I was hoping someone would write about how bad this article was. (Shocked to see it's the same one as the pretty good piece from earlier.)
The worst part to me was the article quoting Mitch Kapor to back up its implicit support of internet censorship:
>...charges that bullying, harassment and cruel behavior are out of control on the web...
>Mitch Kapor, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that Reddit users were predominantly male and 18 to 29 years old.
>“In my view, her job was made more difficult because as a woman, she was particularly subject to the abuse stemming from the pockets of toxic misogyny in the Reddit ecosystem,” said Mr. Kapor, now a partner at Kapor Capital.
Yeah, it's a pretty good example of what has become of news reporting. It has an instance of almost every common issue, except misinterpreting statistics.
Emotionally loaded language. Blatant fact framing. Suppositions. Presenting one side of a controversial issue as an opinion of absolute majority. Manufacturing "context" out of true, but mostly unrelated facts.
It's especially striking in contrast to the original, reasonably balanced, text. Sort of like "before" and "after" pictures.
Either (1) tell me which of those paragraph summaries is inaccurate, and how the accurate summary would reveal "suppositions" and "manufactured context", or (2) tell me which of those paragraph summaries directly implicates either of those two things.
Again, you made a list of things that bother you about news stories, but also affirmatively claimed that the article printed suppositions and manufactured context, so I'd like to see if you can back those two specific arguments up with evidence.
>1. Pao is a hero to many online for her gender equality fight, but was ousted by people online as well. This is mostly beyond dispute, except for the presumption that the Reddit mob actually did oust her, which all the principals in the story deny. That interpretation favors the Reddit mob.
Who is she a hero to? How many is "many"? What evidence do they have of this statement? Is she actually fighting for gender equality? You were also right to question whether the 'crowd' (the current wording) is the cause of her ouster, but it is also worth asking just who is to be included in that group, and whether they can legitimately be thought of as a single coherent entity.
That's just one sentence. Your second point:
>2. Pao's resignation was abrupt and happened amidst a torrent of misogynist drama, renewing concerns about SV sexism. It's indisputable that her resignation was abrupt. It's indisputable that the story has generated concern about online sexism. Some people may not appreciate that concern, but that doesn't make its existence not a fact.
We can split hairs about what is meant by "abrupt resignation", but the community has been unhappy for quite some time. The change.org petition has been around for about a month. "happened amidst a torrent of misogynist drama" is a phrase nearly without empirical meaning. Certainly there was "drama" involved, as with any other significant occurrence, but one must ask to what extent was "misogyny" involved, how was that relevant, and what criteria do they use to qualify that term. And of course, "renewing" what "concerns" to whom?
One can continue down your list in a similar fashion.
Furthermore, the context is certainly manufactured. Pao is famous for her lawsuit, and as a consequence gets associated with "sexism in tech". Ironically, while the outcome of the lawsuit determined that she had not suffered gender discrimination, any news about her now assumes as context a narrative that she is the victim of sexism.
The new sexism angle is a red herring, and the article is worse off for it.
I think it's difficult to argue that sexism is a red herring when someone resigns in the wake of a petition that leads off by criticizing them for taking a sexual harassment case to court. It's also difficult to argue that sexism isn't a factor in a resignation preceded by many hundreds of misogynist rants.
So, your responses to my challenge. Thank you! I think the first one is valid, and that reasonable people can disagree; the second one, less so.
Who is Pao a hero to? Not so much me. I think it's fair to argue that she's less a hero than "someone with a cheering section". Is she fighting for gender equality? That depends on the semantics you adopt. Reasonable people will argue that taking a sexual harassment case to court is "fighting for gender equality". Pao's reasonable detractors will say that she's fighting for her own financial interests.
Did Pao resign abruptly? Categorically yes, so much so that I'm a little irritated at Altman and Ohanian to see how it was managed. In an orderly succession, the CEO announces that they're leaving at, say, the end of the month. That didn't happen here. Not only that, but this CEO resigned amidst loud, newsworthy clamor for her ouster. Reddit's choreography leaves open the question of whether Reddit mobs can oust people at Reddit --- certainly, the mob thinks it can! There's no practical reason Pao couldn't have been quietly replaced by Huffman, who could have joined the board, and then a few weeks from now announce her resignation at the end of, I don't know, September. Operationally, Huffman would be doing the same thing he's doing now, but the optics would be clearer.
They didn't do that because Pao resigned abruptly. Not only did she resign abruptly, but both she and the board noted in their announcement that that Reddit mob was a destructive factor in the resignation.
Pao would not have resigned had the last few months of drama --- most of which does not appear to have been her making, and before you settle on "the buck stops with the CEO" please note that in this weird company, the CEO's boss had an operational role, and was himself responsible for the most dramatic misstep the company made. She probably did leave because she genuinely didn't feel she was the right person at this point to grow Reddit's userbase. But that judgement was almost certainly based in part on the fact that anything Reddit did with her name attached would be trolled and harassed by the redpill "chairmin pow" mob.
I'm going to ignore your implication that other problems I mentioned are unimportant.
Supposition:
"If she eventually succeeds in convincing a three-judge panel that the trial was unfair"
Aren't news supposed to be about what happened, not about what might happen if something else happens? I could understand if the story was about the trial, but it isn't.
Which brings me to the manufactured context part. The story is about resignation from Reddit. I understand that sometimes you need to provide more information about the subject so your reader fully understands what's going on. However, information about the lawsuit against an entirely different company under different circumstances does nothing of this sort. The only seeming reason it's included (and takes almost half the space) is because it supports meta-narrative NYT chose to pursue.
If she eventually succeeds in convincing a three-judge panel that the trial was unfair, Kleiner (and Silicon Valley, symbolically) would be on trial again.
This is self-evidently true.
You might not like that Pao's trial keeps appearing in the Times story about Pao's resignation, but the giant petition for her ouster chose to lead itself off with it. It's materially part of the real context of the story.
The statement is true, but what it speaks about is a what-if scenario.
You might not like that Pao's trial keeps appearing in the Times story about Pao's resignation, but the giant petition for her ouster chose to lead itself off with it. It's materially part of the real context of the story.
I'm not saying that NYT should be prohibited from mentioning the lawsuit. I'm saying that it's not directly related, and definitely not related enough to take up half the article.
That is a weird quote. Is it normal for articles mentioning past trials to say "if a mistrial is declared, the trial was invalid"? Seems like an out of place, almost tautological piece of information. Maybe if something like a motion for a mistrial was filed, but why state a fact like that just randomly? It only serves to apply doubt to the validity of the trial outcome, with no apparent basis (I don't really know anything about the trial myself).
Do you think Kapor really supports additional censorship on reddit?
My issue isn't with what he said in his quote. It's that the Times changed their well-balanced piece into one that implies the crappy parts of reddit need to be brought under 'control' and quoted a sentence from Kapor that lends support. I may be wrong (and to be honest I don't personally know much about Mitch), but I'd be surprised if a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation feels that reddit should be more restrictive on speech it hasn't moderated to this point. While his quote doesn't directly say he supports more censorship by any means, including it in the context of that article misconstrues his (probable) beliefs.
If you're going to make an argument that this piece is "pro-censorship", you're going to have to support it with evidence from the text. I just took the time to reread it, and I do not see support for censorship in it.
I'd specifically point to the Hero vs Angry Mob motif and the quote "bullying, harrassment[sic] and ugly behavior are out of control on the web," which implies that they must be brought under control. Obviously within the context of the overall spin towards sexism as the sole cause we discussed over there -> (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9871281)
The article doesn't saying bullying is out of control. The article says that the Pao incident will renew charges that bullying is out of control. And: Pao's resignation demonstrable did renew those charges!
And the problem Wikipedia has with them is that they can disguise special pleading. But that's clearly not what's happening here: there very obviously is a renewed concern over bullying in the wake of the Pao fiasco.
The weaseling is in the reverse – by saying their article is only about 'some people' they imply that other people exist, but never give them any ink. Hence I say the sentence is equivalent to stating objectively that cyberbullying is a problem that must be stopped and this incident is proof.
Kapor isn't quoted about the Pao lawsuit. He's quoted about the demographics of Reddit and the virulence of misogyny on Reddit. The conflict of interest in that seems six- degrees- of- Kevin- Rose to me.
It seems kind of self-defeating to wish that news outlets would avoid mentioning one of the most noteworthy parts of a story because having it in the open may somehow hurt "freedom of speech".
Mention, sure. Highlight, sure. But this is the top article on a CEO's departure and it doesn't even mention the trigger incident until the 5th paragraph, below the second picture. It says nothing about /r/fatpeoplehate, even though that would support its argument that the internet is 'cruel' (though not that it's sexist).
It solely tries make Ellen Pao into a martyr for anti-sexism in SV.
And don't get me wrong, the nasty behavior on reddit probably warrants an article. I'd argue that the prescription shouldn't be to hide people's behavior through censorship but to change it, whether by convincing them to self-censor or better changing people's minds, which I think sama did well in his announcement. But as a summary overview of why Reddit has a new CEO, this article failed miserably.
Further, it might be burying the trigger precisely because the trigger itself (firing of Victoria) runs against the tone of the (new) article. The whole reason reddit went into lockdown mode was because one of their most beloved employees (who happens to be a woman) was fired. The uproar didn't happen because people were generically upset with Ms. Pao, but because they were passionately upset with how she handled the dismissal a person reddit loved.
Almost no company will say why they fire someone. reddit is not unique in that regard. Personnel retention is a private concern, regardless of how it makes the community feel.
It's not just that they didn't mention why they fired her, it's that they didn't seem to have any plan in place to handle the work that she did, or indeed enough clue about her job to understand that they even needed one. If I remember correctly, one celebrity literally flew out to New York to do an AMA with her assistance and found when he got there that she'd been fired and it wasn't going ahead, and the admins didn't handle the other future AMAs that were relying on her any better.
I am trying to figure out what's happened here and having a lot of trouble. This is the first I heard about the shutdown of some hate subreddits. But how did that play into this? What I know:
1) victoria (and reddit management) shuts down 5 subreddits.
2) victoria is fired (maybe because she refused to move to sf and was otherwise insubordinate).
3) reddit erupts with support for victoria and hate for ellen.
4) ellen resigns.
what's the connection of 1 to 2-4? what else is missing?
1) Victoria, the admin who interfaces celebrities and /r/IAmA, was abruptly dismissed. No cause given, which grew a lot of conspiracy theories, but that's obviously standard practice when you fire an employee.
2) /r/IAmA mods find out when a PR rep reaches out to them after showing up at reddit offices and finding out their appointment with Victoria was canceled. Mods don't know how to get in contact with other people who are supposed to appear that day. They take the subreddit private, with a short message about having to figure the situation out.
3) Reddit uproar starts. /r/OutOfTheLoop post asks why /r/IAmA is closed, an /r/IAmA mod explains, people get upset about Victoria leaving. Separately (in my opinion) — or centrally (in tptacek's)— the hate subreddits from prior incidents like /r/FatPeopleHate deletion and GamerGate kick into high gear.
4) Other subreddits start going private in solidarity. This spreads until over 100 have shut down, pledging a 24 hour blackout. I think the petition starts around this time. /r/all is basically just this drama.
5) General shenanigans. Flaming, offensive content, etc. /u/kn0thing (Alexis Ohanian) posts a flippant comment in the heat of the moment, starts getting flamed too. Mostly though, he says "Not going to talk about Victoria. Chill, we're gonna get this /r/IAmA stuff figured out," on behalf of the admins (reddit staff).
6) /r/IAmA comes back up, says they're independent from the admins and are going to run things themselves. Ellen Pao talks to news media, posts eventually but gets downvoted to 0 - all her comments were thousands negative and had lots of angry/offensive replies. (Later we learn many positive things were said to her too.)
7) A week passes, mostly dying down. Petition gets more signatures, ultimately reaching >100k I think. Eventually they post an apology, to mixed reactions.
8) Sam Altman posts that Pao resigned, but includes a reproach of the behavior exhibited in the prior week. Seems to get positive reactions from both sides – people welcomed a return to civility and also Ellen's departure. People suddenly start realizing that the horrible things she's been doing to reddit might be because of reason and/or outside pressure, not because she hates freedom and happiness.
9) People start using this incident to complain about internet behavior more generally.
> Other subreddits start going private in solidarity. This spreads until over 100 have shut down, pledging a 24 hour blackout. I think the petition starts around this time.
Just a small correction. The petition was made in response to the shut down of fatpeoplehate and others.
Gotcha, more of a resurfacing then. I'll change it to this, which I sort of left out:
Lots of pure speculation that Victoria was fired because Jesse Jackson's AMA the previous day went poorly, or maybe because the reddit administration wanted to ruin IAmA somehow. No hard facts.
yes i'm totally serious and i am still looking for the answer to my question connecting 1 to the rest of the events which you have outlined in greater detail.
To be clear, it didn't happen in the order you specified. It was more like 2-3-1-4 — Victoria fired, protest, subreddits shut down in protest, Ellen resigns (1 week later) — and it was moderators who took down the subreddits, not reddit admins (Victoria was pretty much uninvolved besides getting fired.)
Ah, you meant those subreddits. I thought you meant the ones on strike - I think of the /r/fatpeoplehate thing as a separate, prior incident. That's also not really at all Victoria's department; my understanding is that she really only did AMAs. It was just a recent time the community got pissed off at the reddit administration (and therefore Ellen personally, because CEO), so obviously it fed the flames some more once the Victoria trigger happened.
It is not censorship to say that a private entity has the right to choose who gets kicked out of their dinner party.
I keep hoping that somebody will write about the difference between censorship and private parties choosing not to support and/or tolerate certain behaviors. It shouldn't be necessary, but there's a generation of people so incredibly entitled and so incredibly insane that they actually need a primer on reality.
> Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.
I disagree. Even flagging notcensorship's personal attack (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870590) is a form of censorship. It's certainly not First Amendment protected, and you're absolutely correct that he retains the right to call me out anywhere else on the internet (or world). It might even be morally justifiable. But that doesn't mean it's not censorship. Wikipedia adds:
> Governments, private organizations and individuals may engage in censorship. When an individual such as an author or other creator engages in censorship of their own works or speech, it is called self-censorship. Censorship may be direct or it may be indirect, in which case it is called soft censorship. It occurs in a variety of different media, including speech, books, music, films, and other arts, the press, radio, television, and the Internet for a variety of claimed reasons including national security, to control obscenity, child pornography, and hate speech, to protect children or other vulnerable groups, to promote or restrict political or religious views, and to prevent slander and libel.
> Direct censorship may or may not be legal, depending on the type, place, and content. Many countries provide strong protections against censorship by law, but none of these protections are absolute and frequently a claim of necessity to balance conflicting rights is made, in order to determine what can and cannot be censored. There are no laws against self-censorship.
The only good bits of Reddit are heavily censored by reddit users, not admins. Admins have not censored unpleasant subs; admins have removed subs that engaged in active harassment of people in other subs, in other forums, or AFK.
EDIT: also, parent comment being downvoted and flagged is ironic.
Sure, but the article is talking about the stuff on reddit that wasn't removed. Doesn't calling it "out of control" imply a desire to start controlling it?
(grandparent was edited after flag, even more ironically by a mod I think)
EDIT: In fact, let's all just take a second to appreciate the irony here. A guy made a throwaway account, called me an idiot, and (lamely) doxxed me – all in order to argue for restricting lowbrow content on internet forums. Love it.
Now that it's edited to somewhat more than just calling me out personally (and yes I'm a white guy, I currently live in Virginia and my startup is linked on my profile), there's a couple points to respond to.
(I'd argue that your post just underwent self- or moderator censorship, of the justified sort.)
> You are actively supporting hatred by making that argument.
> It is not censorship or suppression of speech to tell a bigot that they can no longer borrow your megaphone. The bigot remains free to buy, build, or borrow another megaphone, a fact demonstrated clearly by the rise of voat.
> It is morally reprehensible to argue that taking away a privately owned megaphone is equivalent to censorship. It diminishes the meaning of the word, and boils it down to nothing. You should be ashamed of yourself for making such a truly insane and asinine argument.
Let's call a spade a spade. It's absolutely censorship by the definition of the word. You believe it's justified censorship.
"It" is somewhat unclear - but let's call it moderation beyond what is currently exercised by reddit, in order to remove the unpleasant content we saw in the wake of the FPH and Victoria incidents and is excoriated by this article.
I argue against it for precisely the same reason you think it's justified. The range of human opinion on every topic is incredibly broad. That means that there's a tiny minority of people who hold truly outrageous and objectionable views. If you simply hide those people with deletions and shadowbans, you relegate them to their tiny corner of the internet where they're free to reinforce each other's insane ideals. One of the greatest things about reddit is that though it's divided into subreddits, it's one big place - and any given user's reddit lineup will have slightly different posts than another's, whether cat photos or racism. That means you get cross-pollination (or -contamination), which offers a chance to change those people's minds. Yes, the crazies will show up in big community threads. But that means the sanes get a chance to teach them why they're wrong, whether by shaming them like sama, convincing them with reasoned argument (lol), or just downvoting them into oblivion and sending some irrational flames back (your choice!).
When you destroy the centrality of reddit, even if by cutting out really bad stuff, you encourage the sharding of the web into isolated echo chambers.
EDIT: No, I think you're absolutely right that reddit has zero obligation to allow any content. I'm merely arguing that though the content may be reprehensible and censorship is legal and even justifiable, it would not improve reddit to remove it.
> The range of human opinion on every topic is incredibly broad. That means that there's a tiny minority of people who hold truly outrageous and objectionable views. If you simply hide those people with deletions and shadowbans, you relegate them to their tiny corner of the internet where they're free to reinforce each other's insane ideals.
Let's take antisemitism as the truly outrageous & objectional view. Say that a tiny minority of users of reddit are vehemently antisemitic. Sure, they can hang out on their own subreddits and talk about how great antisemitism is, and they do. But they also post in popular subs, bringing their vitriol along with them. The community doesn't care, because censorship is bad. Sound about right so far?
Say you're Jewish. You wander in to a thread on some popular sub and you find a bunch of antisemitic comments. What is your reaction? Do you dig in and try to convince the antisemites that they're wrong? Or do you say fuck it and leave? How many times does this have to happen before you write off reddit all together?
Now let's say reddit is full of antisemites, homophobes, xenophobes, racists, fascists, and sexists. If you're jewish, gay, from another country, black, aren't a fascist, or a woman, why would you want to keep visiting the site?
Let's say you're none of those things, but you think that antisemites et al. are terrible people. Why would you want to spend time on a site that is full of those kinds of people?
Why would you want to visit a site where terrible people aren't told to get the fuck out but rather defended because telling them that they are not welcome in a community is censorship?
Good example, I am a Jew. Me, I'd probably toss some downvotes around and get out - maybe once in a blue moon if I'm drunk I'll write a response to one of the dumber/ridiculous comments. But there's more vocal people than me.
>Now let's say reddit is full of antisemites, homophobes, xenophobes, racists, fascists, and sexists. Do you say fuck it and leave?
Absolutely I'd leave a place like that. See, that's the great thing about reddit. It's not full of those people. 95% of people are not in the category of the "racist sexist 5%." So those people get drowned out, or downvoted to oblivion, or very occasionally rebuked by an authority figure to positive response. And yeah, those assholes who write the worst shit probably aren't going to change their mind. But maybe we can reach the guy who just browses, and make him think twice before hitting the upvote button.
> Why would you want to visit a site where terrible people aren't told to get the fuck out
I just want them to be told to shut the fuck up, not get the fuck out. And I limit this opinion to reddit generally, since I see it as the central place for internet discourse. Subreddits and non-reddit fora should absolutely censor content to create the desired community attitude.
I think it depends on the context. If I'm a mod on reddit and I remove a submission because it's a clear rule breaker, am I censoring the person who posted it, or am I performing content curation? Which is the more accurate term to use?
It might be technically correct to call water a 'clear liquid', but isn't there a better term or name to use, a more accurate and descriptive term to use? A clear liquid can also refer to vodka or rubbing alcohol or even many types of acids. Being clear and using the correct terms are important to the discussion. Overusing the word "Censorship" just because it might be technically correct dilutes the word's meaning. Especially since what's happening most of the time is content curation.
The distinction seems akin to freedom fighter vs. terrorist. If you're arguing in favor of improving the community, it's curation; if you just got shadowbanned, it's censorship. But it's the rules themselves that are at issue, not the mods enforcing them. Since the issue is further restricting discourse on reddit and I am opposed, I use the word censorship.
(I'll add that when it ventures into the realm of truly offensive behavior that can hardly be classified as content, the pro-restrictions term might start to become "justified censorship")
>I think it depends on the context. If I'm a mod on reddit and I remove a submission because it's a clear rule breaker, am I censoring the person who posted it, or am I performing content curation? Which is the more accurate term to use?
If you remove speech you don't like, it is censorship.
Curation would be tagging content for a front-end filter that excludes content based on its configuration.
… but that comment is then written as though every form of censorship is obviously immoral and bad which is self-evidently not true using this definition of censorship.
Because according to this definition what an editor at a newspaper engages in is censorship - and no one takes issue with that. It is an self evidently reasonable position to like or even love that kind of censorship – but the comment writes about it as though any endorsement of this kind of censorship were self-evidently evil, something not many people will agree with.
You can use this definition of censorship – but then also know that liking or loving censorship in certain situation is also quite reasonable. I want my censors to be fierce and awesome! I want to, after all, read a newspaper worth reading. And why not also moderate much more heavily at Reddit? Is that somehow evil? I think it would be awesome.
I mostly intended my comment to be a shot at the Times' shoddy reporting on this one. You're right that censorship is certainly justified in many contexts. But the article quoted a founder of the EFF in its clear bias towards more.
>It shouldn't be necessary, but there's a generation of people so incredibly entitled and so incredibly insane that they actually need a primer on reality.
We best get used to it, the baby boomers will be with us for a while.
I'm really curious how these people are going to feel about themselves in 10-20 years when (hopefully) many of them realize how they're coming across to the non-feral, socialized bulk of humanity. Even into my 20s I thought and said some things that just horrify me now. This was back in the '80s and early '90s, so fortunately none of it's on permanent record the way things are now. I'd like to think I wasn't a bad person, just a product of my environment, but I cringe just thinking about it sometimes.
This article was exactly on point. If you think this is off-base then you've been living in a reddit filter bubble; the dialogue there is skewed toward outright slander and misogyny from the most juvenile perspective.
This person is speculating about the office politics of a site they actively dislike. I doubt that they have given it any thought, or even have any knowledge on the topic.
Insofar as they went along with the overall thrust of the "blackout", yes; that is support of a mysoginist agenda. However /r/science tried to sit on the fence by claiming they had to make their subreddit private due to its frequent collaboration with /r/IAma -- a reason which was nonsensical. None of this began until Reddit's administration indicated its intention to begin banning certain subreddits. The mindless culture of harassment and hate which has festered on reddit over the last couple of years couldn't tolerate a woman of color being behind this perceived attack on their majority-young-white-male "freedom". It's a joke to think that any of this would have happened with a white male as CEO.
How about an older white male, from a business background, who was openly trying to institute censorship and monetization and was unabashedly ignorant of Reddit culture? I'm fairly confident that a CEO like that would have been significantly more hated by Redditors. The issue wasn't race or gender, it was culture.
I'm not claiming the hatred for my hypothetical white male CEO would follow the same narrative pathways. I'm claiming that it's easy to imagine reddit hating a white male CEO as much or more than Ellen Pao.
I won't disagree that race and gender were used as part of that hatred, that's obviously the case. I think, though, that it's easy to mix up whether things are tools that people use to attack someone they already hate vs. reasons for hating them in the first place. I don't honestly know which it was in this case, but it's not hard for me to imagine that it was the former.
I agree that the Reddit "hivemind" does not hate a woman just for being a woman, and they can definitely hate a white man. I still think they are more likely to hate a woman. The hate against Ellen Pao started with her lawsuit which is related to her gender.
To take a hypotetical, let's say Reddit's CEO was a gay man who had sued a previous employer for something related to discrimination based on sexual orientation. I think Redditors would have been less negative about that, as Reddit is very pro gay rights. Then, when Victoria was fired I think the anger would have been less directed at the CEO personally and more towards the admin team as a whole, or at Reddit's owners.
We could also compare the recent banning of /r/fatpeoplehate with /r/jailbait earlier. People were upset about that too, but I cannot remember outright hate directed at the CEO personally.
I do agree with you about the racist posts. That seems like it's just a tool used to attack her.
If the trial based on sexual orientation was still as obviously fraudulent as pao's trial was then the result would be largely the same I think.
After reading up on the trial to me it seemed rather obvious that the suit was fraudulent and had no basis in reality. The jury quickly reached a unanimous agreement on almost all of the counts as well with little room for debate on most of the issues at hand. As far as I recall they just spent a bit of time on the details regarding one specific thingamabob.
FPH ban had some hate against pao but not on this level as far as I recall (wasn't really in the drama then). The jailbait shebangle is before my time so dunno there.
This combined with the various ethical misadventures of her and her homosexual husband (which would actually help them considerably from an ethical viewpoint considerably if the CEO was actually a gay male as then it wouldn't be an obvious sham marriage).
>I still think they are more likely to hate a woman.
Well sure. If 3% of people are virulently sexist (against women) and none or fewer are sexist against men, the overall sentiment leans towards sexism – especially when they're loud about it. But the opinions of the fringe should not indict the actions of the rest of the people on their side. I do not believe that most or even a substantial portion of the 200,000 people who signed the petition to remove Pao were motivated primarily by misogyny or racism.
The worst part to me was the article quoting Mitch Kapor to back up its implicit support of internet censorship:
>...charges that bullying, harassment and cruel behavior are out of control on the web...
>Mitch Kapor, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that Reddit users were predominantly male and 18 to 29 years old.
>“In my view, her job was made more difficult because as a woman, she was particularly subject to the abuse stemming from the pockets of toxic misogyny in the Reddit ecosystem,” said Mr. Kapor, now a partner at Kapor Capital.