On Tuesday, Gawker Media Editorial Director Joel Johnson tweeted that the company was disabling image uploads from comments. His tweets followed a post on Monday from Jezebel staff detailing the ongoing problem of violent rape gifs in the comments , an issue Gawker Media knew about but didn’t fix.
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
Also a clarification (if technical): the primary accounts uploading the rape images, etc. are not Kinja Burners, just throwaway twitter acct
— Joel Johnson (@joeljohnson) August 12, 2014
“It’s the obvious short-term solution and a godsend for now — but a temporary band-aid isn’t enough and HQ knows that,” Jezebel Editor-in-Chief Jessica Coen told me via email. “I’m headed into a crisis tech meeting right now here in Budapest. There’s work to be done, but it’s being taken seriously. That’s what we were hoping for when we published our post yesterday.”
I spoke with Coen via email on Monday. Coen told me “This has been an ongoing problem, one that higher ups have been aware of, but finding a solution clearly hasn’t been a company priority. It’s time to light a fire under management’s collective ass.”
That apparently worked.
I'm now told by a Gawker site editor that their sites are blocking all images in comments after a barrage of violent & graphic image uploads
— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) August 12, 2014
On Monday, Alyssa Rosenberg wrote “Doing feminist journalism is hard. It’s time publishers invested in protecting their staff.” for The Washington Post.
Slate’s Amanda Hess wrote “Jezebel Staff Goes After Gawker for Ignoring Sexist Comments and Rape GIFs.”
BuzzFeed’s Myles Tanzer wrote “Gawker Media Staffers Are Still Ambivalent About Kinja.”
And The New York Times’ Michael Roston tweeted this:
In 2009 I warned Gawker about the problem Gawker seems to be having now: http://t.co/TcM4dYyPRC
— Michael Roston (@michaelroston) August 12, 2014
