Owen Jones sent revolting homophobic abuse

[tabbycatstripy]

Owen Jones has posted some terrible homophobic abuse he received on Twitter. It’s ugly stuff. Apparently he knows who sent it (the person made no effort to hide her identity) so I hope he has informed the police.

He’s blaming it on GC ‘anti-trans’ ‘radicalisation’ anyway.

Maybe we could all list below how many times we’ve sent people abusive, threatening messages online (of any sort)?

I’ll start: 0

There are a couple of posts if you google. All recent, all fairly bland, not much engagement.

A basic google search shows that Section 127 of the Communications Act makes it an offense to send public messages of a “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character,” which is quite clearly a very broad remit. (Which ironically is what a lot of OJ's followers have also now done.)

Why is it that all the men who send women grossly offence on Twitter never get prosecuted then?

Bit of a mystery.

Yes, the police appear to be under the misconception that it only counts if it's covered under the hate crime categories. This isn't the case.

You have to use Google these days.

I found this thread from 11 days ago where AstroTurf would appear to be encouraging a woman to stay in a horrible, abusive relationship and work on it

www.mumsnet.com/talk/relationships/4548038-cant-leave

I don't know what brought him/her to FWR, but I don't really think it was for the feminist analysis. Although hopefully everyone lives and learns.

Ah my mistake, not a troll. Sorry about that, as you were.

Jones has taken a single post from this thread that describes a sense of apathy about the abuse, and posted it on Twitter to his million followers and said, ‘Mumsnet having a normal one’.

This is how I know he’s a poor journalist. This thread is virtually unanimous in its condemnation of the abuse he claims he received. He chooses selectively from the posts to pretend Mumsnet in general is a place where people support abusive communications.

I can't tell you how unsurprised I am. Of course he will have blocked anyone who would be able to point out that the vast majority of posts have condemned the abuse.

Society really needs to get it's position on these issues in order.

It seems to me that we racism the vast majority are all on board, even if a few people are still explicitly racist and there's a small debate to be had around how deep racism runs institutionally.

Obviously credible threats are extremely serious. But if someone were to tweet me that I was a disgusting x, y, z it wouldn't particularly bother me unless it was some sort of a serious accusation that some people might believe. Call me a [insert generic insult here] and it's no biggie.

My point. In my opinion positioning homosexuality as a gender thing not a sex thing, and thus erasing the LGB community and denying the rights of straight people to be straight, is infinitely more offensive than an (ultimately meaningless and ignorable) homophobic slur. When this man is one of those "TWAW except in my bed" people it makes the offensiveness of his words much worse.

Can you recover a hacked Twitter account once you are aware you have been hacked? Or can you get Twitter to lock it or make amendments to it for you?

I would have thought you could but I don't know?

IWs 'proof' that the account wasn't hacked was that it was locked about an hour after the employer tweeted that they were investigating. But I would have thought that by the time they had tweeted that, they would have already contacted the woman in question and been on the way to getting it shut down?

tabbycatstripy · Today 10:05

Jones has taken a single post from this thread that describes a sense of apathy about the abuse, and posted it on Twitter to his million followers and said, ‘Mumsnet having a normal one’.

Ooh wonder if it was mine. 😄

It's discussed which one it was further up the thread.

Ah yes, missed that, not me then.

You can, yes. I think it's as simple as requesting a password change.

Situation I know about that's similar and I dont want to say too much - on-line abuse out of no-where - employers contaced and flapping around looking at procedures working out what to do - in mean time one of the people in same workplace targeted from a group that sadly not stranger to random attacks - got in touch with police which turned out to be best thing that could have happened.

The social media accounts were quickly made private after employer got in touch.

Police spoke to everyone very quickly including employer - house mates - they rapidly realised it was a metal health crisis - and by end of the day the person was sectioned - which isn't easy to get done.

Any abuse is vile and must be very upsetiing to receive - but hopefully the police have been contacted as they are best place to investigate.

I've got an old twitter account somewhere that I set up years ago and never used. I tried to get back into it the other day but couldn't remember the email I used, or the name I gave it, or basically anything, so couldn't. It worries me that if someone managed to hack it and start sending abuse I'd find it difficult to do anything about it.

The poster he has quoted also thinks it's appalling that women accrue holiday pay when they're on ML and that women go into sex work because it's highly paid and tax free.

I'd suggest they're not a regular around these parts.

LOJ has just had a mini rant on Jeremy Vine, about this very subject (unrelated to the subject they were discussing).

I'd suggest they're not a regular around these parts.

Are you suggesting an MRA would post trolly messages on a feminism forum to make women look bad, when he knows that it's being monitored by OJ, who's looking for evidence of women being bad, and thus might get some attention?

Sounds totally implausible.

Certainly not as likely as this woman thinking yesterday was a good day to rejoin Twitter just to send all that abuse to OJ and others.

Oh god I can imagine.

What OJ is claiming is that a young woman who previously tweeted about very mundane non political stuff, doesn't follow a single GC account and hasn't posted on Twitter in 9 months has silently spent that last 9 months being radicalised by what has been said by JKR, Mumsnet, GC Twitter and the media. This young woman then decided that yesterday was going to be the day that she would reactivate her Twitter account, an account that has her name, photograph and place of work for all to see, and put into action all that she had learnt from JKR, Mumsnet, GC Twitter and the media by tweeting a barrage of racist, misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic abuse at high profile people within the space of 24hrs.

The alternative idea that she was hacked is of course a total non-starter because....reasons.

I mean, I guess stranger things have happened, but it sounds pretty fucking ludicrous to me!

Why is he always on there?

I mean, I guess stranger things have happened, but it sounds pretty fucking ludicrous to me!

Well, there was that time the Internet Archive was apparently hacked to make it look like an MSNBC presenter had posted all sorts of homophobic stuff in the past.

Various distorted mirror-image echoes of this current malarky.

Only one of two things can be true here, and they are both rather consequential: Either (a) hackers found a way to effectively alter the digital archives of the Wayback Machine in order to smear the name of a major TV news personality by attributing fabricated content to her, or (b) this major TV news personality is lying — not 10 years ago, but today — in order to falsely deny authorship of her own journalism.

[...] The reason liberal news sites are ignoring the story is as self-evident as it is troubling: Because Reid’s ideology is in accordance with theirs, and they therefore don’t care if she’s lying or telling the truth when denying authorship of these bigoted articles, nor do they care about the anti-LGBT bigotry itself. Those are concepts to be exploited opportunistically for partisan gain; they are devoid of any actual conviction. Their silence on this latest, incredibly strange episode involving one of their iconic media personalities demonstrates that rather compellingly.

Reid is assuming that liberal media outlets will prioritize their ideological and partisan affinity for her over their proclaimed, profound concern for LGBT bigotry, hacking, and journalistic integrity. And on that question, at least, Reid is almost certainly right. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why trust in media institutions has collapsed to the point where people are as willing to believe what they read from fake sites as they are from established ones?

Ah , Jeremy 'Dougal' Vine. ' What on earth is going on here. Why will nobody tell me? I know - I'll ask my friend Owen Jones! '

I can understand someone being sent horrible abusive messages getting upset.

That doesn't make it okay to hound someone. If there's been abuse, call the police and/or alert Twitter before you set 1m followers on them, would be the sensible course of action, surely.