silencing tactics

Laurie Penny on online misogyny

Regular readers already know how much we’ve written here over the years on cyberbullies and their enraged cries about their Free Speech rights being breached whenever somebody declines to publish their bile – bile which absolutely nobody is preventing them from publishing on a blog of their own.

Disingenuous doesn’t begin to cover the hypocrisy of the Women Need To STFU brigade.

Moral panic stifles useful dialogue on social media “trolling”

From work I’ve been doing for a forthcoming book on new media and Australian politics, I have some useful data that may partially inform this discussion in the form of Facebook wallposts from 600 Australians collected before this recent debate took off (late 2011). In recent days I’ve reanalysed this dataset to shed some light on the treatment of women in the social media space.

So, what’s everybody else doing to #destroythejoint?

Torey Maguire reckons feminists should just ignore Alan Jones, since he’s just a formulaic shock-jock troll, but I don’t agree. “Don’t feed the Trolls” is bad science, and we should feed the trolls if we need to. Creative mockery to underline the point that we are not “offended”, we are contemptous: that’s cathartic as well.