Schilling Shows Us How To Handle Cyberbullies

It is likely that very few of the people reading this pay attention to what Curt Schilling says. He is a very outspoken conservative Republican, the founder of a famously failed game development studio and a member of the 2004 World Series champion Red Sox.

But in this case, you should be paying attention, because he is completely, 100 percent right — allowing cyberbullies even a shred of anonymity has to stop.

If you haven’t seen it on the news, Schilling’s daughter Gabby was the subject of a wave of astoundingly offensive and threatening tweets and Facebook comments, after Schilling tweeted his congratulations that she made it on the softball team as a pitcher for the college she will be attending next year. I won’t repost any of them here, but if you want to see some of them just go to Schilling’s blog on WordPress and you can read some of the worst.

Schilling pointed out on that blog that he was easily able to find the names and locations of quite of few of the supposedly anonymous offenders, but did not publish them — at least at first. He said in TV interviews later on that he wanted to give them a chance to back down. And apparently some did, apologizing for their behavior. But many didn’t and that is when he outed them.

He updated the blog, identifying two of the worst offenders and asking his readers with help in identifying two more. At least one of the two he named has already been punished for his actions. A student and occasional radio station DJ at Brookdale Community College has been removed from his DJ job and suspended from the college for the tweets. A second bully has been reported to have lost his part time job as a New York Yankees ticket seller.

Everyone needs to do this
The lesson here is that we all have to hold these supposedly anonymous cyberbullies responsible in the real world for what they do and say on the Internet. And nowhere has this become more of a problem than in the nerd world. Yet for some reason — maybe because nerds are for the most part not the very outspoken, aggressive Schilling types — the nerd community members that have faced this kind of online assault and harassment usually refuse to out their abusers.

That can no longer be the default stance of victims in our nerdy family. These bullies need to be named, identified, and forced to face the real-world consequences of their horrible actions. They would if they said this in any workplace, why should they be allowed to get away with it on the Internet?

Some might say, “Oh, just ignore it, it’s just the Internet” or “It’s Twitter’s responsibility, they should stop these people.” Well, yes, they should. but I couldn’t express it with any greater force than Schilling did himself in a follow-up blog:

For all you tough guys out there who piss and moan with the “just turn it off” or “just block”. Why on earth would I allow someone with zero honor, zero integrity and zero morals to dictate even 1 minute of my life?

Criminal case
The news is now reporting that Schilling has been contacted by local authorities and the FBI about possible criminal charges. This is a good step forward, and maybe having someone as famous as Curt Schilling involved will get the authorities to start taking these online threats seriously — because Lord knows they haven’t up to this point.

In some cases I know victims have relied on the authorities to try to punish these people. In the case of BelleChere, who received actual rape and physical threats of violence if she showed up at New York Comic Con last October, it prevented her from attending, out of concern for her safety. She did much of what Schilling did, finding out exactly who it was that was making these online threats. But, even after approaching the police both in her Massachusetts home city and the New York police, she was told nothing could be done — and she handed them all the data they needed for a criminal threatening investigation.

With PAX East coming up, local game developer and the subject of much GamerGate-inspired online hatred, Brianna Wu decided to pull her company’s booth from PAX because of online threats, one of which went so far as to make a YouTube video of an alleged failed trip to her home to attack her. In Wu’s case the worst perpetrator (he of the video and many, many other rape and death threats) was not identified for some time, and when he was, he claims it was all part of an elaborate joke.

Well, great, except intent means nothing when a crime is actually committed. Death threats are a crime.

Let us hope that Schilling’s fame will make the police and the FBI wake up and realize that a threat of violence or death is a threat, no matter the vehicle used to deliver it.

And let us hope that we all take away from this the notion that anonymity is no longer allowed. If someone threatens you online with violence, under the shield of supposed anonymity, make them face the real world consequences of their actions by naming them publicly. When enough people have lost their jobs or been kicked out of schools, maybe others will realize it isn’t worth behaving this way in the first place.