This morning, the web site Jezebel put up a post calling out its upper management. The post was headlined We Have a Rape Gif Problem and Gawker Media Won’t Do Anything About It. Basically, misogynist trolls have been posting multiple images of gruesome rapes and violence against women in Jezebel’s comments section, over and over, in bulk. With the site’s current commenting software, Kinja, the only way to get rid of these comments has been to hunt them down and manually delete them…but still they return, over and over, like swallows returning to Capistrano or syphilitic sores on the tiny tiny weiners of the fellows who think that threatening women is funny.
Wrote Jezebel’s editors:
We receive multiple distressed emails from readers every time this happens, and have been forwarding them to the architects of Kinja and to higher ups on Gawker’s editorial side for months. Nothing has changed. During the last staff meeting, when the subject was broached, we were told that there were no plans to enable the blocking of IP addresses, no plans to record IP addresses of burner accounts. Moderation tools are supposedly in development, but change is not coming fast enough. This has been going on for months, and it’s impacting our ability to do our jobs.
Jezebel staff and contributors elaborated on the problem in the comments section and readers expressed dismay and solidarity. Within a couple of hours, Gawker media’s editorial director (in Budapest on a work retreat) also posted to the comments:
This is a good first-stage apology. It is gracious, it acknowledges wrongdoing, it takes ownership of the problem, and it offers concrete information about how the problem will be fixed. I don’t think the “I’m in the middle of this thing” lede was an excuse; I think it’s an acceptable explanation for the need for a 24-48 hour timeframe to address the issue longterm. (It’s also an indication of how fast companies need to respond when apologies are warranted. A lot of people can find out about bad behavior very, very quickly, and responding poorly or not at all makes the company in question look even worse. Best Buy, you might wanna take notes.) Johnson also gets points for retweeting the post and retweeting criticism of Gawker Media, which shows an appropriate and rare lack of defensiveness. Among his tweets was this:
It’s not an apology, but it’s a good under-140-character response.
Here’s the thing: A good apology doesn’t negate the sin that predicated it. Gawker Media screwed up big-time, in a classically sexist way, by not acting quickly and decisively to defend its staff and readership from vicious, disgusting, harassing, gory, violent, putting-the-ladies-in-their-place imagery. Johnson’s responses have been a good start, but the true test is what happens in the future. Let’s see. And of course, it’s not just Gawker Media who need to realize that telling women to ignore pervasive hateful behavior is a systemic problem. Ironically, just yesterday on my personal account I retweeted something I found amusing:
Gawker’s initial response to Jezebel staffers’ very legitimate concerns arguably encompasses three (3) of those five phrases. But we ladies hear stuff like this A LOT. A lot a lot. You wouldn’t believe how lot, if you have a penis.
In sum: Apologies are a good start. A “click moment” of male self-awareness would be even better. And genuine, collaborative, full-hearted work to fix a broken culture would be best of all.
Update, 8/12: As a temporary fix, Gawker Media disabled the uploading of .gifs by commenters; Jezebel staffers say the powers-that-be are working on a longterm solution.
