Young men and boys fuelled by “strongly misogynistic” online material are hunting for vulnerable women and girls to exploit on websites such as eating disorder and suicide forums, senior officers have said.
The threat from young males wanting to carry out serious harm is so serious that counter-terrorism officers are joining the National Crime Agency (NCA) in the hunt for them, fearing they could go on to attack or kill.
Britain’s head of counter-terrorism, Matt Jukes, told the Guardian that a joint taskforce would be set up between his force and the NCA to tackle those fixated with violence online, in what he called a “decisive moment”.
Jukes, the Metropolitan police force’s assistant commissioner for specialist operations, said the new pairing would look for those consuming online material about killings or sexual abuse. Those who might go on to plot school shootings and other mass attacks, as well as those who encouraged women and girls to harm themselves, would also fall under their remit.
As someone who would be without a job without the internet, I truly believe we would be better off if the whole thing went away entirely.
I agree and it sucks. At the start of the internet, I was convinced that it was humanity’s single greatest accomplishment: near instantaneous worldwide communication between every human was possible. Access to all of our collective knowledge and intelligence at everyone’s fingertips.
Then we discovered what that actually meant, practically. Either all of our collective knowledge amounts to💩 or we’ll let the greedy scum just latch onto it like everything else and turn it into shit for their personal profit.
I felt the same way when I first got online in the mid-90s. I thought it was gonna bring all people together. Seems pretty quaint at this point!
Things are obviously pretty bad right now but for me the jury’s still out. It could be really good a hundred years from now!
Same here. My job depends on it, and wikipedia is one of my favorite places.
Yet so much terrible stuff has happened because of it.