The Stallman Report

The anonymous authors of this website have instructed people on other websites to come here and downvote any and all comments that speak in favor of RMS:https://mastodon.social/@report_press/113305688857205037

This is telling. They don't want discourse, they want to silence and bully everyone who disagrees with them so only they are allowed to speak.

All they have is anonymous accusations with zero proof, an off-context quote regarding an MIT professor, off-color jokes made 50 years ago and a couple of (retracted) opinions that are no worse than the things being said by prominent philosophers like Michel Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir.

>If you want to discuss our report on Hacker News, you will have to help us overcome the systemic reactionary bias on HN.

The message is clear: HN has a "bias" (according to them) and their readers must take action in order to discuss it.

It could be that readers here disagree with them, it could be that readers don't buy their attempt at character assassination, instead they play victims as if there was a grand conspiracy to keep a homeless old man with cancer at the head of a nonprofit.

How do we know that there are no powerful men behind anonymous accusations?

As I said: “according to many credible witnesses, not all of them anonymous. Heck, some of it is even on video.”

This seems like an irrelevant tangent. Powerful men can hold other powerful men to account, that is still holding powerful men to account.

(In fact, one change desired by is for powerful men to stop reflexively responding to allegations like these by protecting each other and being more skeptical of unsubstantiated pleas of innocence, given the statistics that we know on the nature of sexual assault allegations).

The link provided doesn't mention that.

They did in another post ask for people to "Don't necessarily upvote it -- just "vouch" for it if you think it's on-topic."

By the way the report is pretty solid.

https://mastodon.social/@report_press/113306313558293261

For the sake of correctness, it should be noted it did not say that when first posted, only "Enable showdead in your profile, find the post on /newest, and click [vouch] whenever it's flagged.". It was later changed into "Don't upvote it -- just "vouch" for it if you think it belongs.", and immediately after "Don't necessarily upvote it -- just "vouch" for it if you think it's on-topic.". The revision history is available on Mastodon by pressing the "Last Edited" hypertext.

Same thing happened on reddit.

Instant 100+ upvotes out of nowhere. A bunch of new accounts posting supportive messages that after checking about 20 of them had posted on the sub before and just magically appeared. Downvotes to anything asking questions.

There is one infamous mastodon troll "developer" that can't get enough of themselves and I would put money on them being involved in this, if you know you know.

>The anonymous authors

Not anonymous anymore. And who they are is not too surprising.