Thursday, Feb 26, 2015 11:29 AM MST

Women are harassed and threatened on the Internet on a daily, hourly and minute-by-minute basis. This kind of abuse is usually endured in isolation or quiet commiseration with others who are going through the same thing, but the rest of the population catches occasional glimpses of it when the abuse gets particularly loud, particularly violent or targets white celebrities. And while it’s been an uneven and slow education, more people seem to be catching on to the basic fact that online harassment is bad.

This week two new members were inducted into the club of semi-awareness. Not because the experiences of women on the Internet stirred any empathy in them, but because, after making something of a sport of harassing women online, they got a taste of their own awful medicine.

GamerGate was one of the moments that exposed people to the realities of being a woman on the Internet. The media took notice after death and rape threats from a flock of gamers drove Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu from their homes and forced Anita Sarkeesian to cancel a talk at Utah State University. As the story got picked up by more and more mainstream news outlets, most of the public agreed that it was pretty terrible to threaten to murder women simply because they pointed out the problems of sexism and representation in video games. And most of the people who agreed that it was bad to send women like Wu rape and death threats chose not to, you know, send rape and death threats.

Except for Jan Rankowski. He decided to “satirize” the kind of guy who sends women death threats by posing as the kind of guy who sends women death threats. As Joseph Bernstein reported this week over at BuzzFeed , Rankowski constructed “Jace Connors” as an “over-the-top, super-hyper-macho armed GamerGater” persona. In what he claimed was a comedic stunt, he made a video that claimed he crashed his car en route to confront Wu and went on a rant against her.

Wu was not in on the “joke” and Rankowski’s satire just read as a particularly unhinged, frightening version of the harassment she’d been receiving from thousands of other men. But now that the truth of the video has caught up to him, the men it worked into a frenzy have turned on Rankowski. “They realized I was making fun of them with those videos,” he told BuzzFeed. “I started it as a joke, but it’s become far too real and I wish I could take it all back.”

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