This is the Kater Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 10th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown. When faced with the

specter of online predators, police departments often do little to nothing, and lawmakers often

point their fingers at the online platforms for not doing enough to stop the crime.

Kate as Will Duffield says law enforcement agencies typically have the law on their side when they're trying to act against online harassers

and platforms are typically more than happy to assist with legitimate

investigations. We spoke last week.

New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill wrote about a Canadian woman named Naderatas who used

blogs, product review websites, scam alert services, to harass people that she believed had wronged her throughout

her life.

Her behavior began more than a decade ago, as the New York Times recounts in 2009, a lawyer who'd been working with her

started getting calls and emails at his office from men interested in meeting for sex.

And this sort of harassment is unfortunately

common or common enough online that this isn't the first

case we've seen of this. A gay dating app called Ginder was used a number of years

ago by a man's ex-boyfriend to repeatedly send men to his house looking for, having

communicated with his ex about having violent sex.

And in both of these cases, this Canadian woman who harassed people for years,

and this case in New York in which the boyfriend took out a

restraining order against his his ex He reported it to the police, this harassment repeatedly, and they did nothing.

They didn't act on the order. They didn't arrest the ex-boyfriend, at least not immediately.

And he sued a grinder for failing to prevent this behavior from happening. And in a lot of these cases, we see

platforms blamed for failing to prevent what is ultimately criminal behavior, a failure of law

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