Police confirmed last night that a man has been arrested over anti-feminist harassment of writer Caroline Criado-Perez. It is alleged the man sent abuse messages over several social networking sites including Twitter after the writer won a campaign to have a woman appear on bank notes. The messages appeared not only to be anti-feminist in nature, but also involved death threats and threats of rape.
The police arrested the man three days after a complaint was
made, however Criado-Perez has stated that the reaction of Twitter was
“completely inadequate”. It is well known that there have been previous arrests
on the website for their user’s inflammatory speech, but little has changed in
the administration of the site. The site stated that they are testing ways to
simply reporting, such as a “Report Tweet” button.
There have been many calls across social media sites for
greater account suspension for clearly threatening behaviour on websites, and
victims of this kind of assault feel that simply hiding the offensive material
from their own view is not enough. Groups on Facebook such as Youth Defence
have been criticized for holding homophobic and anti-female views. One user
stated:
“If these things were being said in public, there is no way the law would stand for it”
One particular case which met with stern criticism was when
one Facebook user referred to a woman who died from abortion as “A silly
terrorist who got blown up by his own bomb”. The only problem is that even if
the remarks are offensive, so long as they do not target one member
specifically, the administrators are unlikely to do anything about it, and the
resentment is only going to build.
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