Dealing With Anti-Black Racism and Antisemitism in IRC (It Comes From People Who Intentionally Seed It There to Discredit and Provoke the Site's Community)
Editorial note: A high-level authority said that writing about this is lawful; it's OK to publish and there is "no law against it".
THE part from last week showed how we handled attempts to deplatform this site. As we'll show at a future date, fake addresses are being sent to harass people and companies. And this sort of harassment comes from people who misuse "disability" status to justify their abuse.
This started in 2022, if not earlier (I spoke about it more than 3 years ago). Attempts to deplatform this site culminated last year.
At the time, I was quick to explain what was happening. These are 100% empty threats and a denial of service attack (by means of social engineering) by someone who only days earlier used a sockpuppet account (cade.foster117@proton.me) to submit a report to the webhost, moreover impersonating another person. Many people are being fabricated for the sake of harassment. I reported this to the local police here, adding those as two additional crimes and abuses, dating back many months. This was escalated upwards last month and another case was opened. The cases are piling up.
To be clear, this trolling isn't a case of "safety" assurance. The person reports material my wife wrote in response to illegal attacks on her, including doxing (our Web sites never did doxing, ever, in almost 20 years of its existence, with many authors involved from all around the world). There were also attacks on my mom and the perpetrators come to our IRC channels, spouting out hate crimes like "kill the Jews" and "gas the Jews" in order to provoke people into responding (in order to fake/twist the victim-abuse narrative, essentially reversing it).
Manchester Police has urged me to also report these repeated abuses by the perpetrators to the US and to Canada. The abusive reporters already have a history of being arrested (in Canada) for harassment both online and offline. One person is clinically autistic and uses autism for impunity. The laws haven't caught up with such 'edge cases'.
What we're dealing with here is unprecedented in the sense that, despite being subjected to abuse in the past (lots of it in 2009), we never before dealt with this veracity and abuse of process. At the end the webhost decided to disregard false reports and fake threats from the perpetrators and their sockpuppet accounts.
Some time soon we'll show why the harassment isn't limited in scope and may merit further prosecution for false statements to one's government. For people who seem to reject the very concept of a government this might be difficult to explain. Even explaining to them why racism is wrong isn't easy. █
