Gawker Media has come up with a temporary fix for its popular site Jezebel’s “rape gif problem.”
Editorial director Joel Johnson tweeted Tuesday that Gawker would disable image uploading on its comment platform until it comes up with a long-term solution.
Quick update: we’re disabling all image uploads on comments while we figure out a better long term solution for image trolling. #gawker
— Joel Johnson (@joeljohnson) August 12, 2014
Jezebel staff had posted a statement Monday that said Gawker higher ups failed to address a barrage of violent images and hardcore porn in the site’s comments. The statement said there was no way to trace who was leaving the offending images, so staff had to go through and individually delete the posts and ban the commenters, forcing them “to view and interact with violent pornography and gore as part of our jobs.”
It kind of sucks that they have to do this but it makes sense. maybe some of the idiot trolls will go bother someone else for awhile.
After I read about this problem yesterday I moseyed over to Jezebel and perused the comments. I couldn’t find a single example of abusive trolling. It could be that I was perusing threads that have already been scrubbed or that the threads I was viewing aren’t popular with trolls. Does anyone know how pervasive this problem actually is?
By the way, I have visited Jezebel quite a bit in the past (FYI - Lindy West is a great culture commentator) and I have never seen any of this violent/porn trolling.
DUH! I suggested this “fix” two days ago.
Next, they will have to disable hot-linking.
I’ve - unfortunately - seen them. It’s been going on for a while and when it first started, the images would end up staying up for a while before people dismissed the comments. Now folks seem to have caught on and they dismiss those comments immediately. It also seemed like the authors were hyper aware that it was usually the first few comments that included the gross photos. Then the spammer seems to move on.
It’s too bad that it has come to this. I like comments. Some of the best that I saw yesterday at Jez included My Little Pony gifs. I guess that will be no more (at least for a while).