Peter Bright legal issues
- Thread starter Chaoticwhizz
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Or there's this classic post of his, in which he says to me
I'd also point out that my dolls had substantial defenders in that thread and were subsequently quite well received in the AV Club's photography threads. PeterB, not so much.
Actually that whole thread is a goldmine of
PeterB posts in hindsight.
because I bought a doll. Yeah, I made an unboxing thread and attempted to dramatise the process of posting a parcel, an effort which I didn't execute very well. Still it was a non-sexual doll that depicted an adult, yet his mind leapt straight to "danger to children". PROJECTING MUCH PETWAR?
I'd also point out that my dolls had substantial defenders in that thread and were subsequently quite well received in the AV Club's photography threads. PeterB, not so much.
Actually that whole thread is a goldmine of
PeterB posts in hindsight.This caused me to search some old threads. They read differently in light of today's news.
Holy.Fucking.Shit.
If you can stomach it, read the transcript.
https://www.docdroid.net/UMNWMSx/bright.pdf#page=4
so *this* is what it takes to finally get peterb banned. he's the reason I dropped my sub.
My memory is much spottier these days, but I'm pretty sure that you're far from the only one.
Ben Kuchera is in that thread too. That's a blast from the pastOr there's this classic post of his, in which he says to mebecause I bought a doll. Yeah, I made an unboxing thread and attempted to dramatise the process of posting a parcel, an effort which I didn't execute very well. Still it was a non-sexual doll that depicted an adult, yet his mind leapt straight to "danger to children". PROJECTING MUCH PETWAR?
I'd also point out that my dolls had substantial defenders in that thread and were subsequently quite well received in the AV Club's photography threads. PeterB, not so much.
Actually that whole thread is a goldmine of
Part of the reason why I mentioned the Indeo codec threads here is that I think PeterB/DrPizza has posted to locked threads once.
Just based off snippets from a news article, I probably wouldn’t. Even the few bits from the article were utterly horrific.
That's not especially controversial, on the surface. Moderators can post to locked threads; their jobs would be a shit-ton harder if they couldn't. Now, PeterB having Moderator status and posting in threads that were locked in part because of his own shit-posting? Yeah, I can see it happening, and it's hard for other Mods to do a damn thing about it. As paid Staff, Peter effectively had higher rank than us volunteer Mods.
I remember, he used to openly admit to being attracted to underage boys or that being his thing on this forum ages ago. Enough so that even though I'm not very active on here (anymore) when I saw the news, I wasn't surprised given he hinted at sexual relations underage teenagers in his 20's. Maybe some of the posts were cleaned up or are from pre-2000, or I just remember things he said on IRC.
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Honestly, given his history of admitting to this I was surprised he was hired. I thought he had mellowed out maybe and gotten away from that, but apparently he just went underground.
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Honestly, given his history of admitting to this I was surprised he was hired. I thought he had mellowed out maybe and gotten away from that, but apparently he just went underground.
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People told him this before, back when he copped to only wanting to have sex underage teenagers, they were told to piss off. It's not like it wasn't pointed out to him it wasn't healthy.
To think I called him "Mr. Bright" out of respect when posting to him.
Ugh... I feel sick right now.
Ugh... I feel sick right now.
I'll second that Good riddance. Never liked him before. Disgusting to find out how rotten to the core he turned out to be, as opposed to a run of the mill asshole. But here we are.
I am not under any circumstances defending him. I, as a general rule, hope for the best possible outcome in any situation. If he is convicted, he'll be rightly branded for the rest of his life. Hopefully afterwards he could right the ship. I have no dog in this fight; dude has been foe'd on my list for damn near a decade. I was just responding to 1232's very obvious swipe at my post.
Given the amount of staff and contributing writers here at Ars, I don't think the actions of Peter Bright, as an individual, have $#@& all to do with quality of their content. It certainly isn't a reflection of it. What Peter did was a betrayal of trust on so many levels, and there will be a lot of people and and groups coming out of the woodwork to bash anything and anyone associated with him as long as it suits their ends. Can we elect not to do that here?
We're being a little harsh on Mr. Bright here:
https://www.docdroid.net/UMNWMSx/bright.pdf - page 4
How thoughtful! Very conscientious, and a safe teacher for minors.
https://www.docdroid.net/UMNWMSx/bright.pdf - page 4
How thoughtful! Very conscientious, and a safe teacher for minors.
Ars should really take down all of his articles. Leaving them up kinda seems like they are endorsing a disgusting pedophile.
He’s a real piece of shit. I hope they lock him up for a long time.
He’s a real piece of shit. I hope they lock him up for a long time.
You watch these interviews with neighbours who have lived across the street from a serial killer or a terrorist, or with kids after a mass shooting, and can never imagine what it's like to be in their shoes, that total shock of someone you're familiar with day after day, year after year. And I can't believe we all here who have been familiar with the postings and articles can now say we have some way to relate to those people we'd see interviewed on the news.
I think back to the times when he would post pictures of that Spice Girl, Sporty Spice, I think, and would caption it with, "unf", and sometimes say he liked her because he looked like a little boy. And I always just assumed it was a troll, nothing more than someone who was at times antagonistic and abrasive, and the Sporty Spice thing was just him trying to get a rise out of people. And it kinda became almost an inside joke too for a while. I didn't. I have the auto mental filter where I skim past posts of posters I generally don't either agree with or don't enjoy their postings, and he was on that mental filter list. I'd read the articles because they were informative and sometimes educational.
And even then it feels like we're the neighbours who never knew or may have suspected. We are all able to relate now to those kinds of interviews we see on tv. Worse is that theres the admittance of raping a child, fuck, the monster amongst us. And these poor children. It's all so very horrible to think about it as there are so many emotions and thoughts. There's the selfish thinking about our familiarity with a person on a tech forum and how we feel about this news, and then there's the parallel thoughts of, holy fuck, this person committed some seriously evil shit.
This news is a total shock.
I think back to the times when he would post pictures of that Spice Girl, Sporty Spice, I think, and would caption it with, "unf", and sometimes say he liked her because he looked like a little boy. And I always just assumed it was a troll, nothing more than someone who was at times antagonistic and abrasive, and the Sporty Spice thing was just him trying to get a rise out of people. And it kinda became almost an inside joke too for a while. I didn't. I have the auto mental filter where I skim past posts of posters I generally don't either agree with or don't enjoy their postings, and he was on that mental filter list. I'd read the articles because they were informative and sometimes educational.
And even then it feels like we're the neighbours who never knew or may have suspected. We are all able to relate now to those kinds of interviews we see on tv. Worse is that theres the admittance of raping a child, fuck, the monster amongst us. And these poor children. It's all so very horrible to think about it as there are so many emotions and thoughts. There's the selfish thinking about our familiarity with a person on a tech forum and how we feel about this news, and then there's the parallel thoughts of, holy fuck, this person committed some seriously evil shit.
This news is a total shock.
Look at this Ars bio, it's been completely scrubbed other than his name: https://meincmagazine.com/author/peter-bright/
I don't think it's necessary for Ars to memory hole his entire existence to make it clear they don't endorse this behavior. And IANAL but considering all the people who got their #MeToo outing who retained their credits for the stuff they did before getting outed, there may be legal/ethical issues with ex post facto stripping people of their credits in these kinds of situations.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, really. And hey, he’s actually made “Pizzagate” a real thing. Perhaps that should be his updated bio.
People can be shit and still do work that has enduring value.
My sympathy to the Ars staff. This has to be a shock and a blow.
this.
what he allegedly did has nothing to do with Ars Technica, they terminated his employment, have presumably cooperated with authorities if applicable, there's nothing else they need do. Wiping out anything he wrote here benefits no one other than a few people who need to be as vindictive as possible. nobody with a lick of common sense will believe retaining articles he's written means Ars "endorses" his behavior.
Ars endorsed his behavior for years. Ars seems to be scrubbing threads with peterb in them on the grounds of "doxxing". This behavior makes it look like they're just trying to cover up his obvious behavior over the years so they can say "we didn't know!"
I said "endorse" and that's precisely what I meant.
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Here's a whole poll (remember this one? I do.) all about peterb as a mod. The thread is full of examples of his behavior, and just as full of excuses for his behavior. If, after all that, Ars decided that peterb should stay, then yes, I call that "endorsement" of his behavior.
And then he got hired.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=43658&start=200
Here's a whole poll (remember this one? I do.) all about peterb as a mod. The thread is full of examples of his behavior, and just as full of excuses for his behavior. If, after all that, Ars decided that peterb should stay, then yes, I call that "endorsement" of his behavior.
And then he got hired.
He said a lot of godawful things, and I agree that he absolutely should have been stripped of his moderator status or banned long ago. Jeez, this has been going on for at least a decade. But posting obnoxious things on a forum is on an entirely different planet from being arrested for attempting to molest a child, and the enabling of his obnoxious comments on the forum should in no way be conflated with endorsing his behavior as a child molester.
Considering some of the vile things he said or alluded to, while there may not be any civil/criminal responsibilities...there is a certain level of moral responsibility where Ars-the-organization should reflect upon just how they protected him over the years. I agree entirely that there should not be any conflating his behavior with his official duties. I would stop short of calling it "endorsed" behavior as much as I'd just call turning a blind eye to it, just like they did with Kuchera being a complete ass to the community. I am 100% sure none of them knew just how horrendous he actually was. But in today's world, MeToo, AllLivesMatter, and all the fresh awareness and attention to social issues?
Ars was, or should have been, aware of how much of a goddamn fucking liability and timebomb that man has been.
He wrote news articles for a tech website. He wasn’t curing cancer or feeding starving people in Africa.
I don’t see anything wrong with completely deplatforming a child rapist. This is the same thing as YouTube deciding they don’t want to host content from Nazis.
Ars needs to remove all of his content. They also need to put something on the front page saying they are saddened and disgusted by his behavior and that they are cooperating with authorities. This is a front page news story elsewhere and it seems like Ars is trying to hide it.
May he rot in jail and never harm another child.
Fun fact, recidivism rates for male sex offenders is ~37% before accounting for the very low report rate of sex crimes.
Fun fact, recidivism rates for male sex offenders is ~37% before accounting for the very low report rate of sex crimes.
It's not quite the same as deplatforming Nazis. PeterB is not advocating for pedophilia in those articles, i.e. people who read them will not be influenced towards molesting children.
But I am disappointed Ars hasn't posted any news about this. Having now looked at his twitter history, where he goes on about jail-bait and age of consent, it is surprising Ars hasn't reacted sooner, before he was arrested. "DrPizza" is probably a coincidence, as it's from 1995, his twitter posts are hard to defend. There was even one where he said he was sweating like a pedophile, outright. His twitter behavior was apparently brought to their attention back in 2017.
Guys I’m sure the Ars employees have been flat-out told by their legal department to not say a god damn thing, so just drop it, because it’s not going anywhere. Whether they want to or not, they CAN’T.
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A significant percentage of PeterB's posts would have gotten most other posters at least a temp ban, and repeating the offense should have gotten him a perma-ban long before he was hired. Many of his posts were outright trolls; you don't hire a person like that for an online community.
While he wasn't a major reason why I dropped my sub a few years back, he was certainly typical of Ars's overall editorial policies, which were the reason (the final trigger was Caesar fully justifying Ars's being a yellow-journalism website, publishing underwear pictures of Snowden's girlfriend (not surprisingly, PeterB was also involved with that "investigation" of searching & collecting Snowden's postings), and stating that Ars is free to use users' private email field -- explicitly allowed only for admin usage -- to generate content if Ars feels like it).
That said, while I found PeterB's opinions on sexual matters (particularly consent) revolting, they weren't in themselves against the PGs.
again, what would this accomplish other than give you a bit of revenge? the dude is in jail and probably will not get out for quite a long time. he's not being paid by Ars any more. he is not making any money or any other benefit from the articles staying up.
I'm sure they're working on a statement and talking about whether his articles and forum posts should be anonymized or removed now.
I'm not a frequent poster on the forums (although I've been a member a long time) so I don't know anything about his crapposting here, but I always enjoyed his Ars articles just fine. Shocking to recognize a name in the news for something so heinous.
9 year olds, dude.
I'm not a frequent poster on the forums (although I've been a member a long time) so I don't know anything about his crapposting here, but I always enjoyed his Ars articles just fine. Shocking to recognize a name in the news for something so heinous.
9 year olds, dude.
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