech. I'm arguing that 12 year old slut memes is hate speech and that reddit and fb's stringent free speech policies (which incidentally didn't extend as far as the Gawker network after they outed VA) actually inhibits true free speech. The speech act of collating images and re-contextualising them in an abusive fashion not only hurts those (very young) women in the pictures it contributes to slut shaming and rape culture. It must be horribly diminishing to see a photo of yourself or someone just like yourself shamed and mocked so that other people can laugh, sexualise and judge you and it's horribly dis-empowering for women to see this go pretty much unchecked. It's damaging to society because it reinforces an insipid culture of entitlement over women's bodies therefore subjugating half the population in a myriad of complex ways.

viva wrote:

There is a difference between performing hate crimes and talking about them. There is a difference between killing kids and collecting pictures of dead kids.

While of course performing hate crimes is not the same as speaking of them I don't believe you have to be the victim of a physical hate crime to be the victim of hate speech, the reach of language is far more extensive and intricate than sticks and stones. For example even if you weren't physically hurt in the Cronulla riots if you're a Lebanese Muslim who no longer feels safe going to the beach then the speech of Alan Jones (who was found by Australian courts to have caused incitement to hatred) has hurt you, and if you were hurt in the riots it's likely that you wouldn't have been if not for Jones speech act.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-02/t … ed/4292052

The hard thing is deciding what is hate speech and what is just offensive speech. International law which tries both to protect freedom of expression and rights to equality struggles with this but they do have a useful system of reasoning which 'distinguishes between expression targeting ideas, including offensive expression, which is protected, and abusive expression which targets human beings, which may not be protected.' I feel in the cases where a group of people are targeted with abusive language and the negative re-contexualisation of their images this falls into the second category and reddit and fb could be better proponents of freedom of expression if they censor hate speech.

viva wrote:

Avoiding reddit is more like avoiding the park then avoiding just the creepy dudes - there are other areas of the park that aren't the junkies under the bridge or the homeless dudes wanking in the bushes. r/parenting, r/2xchromosomes, r/seedstock, r/printSF, r/secretsanta... etc etc.

This is a good example actually, after a particularly creepy encounter with a particularly creepy dude in a park I did avoid parks for many years and have since never been to that particular park again. The homeless and the junkies are never the creepy dude, he's generally hard to pick.

Sure if you're a 12 year old slut you can like the page on fb, go out your real name, bring your slutiness to the attention of all your fb friends and family, tell people they're being fuck tards and have all those fuck tards further mock and deride you. The opportunities for descent in these spaces are limited but they're still public spaces and have influence, and causes deindividuation (where peeps become less self aware and inhibited in anonymous group situations, like a mob mentality). It almost becomes victimless because of the real world willingness to objectify women, the legitimisation of this by a large group of other like minded peeps and the lack of insight into the experiences of those who have been targeted. I can't see how this doesn't filter into the real life experiences of all women.

viva wrote:

In the end, Violent Acrez didn't get away with it, he was outed and most of the observing folks agree that he got what he deserved. Creepshots and Jailbait no longer exist. I'm a little proud and inspired by how this situation fell out.

I am too, though it took a while, people put up with a whole lotta crap for a long time.

viva wrote:

What's really insidious? More frighting to me than /beatingwomen? Men's rights communities, and the whole manosphere of simmering, manipulative misogyny. I'm not afraid of some assholes laughing at pics of beat up chicks, those same guys will laugh at amputees, people with down's syndrome, and sponges cut into the shape of a dick and balls. Idiots will always exist, they are not a threat to me.

I think maybe they're the same people, some of em literally the same, some similar types but with different backgrounds. I'm the opposite though, I feel like idiots are more of a threat to me, I grew up in the city of Casey which boasts the highest rates of reported domestic violence in Victoria, I know men there who make jokes about this. I know men who have needed very little to legitimise their violent misogyny, racism, homophobia etc and I've seen how sometimes limitless speech can silence in the most debilitating of ways those who aren't loud, big, empowered enough to talk back. MRA's to me don't seem so scary, just funny but I guess they're all kinda the same, they're all fuck tards, scary ones!

Last edited by aven frey (30-10-12 02:14:04)

blissed · 30-10-12 02:21:42

aven frey wrote:

The hard thing is deciding what is hate speech and what is just offensive speech.

There was a fare bit of parliamentary deliberation in England, which resulted in some hate speech laws that try to make the answer to that question easier for courts to decide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speec … ed_Kingdom

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Last edited by blissed (30-10-12 02:24:12)

#1 23-10-12 02:09:21

violent acrez, jailbait, and real life consequences

#2 24-10-12 00:55:58

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