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 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
1) Its a gross violation of privacy.
Had a trivial but heated argument on Facebook with insults made by both sides? Someone with an axe to grind may choose to submit a profile for you to a database for the entire world to see, maybe taking the original argument completely out of context or telling only half the story. Apparently profiles can be searched for by Name and Employer. This can and will be used as a weapon to get people fired.

Sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree with this. Social media posts are public by definition. If you don't want your employer to see you posting hate speech then don't post hate speech. The fact that someone doesn't want to suffer the consequences of things they say doesn't mean that it's suddenly a privacy issue.

3) The lack of due process.
Cyber bullying is awful and should be tackled but creating a public database of people's behaviours is NOT an appropriate way to go about it. Genuine instances of cyber bullying and stalking should be pursued through proper channels, by reporting it to Facebook, Twitter, parents, schools or the Police. Ironically, creating a public database is itself a form of cyber bullying and cyber stalking, and is little more than online vigilantism.

Why is due process an issue? This is not a government program, it's just one person/group posting their own opinions. You don't have a right to "due process" before someone says their opinion about you. You are of course free to dispute their credibility, but all you can expect to do is convince people to stop listening to them.

As for reporting it, that's a rather idealistic way of looking at things. Bad behavior like this often goes unpunished: police say "it's just the internet" or "that's offensive but not illegal", social media sites take so long to respond that the damage is already done, etc.

4) Who decides what is and is not hate speech?

Whoever is creating the site. It's not like this is anything more than a statement of "my opinion is that the following is offensive", so the answer to "who decides" is pretty clearly implied.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Dude, listen to yourself. You're defending online vigilantism and cyber stalking.

Would you like to address any of the actual points I've made, or is "you're a Bad Person for defending Bad People" the entire extent of your counter-argument?

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Don't you see how this can be used as a weapon? People can and will use it for extortion, and to conduct hate campaigns against people they have a personal grudge against, or people who've engaged in wrongthink.

I don't see how this can be used as a weapon, because the only way to be in the database is to have posted offensive material in public. The only way an innocent person could be vulnerable to abuse would be if the site has no verification mechanism at all and people can submit fake posts, but in that case it will have absolutely zero credibility and an employer's only response to a report is going to be "who cares if my employee is in the database, it's all fake troll posts".

So you're in favour of online vigilantism?

Define "vigilantism", preferably in a neutral and factual manner instead of attempting to bias the entire subject in your favor.

And yet, those are the proper channels for dealing with this. Social media sites, police forces, schools, parents. If there problems with those channels and they aren't working the way they should to deal with instances of cyber bullying, reform them. Cyber bullying, doxxing and cyber stalking is not the right way to deal with cyber bullying.

Proper channels according to who? You?

What you're saying is "If you don't get the result you want? Take the law into your own hands".

Except you're missing the fact that many of these things are not illegal. Posting KKK material is entirely legal, despite the fact that most people find it incredibly offensive. It's not a question of "the police won't deal with this", it's a situation where the law has nothing to do with it. So what exactly are you trying to say here? That if the police won't arrest someone for doing something then we shouldn't ever be allowed to criticize that person, because that would be "taking the law into our own hands"?

They're creating a public database of people and linking them to schools, employers, family members, including minors. They're online vigilantes directly encouraging and enabling cyber bullying, cyber stalking, extortion and hell, possibly even pedophilia.

That's not a response to what I said. You asked who decides what is hate speech, I pointed out that "whoever is running the database" is the obvious answer to the question. Listing a bunch of scary-sounding words about the database doesn't have anything to do with this.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Thats a remarkably naive and complacent attitude. If a company's public reputation has been dragged through the mud by their association with somebody who's been wrongly linked to this database, they're not going to care if the victim is later proven innocent. The damage is already done, all they'll care about is damage control and divesting themselves of that association ASAP. Just look

But how exactly is someone going to be wrongly linked to the database? For it to become more than just some random person posting pictures of conversations while everyone ignores them the operators would need to establish their credibility. For example, by forcing submissions to be in the form of a link to the offensive post and then having the database itself pull the quotes out. A database that lets random people submit screenshots of a supposed conversation will have zero credibility because it's so easy to create fake ones.

Sure

Ok, since you want to be rude and do it that way, we'll go with the top definition in the google search results:

any person who takes the law into his or her own hands, as by avenging a crime. adjective. 3. done violently and summarily, without recourse to lawful procedures: vigilante justice.

There is no violence, so that definition is clearly out. And it isn't really taking the law into one's own hands, since the database is an attempt to express an unfavorable opinion of legal behavior, not to enforce existing laws.

I'm sorry, is that supposed to be an actual argument? Cyber bullying and trolling is a crime in many countries, not to mention against the Terms of use of social media sites, and as such there are actual objective "proper channels" to pursue complaints through. Meaning the Police.

First of all, trolling and cyber bullying are not the same thing. Trolling is not illegal, nor should it be illegal. And bad behavior on the internet can be inappropriate while still falling short of illegal cyber bullying. Reporting legal but offensive behavior to the police is just wasting their time and yours.

Second, of course it's an actual argument. Why is the "proper channel" for dealing with inappropriate behavior reporting it to facebook/twitter/etc rather than public criticism of the person who posted it? Who decided this? You?

You're missing the fact that the website is not about KKK material, its about instances of trolling and hate messages sent directly to actual victims. Which is illegal and against the TOU of social media sites.

Nope. The OP clearly states that it includes offensive behavior in general, not just direct messages:

Absolutely not. Each and every submission goes through a process in which our team determines whether or not the user is just expressing an opinion or exercising harmful speech. There is a big difference between “F*** the Patriots. Go Giants! ” and “I hope Tom Brady dies, and his wife is raped”.

 Chongara wrote:
The real danger isn't from that the though. The real danger is from my earlier example.

I don't like that donkey-cave Jim Brewer, who is always cramping my style. I create a twitter account

@TheRealJimBrewer.

@TheRealJimBrewer proceeds to make lots of racist, and homophobic statements. Maybe even tell a few stories about times "Jim Brewer" got away with being racist work. Maybe @TheRealJimBrewer makes a few threatening sounding posts.

Then I, being the concerned citizen I am. Flag the @TheRealJimBrewer as belonging to the Jim Brewer I don't like. Then I forward link to the database to his boss, family and anyone with a grudge against him.

Which then becomes a question of how credible the fake account is when the real person says "this is a troll account, I never posted that". I suspect that it's a lot harder than simply making a troll account to get someone fired or in serious family trouble.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
I don't know what the laws are in the USA, but trolling IS illegal in the UK under the Malicious Communications Act.

Heres a page from Hertfordshire Police.

https://www.herts.police.uk/advice/chatright_-_internet_safety/trolling.aspx#is_trolling_an_offence

Ok, that's just an incoherent mess (referring to "trolling" as "bickering between people" and then declaring that "trolling" is illegal). Going by the standard definition of "posting something to get a reaction out of people" I sincerely hope that trolling is not illegal in the UK, or your country has some serious free speech issues.

No, the Law. How many times must I restate my answer until you accept that I'm not changing it? Whatever the "proper channels" are, online vigilantism are not one of them.

How many times must I restate the fact that many of the things that this database was supposed to involve are not illegal?

 Chongara wrote:
It's as credible as any of Jim Brewer's real accounts would be. What's publicly available is a screen name and some posts. There is no way to actually tell who is behind it and this website relies on unverified anonymous attributions from 3rd parties. A real account and a "Troll" account are literally indistinguishable under the system. And individual is credited with saying whatever any random person feels like claiming they said. So long as what they claim that person says is sufficiently offensive it goes in the database attached to their real name regardless of if they said it or not. For anyone who is inclined to believe the system fact & fiction are one and the same.

And then what happens when Jim Brewer says "here's my real account" and it doesn't have the same name as the troll? It's not like this kind of troll account is a new thing. If the database doesn't do any kind of verification to sort out troll accounts then it just won't have any credibility and nobody will pay any attention to it.

However repeating and attributing social media posts to a real name and set of credentials with the intent of damaging their reputation when you have no way of verifying the truth of the connection is illegal.

Err, I think you're missing the context of that. The things that I said are not illegal are the posts, not the act of showing them to everyone.

As for your argument, I think you're seriously overstating the case. It is entirely legal to publish those social media posts if you have a reasonable belief that they are accurate. You aren't required to have absolute proof of their authenticity first. The only way you're going to get into legal trouble is if the original post was not at all credible and a reasonable person should have known better, bringing it to the level of a reckless disregard for the truth rather than a failure to establish absolute 100% confidence.

 Chongara wrote:
Suppose Jim Brewer really is @TheRealJimBrewer and he claims "I don't have a twitter account" or "Here's my real account" <Some innocuous 2nd account> that one doesn't belong to me". Again a "Real" and "Troll" account are indistinguishable.

Only if you don't look at things like posting history. I suppose it's theoretically possible that a troll could operate a fake account for months/years posting apparently-legitimate things, persuade the real person's friends to friend the troll on facebook, etc, but how plausible is that scenario? I seriously doubt that most trolls have the attention span to do something like that.

The database has no means to do verification. It will still have the ability to do as much damage as any other unverified source of information will. People don't demand evidence to believe something, they only need hear those things in a loud and emotionally compelling enough voice. An internet database like this is certainly loud enough, and the narrative it puts forward of hunting down abusive bullies is emotionally compelling. They need only hit the mark once or twice by sheer luck to have example they can point to tons of misplaced credibility.

And this is where I have to disagree. Posting accusations isn't going to get you very far if the accusation isn't credible and you have a well-established reputation for having a poor signal to noise ratio. Putting a bunch of low-credibility stuff into a database doesn't add any credibility, so all you have is the exact same situation you have now. The only way the database convinces anyone that wouldn't be convinced by some random person saying "look at this screenshot of twitter abuse" is if the database does establish some means of verification and a record of using it effectively, such that people have a reasonable belief that something posted there is likely to be legitimate.

"An anonymous third party claimed this without showing any evidence" is no basis for a reasonable belief. Even conceding the point that if playing the part of the absolute fool can absolve them of legal responsibility, can we at least agree that it's unethical and shady as hell? This thing is far more readily usable as tool for bullies, liars and trolls than it is for doing any sort of good.

It wouldn't be without evidence, it would be with screenshots/links to posts/etc. Sure, you can claim that it could be fake, but by that standard pretty much nothing on the internet is reliable.

And I'm not disputing that it seems kind of shady, I'm just pointing out that some of the arguments against it are really bad. It isn't a privacy violation, and it probably isn't going to be all that vulnerable to abuse.

Mario wrote:
So before the kickstarter got removed they wanted to create something like this, just for the other side and with reference to public posts? And people are mad at one list that doesn't even exist but are okay with the other?

I think there's a pretty big difference in that Vox Day (the guy who made the "SJW list" site) is a proud sexist and white supremacist* with an obsessive vendetta against "SJWs", and this latest site is nothing more than another round of him screaming "SJWS SUCK TUMBLR FEMINISM RUINS EVERYTHING". With the site in the OP there's at least the possibility of it being a genuine, if misguided, attempt to stop behavior that we can all agree is not acceptable.


*For once this is not actually "everyone on the internet is Hitler" exaggeration. He has openly argued for the inherent superiority of the white race, defended honor killings as a good thing for society because they make women behave, etc.