Fox News report on Todd Barselow’s petition.
And now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine…
Call of the Wild
Comment and review sections online are often rough and uncivil places.
Now some people are calling for an important change unmasking the anonymous contributors.
A petition on Change.org is calling for Amazon to make people attach their names to comments and reviews.
The cause is gathering support, with nearly 5,000 signatures, including New York Times best-selling author Anne Rice, who took to Facebook to call out the anti-author gangster bullies.
A recent study at the University of Houston supports the link between anonymity and hateful language online.
The research looked at thousands of comments on news sites and found that anonymous commenters were almost twice as likely to use vulgar language.
We applaud Anne for bringing so much attention to this issue. Thank you, Anne!
« Anne Rice Signs Todd’s Petition The Proof Is in the Pudding »
God bless you, those at STGRB.
God bless Anne Rice.
God bless everyone who’ve brought attention to this. Thanks to you, we are well on our way to truly stopping these despicable people.
As time goes on, this problem is gaining more attention, and it’s happening faster every day.
Thought you should know, this was featured in TIME.
http://time.com/13137/cyberbullying-amazon-review-petition/
STGRB gets an honorable mention. Way to go, you guys!
You have arrived.
Notice how fast all the regular cyber-bullies, including those that went after Anne, appeared to yell, scream, and stomp their feet at the article? Oh, and to attack STGRB with lies, of course. They always have to do that.
The attacks on STGRB amaze me, because it isn’t exactly an uphill battle to figure out what this site is about.
STGRB does not have a huge number of blog posts. All any journalist would need to do to discover what STGRB is about is just come over here and spend an hour or two reading the archives. Anybody who hasn’t made up his mind about the site could see for himself whether or not the posts are written by racist authors seeking revenge on reviewers who were just doing their jobs as reviewers.
Exactly, once here all readers have to do is see the proof in the posts. All the attempts to discredit STGRB do is get more traffic in and new followers for our cause.
Fox News! This is good news. I don’t know how much the average reader knows about this little war that the author-haters are waging online, but clearly this bit of publicity can only help shine some light on the cockroaches that authors have to contend with.
I wonder if anybody has ever investigated how many of these bullies are publishing industry pros defending their turf. Editors, publicists, bloggers, people like that. Just recently, a bunch of people on Booklikes got all hot and bothered because an anonymous publicist had had to delete her blog, called Life in publishing, because an author ‘threatened’ to reveal her real identity. The blog itself was a non-stop bitchfest about how stupid authors were, how stupid agents were, how unreasonable everyone was to expect her to do any work. But she was defended by the same people who scream “Unprofessional!” if an author does so much as complain about a one star review on their facebook page. Apparently it’s okay for publicists to waste their employer’s time by bitching on the internet instead of working.
It’s also okay to complain about how ungrateful authors are when they flake out of the blog tour their publishers ‘painstakingly’ set up for them even though it would result in zero sales. Apparently the ungrateful authors are supposed to appreciate how hard the publicist worked in arranging that tour so painstakingly! These are the same people who say they don’t care how hard an author worked if the book is bad! How about, I don’t care how hard the publicist worked if it didn’t get me any sales?
“But she was defended by the same people who scream “Unprofessional!” if an author does so much as complain about a one star review on their facebook page.”
Curious indeed. I’m sure at least part of the author-hate is encouraged by industry pros. I’ve seen/heard about infighting and backstabbing among small press owners. It would make sense that it would roll over into author-bullying territory.
Now on the whisperer thread they’ve dragged up Katherine Nader and Karen Bell. Katherine has practically disapperaed from Goodreads, but they had to drag her back! This is proof that they go looking for fights and if they can’t find them, they create them. And of course, Angela Longstaffe, who was banned from Goodreads, had to weigh in about people not using their real names. This from a woman who doesn’t need real names, because she just attacks anyone with the same name as an author she doesn’t like!