Matt Forney has definitely been guilty of much hate speech against women and transgender people. He wrote an article called “The Case Against Female Self-Esteem”. I would never justify that.
Yet the threats he has gotten seem to be over the top:
Had similar threats been issued against the author of Men Are Pigs and Deserve to Die, not only police but UN would be involved.
No one knows. The only good thing is that Straight Dope Message Board is accessible to much less people then Twitter or YouTube – thus chances of finding odd people is much less.
Many people are online because they do not fit in the offline word due to Depression or Mental Illness. We do not know how many people have been seriously harmed by online abuse.
I think threats should just be called “threats”. The word “cyberviolence” is silly and dishonest. Only actions that cause physical harm are violence. Defining the word down is a bad idea.
I’m sorry, but no.
Female authors, feminists, and online personas have received death threats for MUCH less. Anita Sarkeesian Laura Bates
etc tc etc
In regards to Matt Forney - as much as I dislike him, fighting misogyny with threats of violence is not the right way to go, and will only make it worse. It is ‘cyberviolence’.
Have you ever been cyberstalked? If not, why the ever living duck would you be so beside yourself in fear of it happening?! You would have to be about the most boring, mundane ‘mark’ in the history of illegal activity.
If you have been stalked, well, then I guess it’s time for me to put my money where my mouth has been-up God’s ass-and take my first steps out of these “lazy man legs” (otherwise known as a wheelchair) and prove the Jesus doubters wrong.
I think you’ll find that CCitizen’s definition of cyberstalked and cyberviolence are “people disagreeing with me” and “people using their not-nice voice.”
The not-nice voice is also known as cybermenstruation when female posters are involved.
Because having it happen to you has no bearing on how likely it is to happen. It doesn’t take all that much effort to cyberstalk someone. And people don’t do it because you are interesting. They do it because you said or did something that made them angry.
Not that that has anything to do with the post you quoted. He was just explaining how he figured out you were just making fun of him. He took your post exactly the same way I did–a way to mock cyberviolence by faux threatening him. He is on the autism spectrum, but he’s not that hard to understand.
And I do love how the reaction is to think he made up the term rather than just type it into Google. It’s unfortunate the term got attached to a dumb UN proposal, but that doesn’t make it not useful. It wouldn’t just include threats, but stuff like cyberstalking, revenge porn, cyberbullying, and other such.
If you guys can think of a better term to encapsulate all that, maybe you can get that to take off the same way “cyberviolence” has.