This ain’t ‘kids joshing around’
A couple of days ago it was Michelle Marie getting a barrage of abuse on Twitter. The next day it was hackers abusing Leslie Jones. Sexism and racism meet to form the fun new game of Attack the Visible Black Woman.
Leslie Jones, a co-star of this year’s “Ghostbusters” movie who has been besieged in the past month by online abusers who have targeted her appearance and her race, was victimized again on Wednesday when her personal website appeared to have been hacked.
The hackers inserted a picture of the gorilla Harambe on the site, and exposed what appeared to be explicit photos of the actress, along with pictures of her driver’s license and a passport, and images of her with stars like Rihanna, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West.
Because she’s in Ghostbusters, because she’s female, because she’s black, because because because because – a bunch of doodz feel entitled to violate her privacy, hack her website, put intrusive racist sexist shit on her website, and just generally do whatever they can to make her life bad, for their own amusement.
Can we have a safe space from this? Can we be allowed to do what we do without being the targets of angry boy-men? No, we cannot.
Ms. Jones, 48, had spent much of the past month battling online trolls who sent her a stream of racist imagery, pornography and abusive language. She briefly left Twitter, but later returned to tweet about the Rio Olympics.
In the hours after Ms. Jones’s site was taken offline, high-profile defenders offered public support.
“These acts against Leslie Jones are sickening,” the musician Questlove wrote in a post on Twitter. “It’s racist & sexist. It’s disgusting. This is hate crimes. This ain’t ‘kids joshing round.’”
Others, including Paul Feig, the director of the “Ghostbusters” film, the comedian Patton Oswalt and the singer Katy Perry defended the actress on Twitter.
Meanwhile the abusers were hard at work planning their next action.
Even if it is “kids joshing around” it is Not Okay. If it were kids — where they live, not broadcasting — their parents had better be shutting them down and teaching them why that’s wrong, in bold caps.
But being 12 is no excuse if you start broadcasting. All some 30 year old needs to do is egg on a bunch of kids to do his hate speech for him? I don’t think so.
We’re really going to have to get back to that face-to-face principle: People who can’t behave with some level of basic decency in public don’t belong in public.
Virtual space as a free-for-all is not working for anyone except some scumbucket trolls.
“For their own amusement.”
This is the crux of it for me. How is this amusing? What kind of person thinks this kind of hateful abuse is—tee hee!—funny?
— and Twitter is an honorable company.
(Freely adapted from Julius Caesar)
Sorry, I do know it’s not Latin, but I should have spelled it British. Blam my keybored.
Somebody needs to be tracing these people and taking away their ability to do it with impunity.