Yahoo Asleep Over Christian Cyberbully

I'm upset with Yahoo for not stepping in to make a second owner of a Yahoogroup for disabilities after the first owner died -- even after a cyberbullying situation emerged following a post in the group.

Hours after I posted an announcement about this weekend's Krip Hop Homo Hop event in a local Yahoogroup for people with disabilities, I received this unsettling email in reply from a Charlene Freemantle*:

"Did you know that your father murdered your mother and made it look like suicide? EVERYONE KNOWS"

I forwarded Charlene's email to a friend, but got a failure notice that said:
"Remote host said: 554 we cannot accept this message because it appears to contain virus (#5.7.1)"

Naturally, I got scared that Charlene had sent me a virus.

This Yahoogroup for disabilities is one of the oldest and largest in the country; it's for all disabilities, ages, genders, races, sexual orientation, religion, etc. I want to see it remain as a healthy resource. Next I went back into the Yahoogroup and posted about what just happened. I said something like this:

"I don't know whether the attacker is targeting me for supporting an event that might be culturally African-American, or LGBT, or disabled. Nor do I know whether the attacker is targeting people of color generally, or AbilityDykes*, or me or Judy Sierra* personally.

But it's very wrong, and totally unsafe, and Judy and I both hope we can count on everyone's support to back us on that. We have a cyber bully in our midst. It needs to stop immediately.

If anyone has any information on who is behind this, please contact me and the [local] disabled listowners right away. If this has happened to others I'm interested in hearing about it.

Don't tolerate acts like this in our community.

And show your support by coming out and giving mad, mad love to AbilityDykes lunch and Diversifying Hip Hop."

Then I re-posted my info about the Crip Hop Homo Hop event, saying we weren't going to be intimidated.

I also sent Charlene a note:

"What you wrote is cyberbullying and it's not acceptable.

I got [a message] saying your message to me contained a virus.

Don't ever write anything like this to me or Judy again."

And I did some Googling on Charlene which turned up a post from her on a born again Christian website. She seems to be a real person who actually does have a disability.

Next, Ariana*, the moderator of the disability Yahoogroup, jumped in and speculated to the entire newsgroup that it must have been a spammer who had joined our group and sent me the harassing message about murder and suicide. I don't know why she said it was a spammer, perhaps just to reassure people.

Then Ariana sent me an IM. I can't re-produce that here, I don't know how to log that at the moment. But I explained to her the message was not from a spammer, it was our own wack member from our Yahoogroup for disabilities, and I gave Charlene's contact info to Ariana. I'm doing all this with the expectation that Ariana will boot Charlene from the list for being such a creepy, threatening schmuck who talks of murder-suicide and sends possible viruses when people post about Hip Hop. Order will be restored, everyone will be safe, etc.

Then Ariana drops a bombshell. She tells me that Yahoo hasn't given her moderator privileges yet.

So I need to back up. You see, the original disability listowner passed away a few weeks ago. Steve* was a quadriplegic, and he was respected by all, and he started the list years ago. I'm sorry to say I can't remember how he died. But let's face it, everyone with a disability has a short lifespan. Quads and paraplegics in particular die quite young.

So Ariana can't remove Charlene from the list because Yahoo hasn't given Ariana control of the list after Steve's passing. Yikes. So there's this nutty harasser out there with scary words and viruses, and no one can stop her from accessing our disability-related messages and our personal email addresses in the Yahoogroup because Yahoo is evidently out to lunch.

Oh, and Ariana can't accept new members to the disability group, or upload new files, or check for bouncing messages, etc.

Oy, it's quite an uncomfortable situation. It shouldn't be this way.

Every newsgroup really needs to have more than one owner, we know that. The groups I've run have always had two. But we really can't get too mad at Steve, he's passed away.

Yahoo bears some responsibility for the situation here.

I know Yahoo plays it like they're providing a "free service." But c'mon, Yahoo sells ads and makes us watch. That's why they do this. Not for free, but for money. It's their business. And we're their captive audience.

Doesn't Yahoo owe more than nothing to the people who sit through so many ads in their newsgroup technology?

How can we get Yahoo to add a listowner quickly?


(*I don't give real names because I'm scared about what's been happening on and offline.)