The Zuckerberg Atrocity

How about some crass humor?

For some, the costs are higher. In 2010, 12-year-old Amanda Todd bared her chest while chatting online with a person who’d assured her that he was a boy, but was in fact a grown man with a history of pedophilia. For the next two years, Amanda and her mother, Carol Todd, were unable to stop anonymous users from posting that image on sexually explicit pages. A Facebook page, labeled “Controversial Humor,” used Amanda’s name and image—and the names and images of other girls—without consent. In October 2012, Amanda committed suicide, posting a YouTube video that explained her harassment and her decision. In April 2014, Dutch officials announced that they had arrested a 35-year-old man suspected to have used the Internet to extort dozens of girls, including Amanda, in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The suspect now faces charges of child pornography, extortion, criminal harassment, and Internet luring.

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Hildur Lilliendahl Viggósdóttir, decided to draw attention to similar problems by creating a page called “Men who hate women,” where she reposted examples of misogyny she found elsewhere on Facebook. Her page was suspended four times—not because of its offensive content, but because she was reposting images without written permission. Meanwhile, the original postings—graphically depicting rape and glorifying the physical abuse of women—remained on Facebook. As activists had been noting for years, pages like these were allowed by Facebook to remain under the category of “humor.” Other humorous pages live at the time had names like “I kill bitches like you,” “Domestic Violence: Don’t Make Me Tell You Twice,” “I Love the Rape Van,” and “Raping Babies Because You’re Fucking Fearless.”

Thus:

• zuck/zucked/zucking: Shorthand term describing online rape threats for the sake of humor; named after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.

• Raping Mark Zuckerberg page on Facebook: Why not see how long Facebook lets that one stand as a humor page? Doll up photos of Mark Zuckerberg and have at it.

• Taking the Piss: A bit of a twist on the classic English phrase; put photos of Mark Zuckerberg in urinals, snap the photo, post them to a Facebook “humor” page.

• Use your imagination: Really, I can’t keep thinking like this. It’s actually uncomfortable. (See below.)

One would think the problems are obvious. To wit, how do we define fair? Do we really think this sort of thing would stay confined to activism? Of course it wouldn’t. And while fair is fair insofar as Zuckerberg is apparently just fine with how things go at Facebook, so why not treat him the same way, isn’t that also kind of the point? It’s wrong to treat any person that way, regardless of how much the Facebook CEO might occasionally look like he’s hoping you don’t get squirt in his face, and please not in the hair. (Spit or swallow?) Poor Mark. But then, billions of dollars do a lot to relieve the stresses of having a conscience.

Then again, it would be a good thing to hear people on television starting to refer to how a person got “zucked”. Shame might be the only way to test whether or not Mark Zuckerberg has a conscience left.

And if you’re confused? Just read through Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly’s article for The Atlantic. There’s a reason Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are atrocities against humanity.

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Buni, Catherine and Soraya Chemaly. “The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women”. The Atlantic. 9 October 2014.

Today in Talking Points: Special Valentine’s Day edition

A special Valentine’s Day edition of Today in Talking Points:

• Washington state Governor Christine Gregoire signed marriage equality into law on Monday. The Evergreen State is the seventh to recognize and allow gay marriage.
• The Washington Secretary of State’s Office has revised its designation of the ballot referendum against marriage equality after mistakenly assigning it a number already used.
• Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum faced protests as he denounced Washington’s marriage equality law during an appearance in Tacoma.
• New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is next up in the gay marriage debate. He intends to veto a bill establishing gay marriage in the Garden State, despite public opinion in favor.
• Abbie Goldberg and Katherine A. Kuvalanka published an article on marriage equality for the Journal of Marriage and Family. Much of the February issue of JMF is dedicated to considering marriage.
• Columnist and poet Michael Kindt considers one of the studies published in the February JMF, about marriage and cohabitation.
• What is more romantic on Valentine’s Day than rape? Well, okay, that might seem a bit crude, but FOX News commentator Liz Trotta is suffering the slings and arrows of politics and general decency after arguing that women entering the military should expect to be sexually assaulted.
• Meanwhile, in Uganda, one Simon Lokodo, the Minister for Ethics and Integrity, raided a gay rights workshop in Entebbe. Workshop organizer Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera reportedly escaped the raid and is still at large. Ugandan MPs are once again trying to increase legal penalties for being homosexual, though the death penalty is expected to be dropped from the bill.
• Two Catholic priests in Colombia are dead after allegedly hiring their own hitmen. Reports suggest one of the priests had contracted HIV, but relatives insist that the murders were part of an armed roberry, and Frs. Richard Piffano and Rafael Reatiga were not involved in a homosexual relationship.

Making a statement, or, “E for Effort”

Well, here’s something you don’t see every day:

An elderly man has killed himself by programming a robot to shoot him in the head after building the machine from plans downloaded from the internet.

Francis Tovey, 81, who lived alone in Burleigh Heads on the Australian Gold Coast, was found dead in his driveway.

According to the Gold Coast Bulletin, he had been unhappy about the demands of relatives living elsewhere in Australia that he should move out of his home and into care.

Notes left by Mr Tovey — who was born in England — revealed that he had scoured the internet for plans before constructing his complex machine, which involved a jigsaw power tool and was connected to a .22 semi-automatic pistol loaded with four bullets. It could fire multiple shots once triggered remotely.

At 7am on Tuesday he set the robot up in the driveway of his £450,000 house and activated it.

Lori Drew: I will see you in Hell

A couple of weeks ago, Steve Pokin brought us the appalling story of a young girl’s suicide, a tragedy brought on by a MySpace conspiracy intended to hurt her feelings. The last known inbound transmission, the one that pushed her over the edge, read,

Everybody in O’Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you.

What a horrible thing for children to do to one another. They do not know the power of their words, cannot grasp the depth of what they wish upon one another.

Oh, wait. Wrong sermon.

This harassment campaign was coordinated by a 47 year-old woman, the mother of one of the dead girl’s friends. Her name is Lori Drew, she will not be charged with any crime, despite enlisting a neighborhood girl in the campaign and, in the wake of Megan Meier’s suicide, ordering the girl to remain silent. In response to the incident, a local law has made internet harassment a misdemeanor worth 90 days and a $500 fine.

Ms. Drew, pray the atheists are right.  Otherwise, I will so be seeing you in Hell.