Mr. Elmer-DeWitt (Photo: Twitter.com)

This morning's release of the iPad Mini saw crowds completely forgetting about the hurricane and lining up to score themselves a miniaturized version of their favorite fancy tablet. Apple beat reporter Philip Elmer-DeWitt was covering the release for Fortune/CNN Money. His online bio says that he's been covering Apple for the last 30 years. He described the scene as such:

"Judging from the ethnic makeup of the queue in front of the big glass cube of Apple's (AAPL) Fifth Avenue store, however, most of the customers who made the pilgrimage were coming from the environs of Chinatown.

Apple hasn't yet said when the iPad mini will be available in mainland China, so there's likely to be a market there for units shipped from the U.S."

Since Mr. DeWitt didn't cite a source supporting his Chinatown claim, it seemed like an . . . odd assumption.

The paragraph in question was pulled down, but not before we got a screen shot.

We reached out to Mr. Elmer-Dewitt, who said it was taken down because "some readers complained about ethnic profiling."

Gotcha. But why did he say that the Asian customers in line were from Chinatown?

"It's well documented that there's a steady flow of new Apple products from the Fifth Ave store to Chinatown to Hong Kong to the mainland," said Mr. Elmer-Dewitt. "See my old pieces. See the NY Times. My mistake was assuming that all the Asians in line (some of whom brought their children so they could buy 4 iPads, not just the maximum 2) were Chinese and that just because they were Chinese that they were from Chinatown. But I've reported on a lot of these lines, and this one had a higher percentage of Asians than any I've seen before."

Well, alrighty then, no racism to see here, folks.

[via @Joescoscarelli]

(Photo: CNN)

Last night, the now-notorious Reddit troll Violentacrez, whom Gawker recently exposed as a 49-year-old Texas-based programmer named Michael Brutsch, appeared on Anderson Cooper 360 for God knows what reason. In the painfully awkward two-part interview, during which Mr. Cooper thankfully gave us a commercial break to collect ourselves and tweet our thoughts, Mr. Brutsch invoked every possible excuse to justify his poor behavior, which includes creating controversial subreddits like PicsofDeadKids and Jailbait.

Throughout the interview, Mr. Brutsch referred to his Reddit username Violentacrez in the third person, echoing other statements he's made about Violentacrez being a character he played and attempting to distance himself from taking personal responsibility for his actions. He also admitted that his sole purpose for creating racist and misogynistic subreddits was to get a rise out of people (he bragged he has a "gift" for it) in order to accumulate "meaningless internet points."

Shortly after the interview aired, Mr. Brutsch again took to Reddit under his clean handle "mbrutsch" and admitted that appearing on CNN was a "huge mistake, which I will not repeat." He also agreed with users who alleged that Reddit's statement given to CNN is actually riddled with factual inaccuracies. "It was suprising that the admins straight up lied about banning VA multiple times," one user wrote. "Didn't surprise me at all," replied Mr. Brutsch.

Still, it was rather shocking to witness Mr. Brutsch's willingness to completely throw Reddit, a platform he has essentially dedicated his life to for the past five years, under the bus in order to save his own neck. Though he was once a Reddit power user, tapped by administrators to wrangle the darkest subreddits and keep illegal content from cropping up on them, he has continually called Reddit admins out for lying and for not having his back.

"Reddit encouraged and enabled this kind of behavior," he said last night on CNN. Even Redditors whose inconsistent "free speech" logic (keep Jailbait, but block Gawker links) put them in allegiance with Mr. Brutsch probably won't appreciate hearing him blame his trolling on Reddit, both as a platform and community.

We've reached out to Reddit general manager Erik Martin to ask for comment on Mr. Brutsch's accusation and will update when we hear back. But it's true that Reddit administrators have been supportive of Mr. Brutsch's behavior in the past. Mr. Brutsch also brought along to the interview a gold-plated bobblehead that Reddit administrators gave to him for creating Jailbait, a subreddit where users posted sexualized photos of minors. The Atlantic Wire points out that the statue was given to Mr. Brutsch as a token for creating "Worst Reddit," which still seems like a knowing nod and thumbs up to his behavior on the site.

This reporter is a frequent user of Reddit, in both her personal and professional life, and a fan of the platform as a fount of information. At its best, it can be an open forum for thoughtful conversation, hilarious asides and friendly knowledge sharing. But this incident has shed new light on the dark underbelly of a platform that just recently hosted a Q&A with the President of the United States.

It may seem like cognitive dissonance for Reddit to host forums like RapingWomen alongside TwoXChromosomes, but the site is also a microcosm of the Internet at large: full of some of the most wonderful people, but also some of the worst. Still, the laissez-faire attitude of Reddit admins towards the sexist and misogynistic content is concerning at best and borderline-disgusting at worst. As Anil Dash put it, "Reddit does many good things, but is also a horrendously sexist culture."

Of course, this realization is nothing new--the MensRights subreddit has been around for ages, and the internet as a whole has long been a complicated place for women to exist. But the Violentacrez scandal, coupled with that of Creepshots and Predditors, has put the conversation about Reddit's attitudes towards its female users at the forefront.

At least one woman we know, an active Redditor who has attended meetups and accrued a fair amount of "meaningless Internet points," has shut down her account in response to the recent news. "[Violentacrez] is the catalyst, yes, but the general culture of casual racism and misogyny as well," she tweeted.

Through its handling of the Violentacrez crisis, as well as last year's Jailbait scandal, Reddit has emphasized time and time again that it wants to be a platform that embraces free speech, right up to the line of illegality (but never crossing it). This will turn off some users, and perhaps cultivate a culture rife with racism and misogyny, under the banner of free speech. It is not, however, somehow immune to the criticism these types of decisions will evoke from Redditors and the media alike.

As Ken at Popehat wrote in his excellent piece on Reddit, Gawker and anonymity:

Creepers and pedophiles and bigots make up only a tiny minority of Redditors; people angry that they are being criticized make up only a slightly larger minority. Comments from Reddit administrators in the wake of the child pornography outcry has made clear that Reddit wants to be a free speech site that permits everything that the law does not prohibit. That's fine. I'd defend Reddit's freedom to publish what the law allows. But Redditors need not be taken seriously to the extent they believe they have a protected right to be free of criticism and ridicule and inquiry. You can argue all you want that forums like — oh, say, the /r/BeatingWomen subreddit — should be free to thrive without criticism. Moderators can indulge your feelings by banning critics. Moderators can decide to ban links to Gawker on the theory that if you take pictures of children in public and post them for the sexual pleasure of misfit neckbeards, you have a right to privacy that should prevent anyone from identifying you. But Reddit administrators and moderators and Redditors can't stop everyone else from calling out their conduct and their oddly inconsistent philosophy. Private individuals decrying, ridiculing, and even using their skills to identify Redditors are using a classic "more speech" remedy to speech they don't like. It's a feature, not a bug, of free speech.

Of course, individuals on Reddit are also responsible for their own actions. No matter how much Mr. Brutsch claims Reddit "encouraged and enabled his behavior," it was still just a platform full of--as he says--"college kids," and it was ultimately his decision to dutifully play into their twisted tastes. Now, he's paying the price for that: he's lost his job and his health insurance and has ultimately become the face of Internet trolldom. Reddit's reputation will recover from this poor publicity fiasco, but the rep of its most notorious troll probably won't.

(Photo: CNN)

Michael Brutsch, the 49-year-old Texas resident whom Gawker outed last week as the man behind the racist and misogynistic Reddit troll account Violentacrez, is slated to appear tonight on Anderson Cooper 360.

In sound bites published to CNN's Press Room blog, Mr. Brutsch speaks with CNN's Drew Griffin about his experiences moderating the controversial subreddit Jailbait, where users posted sexualized photos of minors before it was shut down by Reddit last year.

Mr. Brutsch even gives an apology for his actions ... well, almost:

GRIFFIN: Anderson outed you without saying your name a year ago, right? You could have stopped then. Is the only reason you're stopping because we now know who you are?

BRUTSCH: Yes. I mean that is, you know, Violentacrez is what I did in my spare time to unwind from my 10-hour-a-day job. That's how I relaxed in the evening. I no longer need to relax in the evening, because I no longer have a job. That and the fact that the curtain's been pulled back and everyone can see the puppeteer ... That and the fact that I have, as with the rape and pregnant reddits, I have come around over the last few months to understand that some of these things can be harmful to other people.

DREW GRIFFIN:  Are you apologizing for what you did or trying to make an excuse for what you did?

MICHAEL BRUTSCH: Well, I am to some degree apologizing for what I did. Again, I was playing to an audience of college kids. Two years ago, when all of this was at its height, the audience was appreciative and supportive of this sort of gallows humor that I put out there.

GRIFFIN: Did you get a thrill out of that?

BRUTSCH: Well, honestly, the biggest thrill I got was those meaningless internet points.

Reddit users collect "karma" by publishing posts or comments to the site, which other users can then vote up or down. "He really did care about the karma," the Daily Dot's Kevin Morris tweeted at Betabeat. "Used to PM me, complaining that our leaderboards weren't accurate."

Mr. Brutsch announced earlier this week in a post on Reddit that he had an interview with CNN. When other users chimed in asking him to provide details about the interview, he responded that they did not pay him to appear. "They did cover valet parking, so that was $40," he said.

When another user asked how the interview went, he replied, "I don't think it will help anything."

Mr. Brutsch, who was fired from his job following Gawker's exposé, is now soliciting programming work in the porn industry.

Ms. Hu (lark.com)

Imagine that you invented this really cool wristband alarm clock, and you think it could be a real 'disruptive' technology. You spend months mocking up a presentation to give to investors at TechCrunch Disrupt, but on the morning of your demo, rich assholes incapable of summoning empathy shit all over your startup, simply because it's a hardware idea.

That's pretty much exactly what happened to Julia Hu, the cofounder of Lark, according to CNN. Napster bad boy Sean Parker literally laughed her off the stage:

"That was a charmingly quirky presentation, but I'm not sure," said Sean Parker, a serial entrepreneur and partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund. "I mean, is this a company?"

Hu's pitch, made at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010, didn't dazzle any of the investors on the panel. Almost laughing, Parker added: "I just have a hard time believing you're serious."

Ms. Hu picked herself back up and took her project to Kickstarter, where she raised all the necessary funds and even gained the attention of Apple, which now sells her product in its stores.

CNN reports that hardware startups--like the infamous Pebble--are swarming Kickstarter in impressive droves, due in part to the risk factors associated with hardware that tend to keep VCs at bay. As CNN writes, "SV Angel partner David Lee puts it bluntly: Venture capitalists are 'allergic to hardware.'"

We reported on this phenomenon last month, when we noticed that spots for Disrupt's Hardware Alley filled up much faster than usual. CNN puts it more succinctly: "We're becoming our own venture capitalists."

Of course, not everyone can be as successful as Ms. Hu or the Pebble crew, but sometimes it's worth a shot. After all, we're getting so sick of apps.

A snippet of one Redditor employee's source code made its way to CNN yesterday in order to illustrate a story about the Pentagon's efforts to combat hackers. "It looks like one of you works for CNN, and was asked to provide some 'hacker looking thing,' and then decided to provide this snippet of html. Or something. Would love to know how this happened!" user Jedberg wrote on Reddit. Betabeat can't tell what the code is for based on the teensy, blown-up excerpt--something to do with column widths on the Reddit blog?--but Jedberg says it's "about as far from 'computer attack' as they come." LIBEL!