‘Hack’ Dove Into The War Between 80K Members Of A Women’s FB Group & 1 Dude

It’s just one of those days on the internet, y’know?
Following news that Yeah The Boy’s first Facebook event had descended into online rape threats and PEDESTRIAN.TV’s report that NSW Police have started investigating the page to see if any crimes have been committed (and one would think yes, rape threats constitute a crime), Triple J Hack has revealed that members of women’s Facebook group Bad Girls Advice have targeted a Sydney man.
After an unsuccessful first date, “Ron” (not his real name) sent a women multiple complaints about her appearance; two days later, he woke up to hundreds of abusive messages and, later still, screenshots of the BGA post dedicated to abusing him. The Hack piece explores the event in more detail, but basically members of the group had identified Ron, shamed him, and, as people on the internet are wont to do, met his abuse tenfold. 
The now 80,000-strong group, whatever their intentions, obviously engaged in an unacceptable form of harassment in encouraging its members to send abusive messages to Ron. The woman who originally alerted him to the page also suffered abuse; after being outed as a “snitch,” the BGA admins tried and failed to obtain her ID and subsequently, “called her a bitch and a cunt, and joked about fucking her grandfather.”
We should point out that, while the Hack radio report only briefly mentions that Ron “got in touch with [the woman] again, and told her via text message that she hadn’t looked like her photos,” the accompanying article includes BGA screenshots that claim he went further and persistently sent abusive messages after he was blocked. 
Even after the abuse, Ron reportedly maintains he did nothing wrong; he told Hack that online dating is superficial, sending judgmental messages to his date is somehow therefore warranted, and all this basically adds up to “how a bad date made me the enemy of 50k women on Facebook”.
And as serious as stalking and doxing obviously is, regardless of gender, this story shouldn’t be used as a “see, everyone has it equally rough” kind of gotcha piece. A man receiving a large amount of abuse, after repeatedly insulting a woman, will never be equitable to a group making violent threats and grounded in widespread misogyny. 
Still, the event is an excellent example of how internet groups can focus on revenge while ignoring the fact that people just aren’t wired for this widespread, almost-immediate kind of abuse. Ron mentions the possibility that, if he had been mentally ill, this level of attention could potentially lead to self-harm.
The radio report includes an excellent discussion with ethicist Matt Beard, who mentions that, for shaming to “work” properly, people need to provide the abuser with a way to fix what they’ve done; messages simply outing Ron as a “balding beer bellied mute little cunt of a man” isn’t the same thing as calling out his misogyny.
Still, if every woman had a Hack program dedicated to their online abuse story, we’d have close to infinite Hack stories.
Photo: Triple J Hack.

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