Jezebel, the blog site, blasted its parent media company, Gawker, over a “rape GIF problem.”
Gawker Media, the post adds, “won’t do anything about it.”
“This weekend, the user or users have escalated to gory images of bloody injuries emblazoned with the Jezebel logo. It’s like playing whack-a-mole with a sociopathic Hydra,” a post, filed by Jezebel Staff, said. “None of us are paid enough to deal with this on a daily basis,” it says.
Jezebel is a blog aimed at women’s interests, including fashion and celebrity news. It was originally started in 2007 under Gawker media.
It continues: “Higher ups at Gawker are well aware of the problem with this feature of Kinja (our publishing platform, in case you’re new here). We receive multiple distressed emails from readers every time this happens, and have been forwarding them to the architects of Kinja and to higher ups on Gawker’s editorial side for months. Nothing has changed. During the last staff meeting, when the subject was broached, we were told that there were no plans to enable the blocking of IP addresses, no plans to record IP addresses of burner accounts.”
Several of Jezebel’s writers chimed in in the comments section.
“I want to apologize to our readers who are forced to interact with these violent gifs regularly. The point of Kinja is to create a better platform for discussion and those discussions CANNOT happen when you’re inundated by such traumatizing material. It’s this person’s goal to shutdown conversations and make you feel unsafe. They want you to feel upset, they want you to feel humiliated and they want you never to come back here,” wrote Madeleine Davies.
And writer Jessica Coen added that the way that Gawker has handled GIFs is “really pathetic.”
