
Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen - ValentineC
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2013/12/9/lena-chen-onlineharassment.html
======
chris_wot
I remember when I was an administrator on Wikipedia, many years ago, there was
a website called Perverted-Justice (PeeJ, I think). There was some sort of
dispute about it, I can't recall what it was about.

However, my online identity and a lot of other admins were accused of
paedophillia. When I had pointed out that I had severely curtailed a number of
people from the then "Boy Love" article (ew), they retracted it from my
username.

It's very, very easy to destroy someone's reputation online. But if you get
caught doing so, I hope you get everything you sow!

~~~
VMG
I think that's why it is important to own the search results for your real
name, and the domain names.

------
JumpCrisscross
> _A lawsuit was always an option. Websites aren 't liable for what their
> users do, but it’s possible to subpoena for the identity of your online
> harasser and haul him or her into court on civil charges like defamation or
> intentional infliction of emotional distress. But Chen and Hamm didn’t want
> to spend more time, money or energy on the problem. They just wanted it to
> go away._

A lawsuit is precisely how you make it "go away". Yes, the police should have
pursued the criminal complaint, but lacking official action private action
should be taken.

~~~
mschuster91
The internet is relentless, and as soon as you hit foreign jurisdictions,
you're bound to fail. Governments, the MAFIAA and dozens other organizations
have tried and failed for over a decade to shut down TPB - do you really think
a mere human stands the chance to ever stop the Internet from trolling her?!

~~~
Daniel_Newby
This is not a well-funded industry with an engineering staff, it is a single
lunatic. Subpoena a list of IP addresses from hosting companies, then subpoena
the ISPs responsible for those addresses, then have the local police put the
kibosh on the lunatics. Yes, it _is_ possible that the lunatic uses a cloaked
Internet connection and has flawless op-sec, but the odds are that he is just
another raving schizo who can barely remember to pay the electric bill.

~~~
nate_meurer
Yes, thank you. The lunatics of whom you speak utterly rely on the shadows in
which they hide. The article makes it seem as though minimal effort has been
put into pursuing the attacker, which is maddening if true. Libel and
defamation are very much actionable in the U.S., especially as civil matters.

------
danso
So doing a Google search for the subject's former boyfriend (the one wrongly
accused of rape, just by association with her), this Blogger post still lies
as the third highest

[http://patrickhammscandal2.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-
patrick-...](http://patrickhammscandal2.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-patrick-hamm-
sexploited-his-student.html)

It strikes me as pretty obvious link-abuse, the kind that I thought Google's
algorithm would squash, but apparently not. It's good practice to own your own
name and domain...but in his case, the victim's own Harvard bio page is ranked
lower than this one-use blog

~~~
betterunix
"It's good practice to own your own name and domain"

Good luck with that. Subdomains make that basically impossible; even large,
established corporations with big branding budgets have difficulty with this.

The real problem here is that people still think that if they see something
written down, it must be true. People might as well be reading The Weekly
World News, though the kind of harassment described here would be well below
the standards of WWN.

~~~
danso
You're absolutely spot on...the problem _is_ that we often don't have time or
motivation to challenge what we see...which is why headline-writing can so
easily color opinions of an entire article body. Even in this case, _even when
I knew this blog post was part of a smear campaign_ , some reflex in me
instinctively mused, "Hmm, maybe this guy _is_ bad...look at all the words
devoted to him".

Now imagine any given employer or background-checker seeing this, without the
context of the OP...what are the chances that they'll be skeptical of the
smear campaign?

But because as humans, we have limited time/energy/patience...computers and
sound algorithms really are one of our best allies in rooting this kind of
thing out. I'm just surprised that Google's ranker hadn't already flagged
this...It's a single-post blog with a circle-jerk of links to other single-use
blogs, with the kind of keyword stuffing that was common in the AltaVista
days...and I'm pretty sure the text is verbatim from other such smear sites.
Isn't that enough penalty to take the site down from the top of the SERPs?

~~~
betterunix
I would rather see a system based on digital signatures, with keys tied to
identities. If you are checking someone's reputation you should be able to
check the identity of people who are making claims about them -- are they
former employers, jilted lovers, or did they choose to remain anonymous? I
want to know what former employers and coworkers have to say; I do not want to
know what an ex-boyfriend masquerading as a former coworker says. If we could
establish a mentality of checking for a signature from a verifiable key
_before_ assuming that a statement is true it would go a long way toward
solving this problem.

Of course, this comes with problems as well. How do you verify public keys?
Web of trust systems do not seem to work in practice; people do not have the
time. A CA model would allow a central authority to silence people who say the
wrong things by denying them verification. The system cannot be like SSH,
because you need a way to verify keys from people you have not yet contacted.

I agree that search engines should be working toward a solution, but in this
case that would not have been enough. This stalker went as far as sending
messages to the victims' employers.

------
mikecane
This article ties in with the recent Block change on Twitter. See all that
vile material posted? Now imagine having that _tweeted_ to you on a daily
basis from multiple fake accounts. This is why the change to Block mattered.
Because of vile driven sociopaths of the type displayed in that article.

~~~
mschuster91
You as the _victim_ can't see the stuff any more. May help your psyche, but it
doesn't stop other twitterers or Google indexing the stuff.

~~~
kaoD
IIRC Google does not index Twitter.

------
mschuster91
As much as I can't stand a lot of the ultra-extremist feminists out there in
the internet, this kind of behaviour (doxxing, cyberhunting) is beyond
unacceptable, it's dangerous to society.

Anyone who ever has engaged in "slut shaming" or whatever the current term is
for hunting down/doxxing activists, please go, take a 9mm and shoot yourself.

And to Google/FB: please, make it possible for victims of doxxing/cyberhunts
to contact a _real human_ in your organization who has the authority and
ability to track and remove such abusive content.

~~~
EliRivers
What _is_ an ultra-extreme feminist? Given that feminism is the advocation of
social and political equality twixt genders, what is extreme feminism? What's
the difference between social and political equality, and _extreme_ social and
political equality? How can two things that are equal be even more equal?

~~~
brazzy
> Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt
> genders, what is extreme feminism?

People who don't define it that way. Or people who (as in pretty much any
controversity) feel compelled to see everyone who doesn't agree with them as
an enemy to be taken down.

~~~
EliRivers
_People who don 't define it that way. _

Well, if we're going to just redefine words we can say anything. I hate those
ultra-vegetarians insisting that static typing is the only way to go.

In the face of people redefining words to mean whatever they want, all I can
do is suggest that without a clear definition, communication becomes
meaningless anyway because I will just redefine "feminist" to mean "a kind of
blancmange popular in the former Yugoslavia", so in the absence of anything
better I'll use a series of dictionaries as my first stop. In this instance,
they're pretty clear on the definition.

~~~
brazzy
So who gets to make the official definition of what "feminism" means? And how
do you enforce that nobody uses it any other way?

Good luck with that...
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription)

------
stefantalpalaru
> [...] self-medication with alcohol, recovery from an eating disorder and
> crushing desire to be liked. All standard stuff for a college student.

Really? That's what passes for "standard" in a prestigious (and probably very
expensive) Ivy League school?

~~~
sneak
This is standard in almost every American environment where people 15-25 hang
out.

------
riggins
all I have to say is this is horrible.

Maybe this is a case were law enforcement hasn't caught up with technology.

------
michaelochurch
Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra shouldn't be mentioned in the same article.

Kathy Sierra was attacked _for being female_. She did nothing that would cause
people to attack her, except for being a successful woman. It was disgusting,
unprovoked, and utterly wrong.

Lena Chen didn't deserve what happened to her, but she courted the attention
in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't. She ran a
blog called _Sex and the Ivy_. I'm sorry, but if you write a blog whose title
says, "I'm in the most privileged 2% of the population, I have lots of sex",
you're putting a target on yourself. Maybe the world shouldn't be that way,
but it is. There are reasons why adults keep their sex lives private (and non-
adults, regardless of chronological age, shouldn't be having sex).

I don't think she deserves "slut-shaming" at this point, and the men involved
in the revenge porn clearly belong in jail. Anyway, she's been in a long-term
relationship (with Hamm) for years, and she's clearly trying to better herself
and recover from the mess she made of her college years (and the additional
mess others worked to make of her life). And the last thing a person with an
obvious biological mental illness needs is for a bunch of cowardly, anonymous,
asswipes on the Internet to make it worse by tearing her down.

Where the anger rightfully belongs is on a culture, not on specific people or
a gender. The _Sex and the City_ fake feminism (it's actually one of the least
feminist TV shows out there) is horrifying, but people like Chen should be
left alone to work out their problems in as much peace as they can have.

This is a strange topic because I know exactly where that male anger comes
from. The culture of casual sex (in high schools, colleges, and some
professional circles) has broken down respect between the genders. It leads
naturally to pre-monogamous, primitive, dysgenic, and in practice anti-
feminist social patterns and has divided men between an "alpha" contingent who
objectify and degrade women, and an "omega" contingent (cyberstalkers,
doxxers) who hate them. It's a hideous culture based on social status and
acquisitiveness ("Game") and it's left a large number of people (men and women
both) unable to form mature relationships.

Most male misogynists are in what I would call the Misogyny Loop. (There's
probably a Misandry Loop for heterosexual women.) Because they have negative
and false beliefs about women (i.e. "all women are whores who fall for Game")
they end up meeting and dating only damaged women, and the sampling confirms
their incorrect (and, from our perspective, socially unacceptable) beliefs.

The real enemy, though, is a specific culture created by the worst of men and
the worst of women. _Sex and the City_ feminism is based on lowering moral
standards for women (i.e. women should be able to behave like the worst 5% of
men without consequence) when the real goal should be to raise moral standards
for men.

I want to make it clear that I have no sympathy whatsoever for the 1% of men
who engage in cyberstalking and doxxing. I do feel slightly bad for the 39%
who have been led astray into casual misogyny by a fucked-up and perverted
culture. (But I feel much worse for non-participating, innocent women like
Kathy Sierra.)

~~~
tptacek
_It leads naturally to pre-monogamous, primitive, dysgenic, and in practice
anti-feminist social patterns and has divided men between an "alpha"
contingent who objectify and degrade women, and an "omega" contingent
(cyberstalkers, doxxers) who hate them._

Lots of big words, but always the same adolescent logic: "the culture" somehow
prevents male nerds from dating. So it's no surprise that they abuse women.

How is it that so many of us manage to actually grow up? Most of the male
nerds I know today have families. It's because there is no such thing as an
"alpha" or an "omega". Those are concepts are invented and reinvented in
different contexts to let people off the hook for their own thoughts and
actions. It's not about taking personal responsibility for... what, being on
the same Internet as a person who wrote a sex blog? --- no, it's that they're
_omegas_ victimized by a _culture_ that promotes _Game_.

Horseshit.

The problem as I see it is much simpler. Variance in human cognitive ability
ensures that there will always be people damaged enough to harm others purely
out of blind, undirected malice. The Internet (a) creates an affordance that
makes harassing women the simplest way to do that and (b) amplifies them. You
don't need a conspiracy theory about "Game" and "alphas" and "omegas" to
understand what's happening; people that used to spend their lives living in
their grandparents basement torturing animals for fun now spend that time
doing something else online.

What I don't understand is the urge others have to rationalize their behavior.

~~~
napoleond
I didn't read that the same way you did. I don't think GP was using "culture"
as an excuse for anyone's behaviour; rather I read it as a suggestion that
maybe _in addition to_ personal culpability, there are cultural problems in
place which perpetuate/encourage/condone bad behaviour. Doesn't sound like
horseshit to me, at least not in the obvious sense which you seem to suggest.
(FWIW, I might also forego the "alpha/omega" labels, but that's a small nit to
pick.)

The last part of your comment almost seems orthogonal to that; "whether or not
there is a problematic culture in place, there are also crazy people alive,
and the internet gives them a platform".

~~~
tptacek
If there's a cultural problem, it's the one that suggests that having a hard
time finding a date when you're 17 (or 24) is a problem that implicates all of
society and can be expected to motivate a hatred of women.

The person we're talking about on this thread did nothing worse than write a
blog about a topic that makes certain people feel uncomfortable. In return,
she was the victim of a concerted and unrelenting campaign of harassment. And
what the commenter we're replying to has to say about this is that he thinks
she might be mentally ill, and, if nothing else, surely provoked the
harassment by writing. That would be a contemptible sentiment if it wasn't
instead alarming evidence of a real problem within the commenter.

~~~
napoleond
I think you might be letting your opinions about 'michaelochurch unfairly
affect the way you parsed his comment. You have to read pretty deeply between
the lines (and his mentions of "alpha"/"omega"/"Game") to get to _any_ point
about "having a hard time finding a date". What he does directly refer to is
"a culture of casual sex" and although I'm far from a prude and ideologically
believe that what happens in someone's bedroom is their own business, I don't
think it's "horseshit" to suggest that a culture of casual sex (or even a
culture which glorified that idea, without it necessarily being a reflection
of the way things actually are) could negatively affect social norms with
regard to male-female interactions.

I also take issue with the assumptions 'michaelochurch has made about the
mental welfare of someone who is completely foreign to me (and presumably,
him, and... you?) and if that was your only original issue, you should have
said so. (Then again, it could be argued that you repeatedly make assumptions
about _his_ mental welfare publicly, so I guess that would have been a strange
comment for you to make.)

As an aside: if we really think someone on the internet is crazy, we can
nicely suggest to them one time that they may want to speak to a professional
(which I know you have already done in this case, and in an admirable
fashion). After that, for a foreign commenter on a message board, the
remaining options are to a) engage with the _content of their posts_ or b)
ignore them. Replying to each of their comments in disagreement without
actually coming up with a good reason is what I took issue with here (not that
there weren't good reasons to disagree with GP, just that I didn't think you
chose one) and, of course, making further commentary _about them_ frequently
also seems problematic to me.

~~~
tptacek
You're right about how I'm engaging with him. I'll stop. Thanks for the sanity
check.

------
Confusion
I think the main problem here is not that people are harassing her. The main
problem is the fact that it is possible for people to be harassed in this way.
There are a number of things that the people around someone have to believe
for that to be possible. Beliefs that I would say are simply _wrong_.

My main belief here is: if you care about preventing the personal misery of
people like Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra, you should not try to prevent this
type of harassment with judicial or technical means. You should try to change
the beliefs of people so this kind of harassment is simply not possible, which
automatically results in this kind of harassment not being perpetrated
(because it is pointless).

Here are some of the beliefs that are necessary ingredients for this kind of
harassment to be possible:

* people are not adapted to living in a small world, where your actions can become known to, and commented on by, a vast amount of people. Given you are living in such a world, you should internalize the fact that it shouldn't matter one bit what a few random internet commentators say or think about you.

You happen to have drawn some attention and as a result not only the one
lunatic in your direct environment has noticed you, but another hundred of the
thousands of lunatics out there have noticed you and are vocal about that. But
they are just random unknown people. They think you are a slut? Why do you
care? More importantly and much more relevant to solving this: why do your
friends care?

* so a reasonable concern is of course: what is the actual impact of the beliefs and statements of these unknown people on your direct environment? How many of the people you should reasonably care about have noticed? How many of those people seriously wonder whether these random people are right?

If they have noticed: people adjusted to this world wouldn't believe anything
J. Random person says. They would ignore it as one set of implausible
datapoints in the overload of information available these days. If anyone
believes it: good to know, those people are not fit to be friends or
colleagues. Someone thinks you're a slut because some random people on the
internet are saying so? What kind of gullible numskull is that person? A
person maladjusted to this small world.

* suppose some facts are undeniable. These are pictures of you naked. Why is that a problem? Having seen someone naked or having been seen naked should not change the way you behave towards each other. That's allowing yourself to be victimized by the puritanical standards that have become a strong factor in Western civilization over the past fifteen hundred years. If someone cares about it being possible to see you naked on the internet, then that person is at fault, not you.

* suppose some facts are really scandalous. Let's say it's evidence of a crime, but it was too long ago to prosecute. It still shouldn't matter. You aren't a few photographs or letters and anyone who believes otherwise is, again, not worth the air in his lungs. I don't care if you murdered someone thirty years ago: if you've been a decent person ever since and I have no reason to suppose you would commit such a transgression again, then I should assume you will be a decent person now.

So, tl;dr: the reason it is possible for people to be harassed in this way is
because too many people care too much about opinions of random others, care
too much about what other people do and commit the fundamental attribution
error. Solve that and the problem goes away.

~~~
acqq
Mr Confusion, please write here your real name, let somebody make all top
Google results to your name link to always new brutal lies about you, then
explain us all how you can not care too much about the opinions of random
others.

For the start, I'd like to know what would happen if people start down-voting
your posts here, would you delete some? Would you close the account? You see,
it's easier, you haven't provided your real name.

~~~
Confusion
Nobody would bother to make the top search result point to new brutal lies if
my friends and potential employers wouldn't care about the top search result.
Which they wouldn't if they would care less about what some random persons on
the other side of the world believe. Which they should if they would properly
internalize how the world works these days.

I practice what I preach. I'm constantly advocating being wary of information
found on the internet. I advocate not caring about what random people think.
However, this way of achieving change takes a lot of time. It doesn't prevent
a new incident tomorrow or next year. But maybe in 10 years.

