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DECISION – 'aristarchus':
Introduction:
Actions have consequences. This is not a matter of free speech or censorship.
Doxing "Doxing or doxxing is the act of publicly revealing previously private personal information about an individual or organization, usually via the internet." This is the definition upon which we are basing this decision. Legally, the term does not appear to be well-defined in the US but doxing is also covered by laws relating to harassment, threats, and abuse. Elsewhere in the world, the definitions are sometimes more clearly defined but might cover a broader interpretation than the US definitions. Which interpretation is applicable could depend on the location of the perpetrator.
Background:
We first noticed that something was amiss in late 2020. Submissions from 'aristarchus' would contain certain words, phrases and names which were apparently unconnected with the rest of the content. We were unable to understand their significance at that time, but they would be meaningful to the intended victim. (Story submissions by 'aristarchus' often contain additional material that he has inserted himself.) In almost all cases we removed them prior to posting the submission as a story because they had no bearing on the rest of the submission.
In late 2021 the doxing became more blatant both in comments that were made to stories and as well as on IRC. We also contacted the victim (by now it was obvious to us who it was) who responded and explained what had been published, where and when. We also discovered additional material that had not been seen by the victim. He had been suffering this abuse for a considerable time.
Please Note:
This investigation is not something that has been carried out purely on a whim by the admins on this site. During it we have consulted with and taken advice from a representative of the board of directors. (As an aside, SoylentNews PBC has never been 'run' by 'TheMightyBuzzard' or any of the current admin staff whose names you know well.) This is a serious matter and the investigation was conducted with utmost discretion by a very small team.
To ensure that 'aristarchus' is aware of this Decision he will receive an Admin-to-User message and an email to the address associated with his username drawing his attention to it.
Publishing Personal Information:
It is now apparent that 'aristarchus' has doxed at least one person in our community, and possibly others who may have left the site rather than suffer the harassment. This is not a single act, but has taken place repeatedly over a significant period of time.
'aristarchus' has published the victim's full name, where the victim lives, and the victim's employer. Presumably he believes this information to be accurate. We have seen additional comments that contain threats and state very personal information, such that posting them here would likely do further damage. We are trying to be discreet. If it were you, would you want us to air all the information that has been revealed? This action might also have placed other members of the victim's family at risk from abuse or embarrassment.
It is obvious that 'aristarchus' has conducted research away from this site. SoylentNews PBC does not hold such information nor has it been ever been declared in any comments.
We can only guess at the true reason behind these disclosures: at the very least it appears to be a smear campaign.
What We Have Done So Far:
- The victim has a full copy of all the evidence that we have been able to trace to date. The evidence was all publicly accessible. We are not aware of a compromise of any other community members' information. We are not going to indicate where this information might be found.
- We have made a separate backup of the database to ensure that evidence should not be lost.
- We have removed personal information from database comments and IRC logs where possible.
- It is entirely for the victim to decide whether to seek legal redress in this matter.
Options:
There are 2 options open to us.
(1) Permanent Ban
- 'aristarchus' will face a full and permanent ban from this community.
- His account(s) will be completely disabled.
- Any further posting he may make to the site will be treated as Spam.
(2) Temporary Ban
- 'aristarchus' will face a temporary ban of 3 months where his account(s) will be disabled. He will be able to restore his 'aristarchus' account when his ban ends. His conduct during this time will be taken into consideration before his account is reactivated.
- During the ban 'aristarchus' may still post on the site as an 'Anonymous Coward', with all the limitations that are associated with that i.e. no journal, no ability to moderate, etc. Whether he wishes to make his identity known in his AC posts is entirely up to him.
- During and subsequent to the ban he is to act as we would expect any other member of this community to act. He is not to disrupt other discussions nor is he to continue to complain about his treatment. The ban is entirely a consequence of his own actions. We will not discuss this matter publicly. If he has complaints he may contact us via email as usual.
- He is to refrain immediately and completely from harassing other members of this community.
- Any serious future abuses by 'aristarchus' can result in a permanent ban being imposed without further warning.
We acknowledge that 'aristarchus' regularly makes insightful and interesting observations and we recognize that he has many supporters on this site. That is why we have offered the option of a conditional Temporary ban.
Action/Conclusion:
'aristarchus' must now decide which ban he wishes to accept. This is not negotiable – there are no other options open to him. If he does not respond either by commenting here or by email within 48 hours of the release of this Decision then we will assume that he has chosen the Temporary Ban and he is bound by the conditions stated within it. He may elect to change to a Permanent ban at any time.
For legal reasons we do not intend to comment further. The community can now see why several of the site admins have been putting in long working days, sometimes in excess of 12 hours since just before Christmas. We are exhausted and need to have a period of normal activity so that we can recover. We urge the community to be circumspect and restrained in the discussions to this Decision – there is little to be gained from inflaming the current situation any further. We ask you not to speculate about the identity of the victim.
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Thursday February 03 2022, @02:31PM (20 children)
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 03 2022, @02:48PM (3 children)
FWIW, I always thought SN was run by buff well-groomed gentlemen in bespoke suits surrounded by empty vintage port bottles. In their mother's basement, of course.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 03 2022, @06:18PM (2 children)
Mom has great taste in port!
But on a serious note: This is why we can't have nice things and also why organizations end up needing Codes of Conduct.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Saturday February 05 2022, @01:36AM (1 child)
From: https://web.archive.org/web/20140425014730/http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html [archive.org]
"... What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn't happen. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.
Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to see how many times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it. ...
This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled. ...
The normal experience of social software is failure. If you go into Yahoo groups and you map out the subscriptions, it is, unsurprisingly, a power law. There's a small number of highly populated groups, a moderate number of moderately populated groups, and this long, flat tail of failure. And the failure is inevitably more than 50% of the total mailing lists in any category. So it's not like a cake recipe. There's nothing you can do to make it come out right every time.
There are, however, I think, about half a dozen things that are broadly true of all the groups I've looked at and all the online constitutions I've read for software that supports large and long-lived groups. And I'd break that list in half. I'd say, if you are going to create a piece of social software designed to support large groups, you have to accept three things, and design for four things. ...
Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse.
The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you'll hear about it very quickly. ..."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05 2022, @05:59AM
Nice, but the scope of that talk was actually fairly narrow. He was right about group dynamics being a human problem, but of his guidelines , there are some clearly incorrect ones. For example, the idea of limiting investment in handles is specifically and only correct under the assumption that the participants are interested in interactions where persistent identities matter - this is a flagrantly false, non-generalisable assumption. Here alone, the value of ephemeral identities has been shown, and slashdot's wind-down has shown the same. Similarly, the effects of scale matter at the personal level - some people are more sensitive than others, some have higher tolerance than others, but he makes basically no clear mention of individual management strategies.
A group is its own worst enemy is a cute concept, but that matters in constrained circumstances, and those constraints aren't always true. In fact many of the more implications violate them from the outset.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 03 2022, @04:23PM (14 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 03 2022, @04:34PM (5 children)
You really can't dox Zumi. She has published her full name, her favorite colors, favorite flavor of jelly-beans, and her shoe size openly. The only thing she hasn't published is her physical mailing address. Anyone who published that address would be guilty of doxxing, I suppose.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday February 03 2022, @11:38PM (3 children)
You are obsessed with me :) It's kind of cute, but also kind of creepy.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 07 2022, @07:11AM (2 children)
You flatter yourself wombyn.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday February 07 2022, @10:33PM (1 child)
Then disabuse me of this notion by shutting the haemorrhaging fuck up and not replying to me, LOL
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14 2022, @06:24AM
You first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 04 2022, @01:32AM
now picturing Azuma as a hyper dog [puppyleaks.com] tearing around the house
(Score: 5, Informative) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 03 2022, @05:38PM (7 children)
Unless you're one of those people who are still aware of the old English convention to refer to unknown-gender entities with male pronouns.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 03 2022, @10:11PM (6 children)
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 04 2022, @06:14PM (5 children)
I'm relatively conservative and I use 'they' or him/her or s/he when trying to hide the gender.
The grammar Nazi part of me doesn't like to use 'they' for one person because it grammatically refers to more than one person.
Interestingly I would much rather be a liberal in a conservative environment than a conservative in a liberal environment. The left has absolutely no tolerance for dissent, it's obvious. For instance, aristarchus, the very topic of this discussion is on the left. Who has he been going after? Anyone on the right. He wants their jobs, he wants them harassed personally, etc... just because they disagree with them. I don't see from the right nearly the degree of intolerance that I see from the left. Yet the more moderates and the right aren't trying to dox aristarchus, have him fired and harassed.
It makes sense. Leaders of socialist countries destroy any dissent and go after any dissenters.
When you say "drives to many on the right into a tizzy" what you mean is that some people in the right might simply disagree with you on a matter. They won't try to go after your job, try to dox you, vandalize your property, etc... They'll simply explain why they disagree.
When people on the left go into a tizzy because someone disagreed with them on something then that's a completely different story.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 04 2022, @06:31PM (2 children)
Another recent example
(Krysten is a democrat)
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/575280-far-left-bullies-resort-to-harassing-shaming-kyrsten-sinema-it-wont-work [thehill.com]
Joe Manchin got death threat emails and whanot and he's a democrat. Can't vote against the party, can't disagree, or else ...
These are just the most recent examples I can think of, people have lost their jobs because people on the left would complain to someone's employer over something that happened outside of work because of a disagreement (I can't find the example now but I posted one before because they go way back). When has someone on the right gone to an employer to get someone on the left fired.
I believe, statistically, companies are FAR more likely to get sued by people on the left. So they try to cater to the left to avoid lawsuits. The left has ZERO tolerance for dissent.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 04 2022, @06:52PM (1 child)
Except that this behavior isn't limited to the left. For example, many of the local election officials (both Republicans and Democrats) who refused to support Donald Trump's claims of massive voter fraud and a stolen election have been harassed and received threats. Pretending that this phenomenon is limited to one side of the political spectrum is asinine. Making generalizations about "the right" or "the left" is almost never helpful, and is more about taking cheap shots instead of making actual cogent arguments.
There are lots of instances of people on "the right" trying to get university faculty members on "the left" fired. In fact, Turning Point USA operates a Professor Watchlist, which is really an effort to blacklist faculty whom they claim promote liberal views in the classroom. However, if you look at their justification for including many of those faculty members, in many cases it is based on political opinions expressed in op-eds or posted on personal social media accounts. Your generalization completely fails.
As for your statement that businesses cater to the left, it's more likely that a lot of businesses focusing on tying to attract younger demographics like in the 18-49 age range. That's why, for example, TV networks generally focus on the 18-49 subset of ratings when deciding whether to cancel or renew shows. Advertisers are generally more concerned about attracting younger people, whom they believe are more likely to spend money at their businesses. Statistically speaking, that age range tends to lean left of center. They're just trying to appeal to customers in their desired demographics. I've not seen anything suggesting that it's about fear of being sued.
Let's refrain from making absurd generalizations about "the left" or "the right", okay? They're just not helpful.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 04 2022, @07:14PM
(same poster as the one you are responding to).
I do agree, in the case of Donald Trump, he did have an attitude of going after and firing anyone he disagrees with.
I remember George Bush, at one time, said something to the extent that you are either with us or against us (you can't be neutral?).
You are right, both parties are guilty of this, when the right is in charge they can also be intolerant as well. It's partly that the left is who is in charge right now so they have a lot more room to be intolerant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 04 2022, @06:58PM
(instead of 'they' often times I may use the term 'this person').
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 07 2022, @11:52AM
Let's also not forget the attempts at deplatforming like what they are trying to do to Joe Rogan and Spotify.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 06 2022, @05:03AM
As if there was any doubt about who the whiny right-wing snowflake is. Worries about busloads, or plane-loads! of anti-fa being sent to his address, courtesy of Amazon? They may also be bringing law enforcement, but you know, if you have done nothing wrong, which I suspect our "victim" has not. So cut the crap, bytram! This whole thing is so contrived as to be laughable. It is laughable. Evidence? Legal considerations? Looks like SN is going down.