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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Facebook employee uses access to stalk women

30 replies

QuarksandLeptons · 02/05/2018 20:55

Senior engineer at Facebook using insider information to stalk women online.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/02/facebook-engineer-fired-alleged-stalker-tinder

This story is unsettling as it adds to the evidence that social media platforms seem to attract misogynistic men as their employees. This coupled with the fact that said social media platforms shape public opinion is a very worrying phenomenon for women’s rights and representation.

I’m not saying this one weird man could shape and influence much on his own but with a tech culture that seems to embrace incel type men, the influence could be further reaching.

Like the Cambridge Analytica scandal proved, platforms like Facebook have powers over public discourse that no private corporation should have. Voting in Trump & influencing Brexit are obvious cases but it seems a core contingent of misogynistic men working for these companies may also be shaping as influencing regressive and violent attitudes towards women.

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womanformallyknownaswoman · 03/05/2018 04:53

@TotallyLibrarianPoo - thank you for the acknowledgement - it's heartening when people understand the enormity of what I dealt with.

Holy Crap woman that's brutal! And it's still happening occasionally?!

Yes it was - extremely. I had never been stalked before and it taught me a thing or two. And of course I get the dangerous one :( I handled him well, all things considered, but it was horrible and made me ill. I keep saying I'm gonna write a book about his MO as he used many accounts and platforms - and posted stuff so only I knew it was him.

He makes me laugh now when he appears (maybe my gallows humour or the memories so horrible or the thought he is still so obsessed…..)

How can the police be at Linda's and posie's doors immediately about posting truths/self defence, and yet this has been happening to you for over a year with no repercussion? This is insane!

Yep I came to experience how useless the police are - they go for low hanging fruit - they won't take on cyberstalking as too labour intensive (in other words they don't have skills and aren't prepared to consider other options like using safe cyber people to investigate). Apple Security told me they are very frustrated at the lack of international law - there isn't any effectively across most of cyber space - and these predator types know that. It made me realise I was in the equivalent of The Wild West - lawless effectively - having to rely on an odd deputy or too who were all in the pay of the Ranch Owners. I was on my own as thousands of women find every week. And the police will only deal with stuff in their own country normally, unless children are involved.

How they can justify investigating vexatious complaints against Posie and Linda is anybody's guess- they should have better things to do. WE need our own police force (women) imo.

TotallyLibrarianPoo · 03/05/2018 03:19

Holy Crap woman that's brutal! And it's still happening occasionally?!

How can the police be at Linda's and posie's doors immediately about posting truths/self defence, and yet this has been happening to you for over a year with no repercussion? This is insane!

womanformallyknownaswoman · 03/05/2018 01:09

I was staked for a year or so and am still occasionally by a systems engineer working for one of largest social media platforms. Apple escalation team involved for 6 months and said it was worse case of cyber stalking they had come across in this part of the world.

This is a guy who stalked me for posting about male violence and cluster B personality disorders. I don't know him.

Actually this has reminded me that I do need to do something about this - stalker in USA and police worse than useless.

QuarksandLeptons · 02/05/2018 21:07

Machine learning systems reflect the biases of the people who program them.

Perfectly put!

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MIdgebabe · 02/05/2018 20:59

Even if they are not deliberately doing that, I certainly suspect it is a direct result of their lack of diversity, their desire to classify and group people to improve advertising revenue and the ability of the platforms to reflect and amplify things.

Machine learning systems reflect the biases of the people who program them.

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