Dr Garrett is chiefly accused of an online campaign of material which is (variously) criminal, illegal or offensive. The criminal matters alleged include cybercrime, hate crime, blackmail, issuing threats of violence or death, and matters adjacent to terrorism. Other illegal matters alleged include defamation, harassment and online abuse. Offensive matters alleged include material that is variously racist, antisemitic, misogynist, homophobic or otherwise hateful or discriminatory, sexually incontinent, or drugs-related. Dr Garrett is alleged to have waged this campaign through the medium of IRC ‘sockpuppet’ accounts – accounts under pseudonymous user nicknames intended to be a vehicle for distributing material anonymously and deniably.
You can see the harassment they were recieving here. There was some pretty vile stuff directed at Rianne in particular.
If you ignore Matt for a moment (really hard, I know), the page https://techrights.org/wiki/Matthew_J_Garrett/ is the most stunning demonstration of how NOT to react to trolling. The "documentation" effort behind it made the trolls harassing that couple more successful than I thought was ever possible.
"Don't feed the trolls": yet that site is a city-size open buffet giving the trolls massive exposure and encouraging them to come again and again for more. Which they kept doing because they were getting exactly what they were after: an amazing amount of attention, time and hurt. Unbelievable.
Why didn't they restrict access their IRC server / channels for a while? If IRC can't do that, then it's a good thing it died. Or was that server left wide open out of some extreme (and: very naive) "freedom" ideology maybe? No, you can't just leave your door wide open to everyone using the Internet = billions of random people. How much more evidence of that do people need?
This is a wild read. Reminds me of blogs written by the Temple OS guy. I wonder how they decided that this is coming from MG - there must be a backstory.
Yeah I was going to write "I feel kind of bad for these people because it feels like there may be some untreated mental illness involved" but then I thought if I wrote that it was going to wind up on its own page clipped as "I feel kind of bad for these people" followed by a blurb saying "See? We told you Matthew Garrett eats cats."
You can see the harassment they were recieving here. There was some pretty vile stuff directed at Rianne in particular.
https://news.tuxmachines.org/n/2023/08/11/Garrett_Committing...