[Trigger warning for harassment, threatening violence against women]
Angry Mob by Robert Couse-Baker
A few years ago, a wonderful woman and prominent tech blogger named Kathy Sierra was driven offline because the the readers of a hate website called MeanKids decided SHE had to die. In a substantial media circus, it was determined that the primary reason the MeanKids site targeted her was because she was too nice. It annoyed them. They threatened to kill her. They posted pictures of her with a noose. They said they were waiting for her at her next conference.
She stopped blogging. Eventually she got rid of her Twitter account. She cancelled speaking engagements because she was afraid she would be murdered. It seems that as soon as a woman is popular enough to be noticed, someone decides it’s time to play dirty. (In the midst of the media attention, they took the opportunity to post obscene and harassing photoshopped pictures of Robert Scoble’s wife at the same time.)
These people think that if they scare the women of our community enough, this will stay a secret, and their misogyny and violence can snowball. This seems to be a group attack, and here, their details are FAR more specific than they were in the Kathy Sierra case.
This is being planned, and planned thoroughly.
These people are escalating, and they’re looking for a success. Hate bloggers claim innocence because they are acting within their First Amendment rights. But their mobs look up to them, and the mob mentality that they are stoking is escalating.
I am being stalked. People want to kill me. They want me to be afraid.
These people are planning a hate crime, and they are relying on me hiding in silence to succeed.
Read the rest at Ittybiz: Death Threats and Hate Crimes, Attacks On Women Bloggers Escalating. Maybe some of you are getting hit elsewhere, and you should know that it’s not just you:
He has already started harassing a few of my colleagues and judging by the overwhelmingly positive and inflamed reaction he’s getting from his audience, he’s not going to stop. More women are in his sights. It seems he has a list, and his mob is eager to see whose names are on it.
Geek Feminism Blog 
Wow – I knew there was the occasional crazy person targeting board moderators and bloggers (male and female), but how can there be hate/death threat blogging sites?
In most cases of death threats that I know of, the FBI does get involved.
See this link for John Scalzi’s take on these kinds of gendered attacks.
I don’t know, but it seems in USA and Europe this ugly cases are more popular than in Latin America ¿? at least, i haven’t been a victim of any kind of bad treatment just for being a women in a tech world or any world; and if someday something less than this happen to me, there is a very hard law (in my country) that protect woman against any kind of bad behavior – physical or psychological. I don’t know why Europe and USA does not have a law that protect woman? still….¿? Anyone should be able to stay behind a “law” to do this kind of things, and should not exist a law that permit that.
Maybe i am not seeing the whole picture, but it is very disturbing for me reading this things, i am just not use to. I hope it get better soon…. it is imperative.
Signal boosted at my DW and IJ – Dreamwidth and InsaneJournal
That kind of thing is abhorrent and horrendous.
I have long maintained that a person or group has no first amendment right to use speech that incites the violation of constitutional or other rights of other people. Also you may wish to include all living beings.
Just a quick head’s up: a few of the comments that had been eaten by the spam filter suggest that this could be a hoax. However, I’m not letting them out of moderation yet because some of them link to very anti-woman stuff / imply that any woman who complains about such things is lying / etc.
As a woman who HAS received death threats for her open source work and HAS had to contact police and so on… I’m finding it pretty hard to walk the line between letting you all tell a story about what’s going on in this particular case and potentially making it harder for the next person to come public if something like this happens to them because it’s all a bit too much “the boy who cried wolf.”
So what I’m going to say here is that there may be more to this than what the original poster says, or it could be that there’s a bonus slag campaign going against her because she dared to talk about the harassment, and I’m not sure which it is (and we’ll likely never know).
I’m not planning on blocking all posts regarding the controversy, but please remember to be respectful in what you say and careful in the links you choose to provide. Any post with links that are very anti-woman or victim-blaming will likely not be published unless there’s some good critical commentary attached.