Why did prominent blogger Kathy Sierra suddenly cancel the talk she was supposed to give Tuesday in San Diego? Because of specific, sexually graphic death threats posted on her blog and elsewhere on the Internet. One of the tamer threats featured a photo of her next to a noose.

Death threats! If you've never heard of Sierra, perhaps you assume that she writes about religion, the mob or the Satanic Verses. But actually, Sierra writes about cognition and computers.

What kind of death threats? Particularly nasty, violent sexual ones both at her blog and at other sites around the web, including one maintained by a man named Chris Locke a/k/a Rageboy. Here's a few samples:

Name: siftee
Email: siftee@yahoo.com
IP: 62.37.152.243
Comment:

fuck off you boring slut... i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob

Another blog featured a picture of her with a noose, with one comment that said: "the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size."

These are just a few of the comments, most of which have been deleted. Another person actually posted her address in the comments section of the post in which she described the threats. Needless to say, she was scared out of her wits, canceled her appearance at the EdTech conference in San Diego, and has suspended her blog. Now I don't want to give the idea that only misogynists posted about her. If you read this comment thread, you will say any number of supportive comments from her mostly male readership which denounce those making these vile threats, and which offer her their thanks and appreciation for all she has done to help them.

Nonetheless, as Sara Robinson at Orcinus makes clear, Kathy Sierra was the victim of a hate crime, an act of terrorism designed to silence her and other women on the web, regardless of what subjects they blog about:

What happened to Kathy Sierra is a hate crime. Let's be very clear about that. Sending death threats via the Internet is a criminal offense. And a hate crime, by definition, is a crime that's committed with the intent of "sending a message" that will intimidate an entire group, and change their behavior in ways that will ultimately marginalize and silence them. Whether or not Sierra would actually be able to use hate-crime law in a court case is a matter of jurisdiction; but by the definition and intent of hate-crimes law, that's what this was. Sierra was threatened because she was a woman -- and the purpose of the attack was to silence any woman who dares to raise her voice in a blog. [...]

Hate crime is a low-level form of terrorism designed to disenfranchise, stifle, and ultimately remove certain people from the public sphere by forcing them to erect imaginary boundaries of fear in their own heads. It causes people to change their behavior, shrink their horizons, and stop participating fully in their own lives. Suddenly, there are places -- the synagogue, the clinic, downtown after dark, professional conferences, the comments threads that form the living rooms of their own online homes -- that they can no longer approach with a feeling of acceptance, belonging, and safety. Walsh notes that the hate mail she gets has definitely had this effect on her own writing, and that of her other female writers.

I see some of the same, coarse and misogynistic behavior on many blogs, including, regrettably some liberal blogs. The question is what should we do about it? Does free speech give you the right to publish the most vile and contemptible abuse toward women, or gays, Latinos, African-Americans, Asians, liberals, etc., abuse that crosses the line into virtual threats against the lives of the people being castigated by these foul mouthed First Amendment defenders (for themselves, that is)? I don't know the answer. But one thing all of us on the internet, regardless of political persuasion, gender, religious creed (or non-creed), sexual orientation, race or ethnicity is expose these evil hateful people to the cold light of day each and every time something like this happens. For too long we have allowed the most hateful and vicious bigots among us to dominate our discourse, and set the rules of what is acceptable speech online. These cretins should be mocked and scorned at every opportunity, and no blog should permit their comments to remain posted on the internet. If they do, that blog should be the focus of intense scrutiny and nonstop criticism by the rest of the online communities who don't value hate speech.

Let me be clear, this isn't a First Amendment issue. The First Amendment protects your right to speech from Government suppression, not from the actions of private individuals. And what I am suggesting is private action by the decent and honorable people on the web who don't believe it is appropriate to make comments like those I've described above, or to provide places where people who make such comments can thrive like maggots on a disease ridden corpse. One idea (which has already been used with much success vis-a-vis Sinclair Broadcasting and Ann Coulter our telephone and email campaigns directed at their advertisers.

All too often we say, just ignore the vile, hateful, murderous speech that one can find everyday at right wing blogs and forums like Free Republic and little green footballs (no cites provided, as I don't want to give them the traffic). Get a thicker skin, blah, blah, blah. What happens to a person when they do that, however, is that they cheapen themselves and the value of their own lives. In effect they suffer psychological harm by suppressing the fear and outrage such verbal abuse creates. As Joan Walsh, Salon's editor in chief recently wrote in an article discussing this case, that passivity can have a very negative effect on the people who are targeted by this abuse:

But it coarsens you to look away, and to tell others to do the same. I've grown a thicker skin. I didn't want skin this thick. And what does it mean that women writers have to drag around this anchor every time they start to write -- that we reflexively compose our own hate mail, and sometimes type and retype to try to avoid it? I can honestly say it's probably made me more precise and less glib. That's good. But it's also, for now, made me too cautious. I write less than I would if I wasn't thinking these thoughts. I think that's bad. I think Web misogyny puts women writers at a disadvantage, and as someone who's worked for women's advancement in the workplace, and the world, that saddens me. [..]

I truly believe misogynist trolls are only a tiny sliver of the Web population. But I can no longer say they don't matter, or they do no real harm. We have them here at Salon in politics and relationship threads; Sierra has them in the world of tech marketing. They're probably not the same guys. That's disturbing. What's unique to the Web is that they can easily collaborate: A vicious prankster who'd like to rattle Sierra can make threats or even find and publish her address, and he might only want to scare her, not do her real physical harm. But he can be joined by an unhinged person who takes the address and acts on it. And who's to blame?

The internet gives this vocal minority of haters a big megaphone to spread their message of hate and intimidation of women farther than ever before. The same can be said to apply to other targets of online hate speech, like the LBGT community and other minorities. Even those of us who self-identify as liberals. So in my opinion, it's time we started to address this issue, and find ways to punish the transgressors. Way past time.

Hate Crimes Hate Speech Kathy Sierra sexism racism prejudice