Salon.com > michael brutsch

The war on 12-year-old girls

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:05:00 +0000

Behold the scariest, most dangerous creature in America: the 12-year-old girl. Better shut her down.

It's been an alarmingly terrible week for girls. There's been the sickening story of the death of Amanda Todd, whose odyssey of bullying and shaming began when she was a curious seventh-grader who responded to a webcam user's request for a "flash" of her young breasts. On the bright side, though, there was also the cheery news that vaccinations won't turn 11- and 12-year-old girls into dirty whores. That's got to be some form of possible advancement for female health, because "promiscuity risk" is still the No. 1 concern parents have about Gardasil, the vaccine against the HPV virus that can lead to cervical cancer. Great to know we live in a country where families are more worried about the imaginary risk of their daughters' sexual behavior than the real one of viruses and cancer.

Leaked memo from Reddit CEO: “We will not ban legal content”

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:30:00 +0000

Gawker's recent expose on the identity of notorious troll Violentacrez hit the Internet hard: Michael Brutsch lost his job, Reddit moderators banned the profile for a day and censored links to Gawker in over 70 subreddits, and the Internet exploded into a heated debate about doxxing -- the practice of using publicly available information to piece together and reveal an anonymous poster's identity -- and free speech on the Internet.

During this time, however, one voice remained conspicuously absent: that of Reddit's management.

On Tuesday night, Gawker received a leaked memo from Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, originally posted in a private subreddit. In the memo, Wong finally weighed in on the issue, saying, "We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it," meaning that free speech -- even for creepy trolls like Violentacrez -- continues to have a place on the site. But Wong acknowledged that the Reddit community went against this very principle by banning Chen's piece and censoring links to Gawker:

Amanda Todd’s “jailbait” blackmailer targeted

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 20:55:00 +0000

The story of 15-year-old Amanda Todd differs in many ways from that of 49-year-old Reddit troll Michael Brutsch. But where these two recent narratives dovetail is in the way they both illuminate the harrowing world of anonymous bullying — and the devastating real-world consequences of the stomach-turning online culture of "jailbait."

In September, the British Columbia teenager Todd posted a chronicle of "My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm" on YouTube. In the nearly nine-minute video, Todd silently told, via handwritten notes, of first going on webcam as a seventh-grade student, and of the person who'd asked her to flash him. She did, and a year later, he found her on Facebook and demanded she "put on a show" or he'd send the topless photo of her to her friends and family. She refused, and he followed through on his threat, setting off a chain of grotesque events. As Todd battled depression and anxiety and drugs, she said the man created a Facebook page to broadcast the image. She changed schools and still endured "name calling" and being "judged," and friendlessness. "I can never get that photo back. It's out there forever," she wrote. She was teased and harassed, beaten up. She attempted suicide by drinking bleach. "Every day I think, why am I still here?" she wrote. Now, she isn't. Todd died last week, and a local school official told the Star she'd committed suicide.

Infamous Reddit troll loses job after Gawker expose

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 21:59:00 +0000

Less than a day after Gawker's Adrian Chen outed Violentacrez, Reddit's most infamous user and inciter (referred to as a "troll" in Internet-speak) has realized his worst fear: getting found out and then fired in real life.

Of Violentacrez, Chen writes:

If you are capable of being offended, Brutsch has almost certainly done something that would offend you, then did his best to rub your face in it. His speciality is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed, all on the sprawling online community Reddit. At the time I called Brutsch, his latest project was moderating a new section of Reddit where users posted covert photos they had taken of women in public, usually close-ups of their asses or breasts, for a voyeuristic sexual thrill. It was called "Creepshots."