your daily reminder that the UN is seriously dedicating its time to "Cyberviolence against Women," starring Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn

ezel hejsane wrote:WE NINETYS AGAIN MOTHERFUCKERS WELCOME TO THE SECOND ERA OF MORAL PANIC OVER VIDYA GAMES

Here is a link to the document:
http://www.unwomen.org/~/media/headquarters/attachments/sections/library/publications/2015/cyber_violence_gender%20report.pdf?v=1&d=20150924T154259
I strongly encourage everyone to read it, or try to read it, because it contains a plethora of bad grammar, nonsensical info graphics and graphs, poor citations, and much more. But I figured Reddit would especially love this section (from Page 30):
"Women’s Aid in the UK has created a practical guide for victims of online abuse entitled: Digital stalking: a guide to technology risks for victims. "Just five rules for what you can do on the site: Don’t spam; Don’t ask for votes or engage in vote manipulation; Don’t post personal information; No child pornography or sexually suggestive content featuring minors; Don’t break the site or do anything that interferes with normal use of the site.”
To be clear, this makes absolutely no sense in context. The quoted rules are not found anywhere in "Digital stalking: a guide to technology risks for victims." The quote is never used by Women's Aid. I genuinely have no idea how something like this happened, nor how someone didn't catch it.

• Improve girls’ and women’s access to affordable and accessible (e.g. for low literacy levels) mobile
technology, services and data plans including affordable mobile devices with internet connectivity (feature and
smart phones).
• Address issues of awareness of tools and services online and digital literacy and training for girls and women
• Adopt laws to regulate internet based crimes related to VAW online and address other intuitional needs like
public review mechanisms, and training within the justice and police system
• Increase girls’ and women’s self-awareness about what constitutes VAW online and awareness of rights, and
develop public campaigns on violence against women (online and off)
• Increase understanding around how privacy affects girls’ and women’s use of mobile phones
• Safety and privacy audits of apps to prevent risks and increase confidence in use
• Develop technology solutions to protect girls’ and women’s privacy
• Engaging girls and women as content creators and developers of solutions, including those around combatting
VAW and also addressing gaps in solutions (e.g. around prevention)
• Tackle hand in hand all the offline challenges around VAW and gender norms
• Collect gender-disaggregated data on access to and use of technology

Attention news media, please repeat after me: I will not scapegoat mental illness for mass shootings. I will not scapegoat mental illness...

“Why are there so many mass shootings?” is the wrong question.

Instead ask “Why are there so many mass shootings committed by men?"

Over 95% of mass shootings are committed by men. Mostly straight white men. That statistic should be front and center in every news story.

Nope. It must end. We can't continue to ignore the fact that it is almost exclusively men committing mass shootings.

This is irrefutable. Yet talking about how toxic forms of masculinity impact our society in devastating ways is too uncomfortable for most.

I realize that simply asking "Why are shooting rampages in the US almost exclusively committed by men?" makes folks deeply uncomfortable...

samoyed wrote:"Attention news media, please repeat after me: I will not scapegoat mental illness for mass shootings. I will not scapegoat mental illness..."
this is seriously what wasted the un's time
wow

ギルダ「gilda」 wrote:

your friendly reminder that zoe quinn is completely unrepentant about using political tragedies to make herself look like the great american victim and making them all about herself

So I'd downloaded the U.N. report, which was ostensibly compiled by Nidhi Tandon, so I went to see what her other work looked like. Below is an excerpt from 2002 "presentation for UNCTAD e-commerce strategies for development" titled E-commerce training with small-scale entrepreneurs in developing countries: some findings. [Google Scholar] [pdf]

The regulatory hurdles that one women’s business association had to contend with were less due to existing regulations and more a result of a vacuum in Internet Governance at the national level. Internet governance is not about the control of the Internet and its content, but of much narrower issues such as management, administration of Internet names, numbers, licensing, frequencies, bandwidth and standards. Government intervention usually takes three forms:
Control of entry to the market by suppliers;
Access of suppliers to certain resources (e.g. spectrum, licenses)
Control of operation (e.g. technical standards, service quality)
From all accounts, it is reasonable to conclude that current government procedures are inadequate to handle the rapid pace of change, the globalization of the Internet, its commercialization and the growth in user-driven demands. This vacuum is made even more acute by the clash between a top-down formal government-driven telecom structure and a bottom-up informal industry-driven Internet. To date, the transformation processes in the telecommunications sector’s regulation has been driven by economic efficiency factors and not by equity factors.9 This has had an immediate impact on the one service most sought after by micro and SMEs – which is local telephone costs.

Emphasis mine. This was 13 years ago, so it's possible her views changed. But there's something more important than the sentence I emphasized: this is a real fucking report. Nidhi's been doing real research towards helping the poorest of women develop agriculture and other business. Such articles as
Information and Communication Technologies in Bangladesh Trends, Opportunities and Options for Women Workers (2006) [PDF]
Communications and Commerce: The Role of ICT in Linking Women Entrepreneurs with Global Markets (2010) [paywalled link :(]
New agribusiness investments mean wholesale sell-out for women farmers (2010) [Google Scholar] [PDF]
Low Income Women:First Casualties of Green Economy Land Grab (2012)[Google Scholar] [PDF]
The road to Rio +20: women and the green economy (2012) [HTML]
From the looks of it agriculture is the only culture she's interested in studying. There's nothing about online harassment, or disenfranchisement of women online due to Cyber Violence™. She's literally working to curb world hunger, and she somehow got saddled with this piece of shit assignment.
Working to improve the lives of women in Bangladesh, where the women are so poor that multiple generations are reduced to whoring.
Cyber Violence™.
I feel so, so sorry for her. She clearly got stuck with a completely bullshit job, and I can't help but suspect the abysmal state of the report stems from some mixture of disinterest and resentment. Hell, she's liable to be a new gamergate ally from the looks of it; Further down in the 2002 presentation

The first objectives behind ICT training for women need to focus on breaking myths and pre-conceptions about the new technologies – this is an “outcome” objective.

How the fuck did this serious professional get stuck manufacturing credibility for a pair of 1st world whingers to pad their Patreons? How did she not break down and start murdering people?
Oh and check out this shit cherry on top of the Cyber Violence™ report:

Disclaimer
The opinions, analyses and recommendations contained in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of UN Women, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and its Executive Board, or of the United Nations Member States.
All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, by any means whatsoever, without the prior authorization of Broadband Commission co-Vice Chairs ITU or UNESCO. The designations employed and the presentation of material throughout the publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of ITU and UNESCO concerning the legal status of any country, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning its frontiers or boundaries.

I haven't seen any such vociferous disclaimers on any of the 6-8 UN reports I've checked, nor a single instance of the reproduction limitations.
In fact, the credited "Authors/editor(s): UN Women, UNDP and ITU" just explicitly divorced themselves from the report.
They knew it was shitty. They knew it was counterfactual. They felt compelled to publish it anyway.
WHY?

https://twitter.com/AuerbachKeller/status/651837035053977600
Spoke to a UN ITU rep about the bungled Cyberviolence report. "We overstretched. Focus now on rectifying and reposting full report asap."
https://twitter.com/AuerbachKeller/status/651837392484192256
UN ITU rep: Broadband Commission chairs and co-chairs did not review Cyberviolence report prior to release. Members were not obligated to.
I wonder how many more stones we have to roll for media and organizations to check their work before they publish?
Edited for presentation