Wil Wheaton used a dramatic story of a young girl who committed suicide, supposedly after a horrible spout of cyberbullying, in order to advocate for an end to online anonymity. Which turned out to be untrue.

TracyMorganFreeman · 2014-11-13T04:22:43+00:00

People have committed suicide due to non-anonymous bullying too.

What evidence is there even for that proposal to be effective?

eletheros · 2014-11-13T05:10:44+00:00

"The internet shouldn't be anonymous!" is spouted by every easily offended person who doesn't know how the internet works.

RememberWind · 2014-11-13T02:28:49+00:00

When did he do this?

EDIT: Nevermind, I got it:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/11/anonymous-trolls-are-destroying-online-games-heres-how-to-stop-them/

Meistermalkav · 2014-11-13T08:43:13+00:00

Lets put this into perspective:

Lets imagine you are a gay male teenager, that wants to inform himself about his sexuality, in private, not neccesarily around his parents. Where do you want to do this:

a) In front of everybody, with your name out in the clear, just because "cyberbullying is a scourge that needs to be combatted?"

b) Anonymously?

The solution is not to introduce a real names only policy. It is to forcefully remove real names from the internet. If there are no more real names on the internet, only then will bullying stop, because then the bullies have nothing to bully.

You are welcome.

TracyMorganFreeman · 2014-11-13T04:56:22+00:00

It seems Wil despite professing to be a gamer and familiar with the community has zero understanding of what a troll actually does.

It’s time to break this cycle—and to teach gamers that they can compete without being competitive

Wait...what?

that they can win and lose without spewing racist, misogynist, homophobic bile at their fellow gamers

Normal bile is cool then?

This is just thought policing. Only certain insults are intolerable!

When I started playing video games, we were in arcades, and we had to win and lose with grace, or we’d get our butts beaten (literally) by other players.

So he's justifying reducing people's privacy because his generation was violent?

Or, worse, we’d be kicked out!

People report and ban trolls all the time.

When we played games next to each other on the couch, we could trash talk and razz each other, but we were still in the same room together, and our behavior out of game was even more important than the way we behaved in the game.

Oh see, it really is "only certain insults are intolerable".

Playing games with real, live humans prevented any of the poisonous behavior proliferating online today.

Or maybe the kinds of people interact with in person daily are more often the same race and gender so those kinds of insults don't land as well.

Maybe Wil should check his privilege here, or call it what it really is: sampling bias.

but at a table, sitting face-to-face across a tabletop game, or even playing at a LAN party, sportsmanship matters.

And virtually every arranged team enforces intra team sportsmanship levels everyone agrees to or is no longer part of the team.

But in the gaming community, those protections aren’t necessary, and they aren’t helping.

Anyone who argues what rights people should have based on how much they think they're necessary is probably not thinking too deeply about the philosophical or political implications of that.

While I don’t believe bad actors represent gaming culture’s mainstream, I feel sure they wouldn’t issue rape and death threats, or harass other gamers, if they would be held accountable for their actions.

Because people never do those things when they don't have anonymity right?

Of course the fact that such things are done anonymously basically makes it impossible to claim they're credible too, so their very premise is rendered moot.

lordslag1 · 2014-11-13T12:40:26+00:00

What a stooge that guy is.

2014-11-13T14:19:57+00:00

Wil Wheaton. Bad actor. Bad human being.

anonagent · 2014-11-13T22:00:29+00:00

Not even surprised, he's a fucktarded SJW, of course he'll use the same tactics they do.

Jesus_marley · 2014-11-13T11:01:35+00:00

It said in the article that she suffered a head injury. One of the long term consequences of concussions is depression and suicidal thoughts. Did anyone consider this to the reason that she killed herself?

ukreview · 2014-11-13T11:46:40+00:00

there were reports she was trolling herself for the attention. i feel so bad for her. she needed help. what the ex-start trek actor is doing is exploiting the suffering of a poor girl for his own political reasons and he got the facts of the case wrong. he once said he was glad there wasn't live blogging when he was in start trek because he would have got a lot of abuse on account of his really bad acting. he has quite a few chips on his shoulder.

2014-11-13T18:01:54+00:00

Q: "What do I have to do to convince you people?"

Worf: "Die."

Wesley: "That sounds great for klingons, but I think I need something a little less dangerous."

Worf: "Go to her door. Beg like a human."

nanonan · 2014-11-13T03:41:18+00:00

[permanently deleted]

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