this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
307 points (92.1% liked)

Technology

60073 readers
3602 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

When China's prodigious tech influencer, Naomi Wu, found herself silenced, it wasn't just the machinery of a surveillance state at play. Instead, it was a confluence of state repression and the sometimes capricious attention of a Western audience that, as she asserts, often views Chinese activists more as ideological tokens than as genuine human beings.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] hesusingthespiritbomb 19 points 1 year ago

So she's actually been around for a long time. The only reason I know was because she was a minor figure in a major internet drama..

Basically in 2014 there was something called GamerGate. It started off as anger over journalists being complete dickwads, and ended in being the blueprint neonazis used to radicalize people.

While the tech journalists were "the good guys" they embodied the "you're not wrong, just an asshole" thing 10000x. They would behave like high school bullies and then be super vindictive to anyone who was perceived as crossing them.

During this time, Wu went to a tech conference with a LED miniskirt that she made. She posted it on the Internet and got a lot of comments. The vast majority of them were good. However, one person said something along the lines of "you look great. These tech conferences can be sexist, I hope you didn't get body shamed". She responded with something like "most people were chill. The only real dicks were the progressive 'conformity non/conformity' types".

This caused a massive shitstorm. Bad actors were able to use the very real argument that the same people calling them sexist were judging Wu so hard that it was visible in pictures". The journalists then attacked her and accused Wu of working with them. Wu apologized. She said she was Chinese and didn't mean to get involved in US culture war discussions. However, she also refused to take a side because she didn't want to get involved in US culture war discussions.

As a result, she got put on a shit list by the media for a long time. That line about VICE NEWS considering outing her? A media organization linked to GamerGate called Gawker pioneered that tactic. They largely used it on us conservatives. Peter Thiel was the biggest example, most people outed were more or less nobodies. I'm guessing VICE had initial thoughts of outing her in the same way, and only later realizing that outing a woman for being a lesbian dating a minority in China is a very different ballgame than outing Timothy Geithner's brother for being on Grindr.