Welcome to our cowardly new world order

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/04/2015 (3306 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What’s worse than a racist Facebook page? One that’s been set up as part of an ongoing attempt to cyberbully and smear a young woman.

That, with a few hours of hindsight and a bit of reporting, is essentially at the core of Wednesday morning’s media hubbub about the Facebook page called Aboriginals Need To Get A Job And Stop Using Our Tax Dollars. The page, which included a bunch of predictably racist vitriol, was set up in December but caught fire on social media Tuesday night.

I saw posts about it in my own feeds, as did my colleague, Melissa Martin. As one does, she spent much of the night doing some online sleuthing — tracing names, IP addresses, even court records. Even to me, there was something that looked off about the Facebook page. It was too formulaic, too obviously trolling. I’ve seen a lot of racist stuff online, and this seemed a little too calculated to spark outrage across the city.

Which is exactly what happened in the morning, especially on drive-time radio, complete with hand-wringing about Winnipeg’s significant racism problem. As media condemned the Facebook page, more people sought it out, and also clicked on a site frequently mentioned and linked throughout the page. That site is a relatively new and scurrilous local version of The Dirty, which allows users to post all kinds of profane, hateful fabrications, mostly about slutty, cheating whores, dirty Indians and violence that should be done to Mayor Brian Bowman and his wife.

Posts on The Dirty knockoff site began at about the same time as the Aboriginals Need To Get A Job Facebook page was created. Before it was removed by Facebook Wednesday morning, the page had 5,000 likes, which many took to be proof of Winnipeg’s entrenched racism. Most of those likes came from outside North America, a common feature when “likes” are purchased through an online service.

Overnight, as she fell deeper into the online rabbit hole, Martin developed a theory — that the Facebook page was essentially bogus, its overt bigotry meant mostly to paint the young woman listed as the page’s administrator as a stone-cold racist. In the morning, talking to sources, checking court documents and speaking with the spokesman for the site himself, it’s clear Martin was correct.

The woman listed as the administrator of the Facebook page is a staffer at the Manitoba Real Estate Association who has been the victim, for roughly two years, of online harassment that includes everything from graphic descriptions of her imagined sexual habits to how she ought to be raped and not report it, an oh-so-clever play on the hashtag that made headlines recently.

The woman has nothing to do with the Facebook page, even though thousands of Winnipeggers probably saw her name on it and thought the worst.

As an aside, it should raise some “there’s more going on here” red flags when the administrator of a Facebook page then links repeatedly to a website that calls her every misogynist profanity in the book. But that’s a minor point in a mess that highlights how damaging and insidious online harassment can be.

One of the people involved with thedirty.com-style website, and likely behind the Facebook page, is a self-styled real estate agent named Lucenzo Carmine Rizzuto.

In civil cases he filed in the last couple of years, mostly against the woman and the MREA, Rizzuto also goes by the names Michael John Joseph Stopyra-Kalakaylo and Douglas Walter Kornaga.

In a brief conversation, Rizzuto said he was merely the spokesman for the website and had nothing to do with the Facebook page, even though Wednesday afternoon the website claimed the Facebook page was all an April Fool’s joke to sucker the media.

The real owners, said Rizzuto, are Davna and Tiffany Stopyra-Rizzuto. In a court document Rizutto himself filed, he identifies those women as his sisters. Martin could find no other information about them — no contact information, no online presence, no Google mentions other than on websites containing vulgar and defamatory posts.

Another woman, a former MREA employee, has also been targeted in online posts of the same variety, on the same site. Rizzuto told me that second woman cheated on someone he knows, and there are several anonymous posts online by scorned men making lewd and cruel comments about both women.

Beyond that, it’s slightly unclear what prompted this level of online bullying, which seems to have begun with one woman and then shifted over months to the current MREA staffer.

Last summer, in a statement of claim, Rizzuto tried to sue the MREA, the woman, and several others for $13 million, claiming defamation and discrimination against him based on his Italian background. One of the racist posts, this one from earlier this year, suggested people who believe “dirty, drunken Indians make our city a bad place to live,” hold a protest in front of the MREA offices, for reasons unknown.

In a late-day statement, the MREA condemned the Facebook page as “deplorable.”

“Any connection to the Manitoba Real Estate Association is unfounded, and appears to be connected with an ongoing cyberbullying matter,” said the statement. “As additional comment may fuel this issue, we will not be commenting further.”

This so-called April Fool’s joke appears to be an ongoing, well-orchestrated campaign of online hate meant to stir up racism, funnel people to a horrible website and destroy the lives of two women who don’t appear to have received much help from the police or RCMP.

This really was a masterful bit of work, twisting Winnipeg’s legitimate concern about racism to target young women when the old-fashioned kinds of online defamation and harassment don’t seem to be awful enough. And, many are complicit, drawing attention to those sites, clicking through the disgusting posts, believing the worst about the women named.

In our rush to condemn racism, we’ve also colluded in the victimization of those young women. It’s not clear to me which sin is worse.

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca