David Futrelle has more on the oh so funny campaign to flood an anonymous survey on sexual violence with fake claims.
Although the information is being collected to track trends, and no one will be charged with anything as a result of such a report, a number of Men’s Rights subreddit regulars decided it would be a great idea to flood Occidental College with false reports to basically break the system, and they suggested this to much acclaim; others proudly reported that they’d sent in bogus reports.
So what has happened since then? The story has been picked up by a number of sites, including Gawker, Business Insider, RawStory, and LAist. In a followup post, Adam Weinsten of Gawker confirmed that Occidental College had indeed been hit with some 400 bogus rape reports in the past 36 hours — that is, after posts encouraging false reports appeared on 4chan and the Men’s Rights subreddit.
Meanwhile, on the Men’s Rights subreddit, after belatedly realizing that this whole thing makes them look kind of bad, the subreddit’s mods are trying their best to make the whole embarrassing thing go away — and not really doing a great job of it.
But as for “this whole thing makes them look kind of bad” – it doesn’t really, because there is no “them” to make look bad, because they don’t use their real names. They’re safe from repercussions in their real lives.
Futrelle demonstrates a lot of evasion and diversion of attention on that subreddit though, all amusing in the usual eye-rolling way.