Saturday, April 15, 2023
On Friday, 34-year-old Jeremy David Hanson of Rossmoor, California, was sentenced to one year in prison for using Merriam-Webster‘s “contact us” feature to send threats. In October 2021, he stated in an email that he wanted to “shoot up and bomb” the offices of Merriam-Webster Inc., located in Springfield, Massachusetts. Hanson, who showed bias against the LGBTQ community, was reportedly upset at Merriam-Webster’s definitions for words for gender identities. He also left threatening messages in the comments sections for the Merriam-Webster pages for the words “girl” and “woman.” Why did he want to shoot and bomb Merriam-Webster? According to one of the comments he posted to the site, he accused the company of “creating fake definitions.” In March 2022, Hanson also threatened the president of the University of North Texas. Hanson was arrested the following month, and in September, he pleaded guilty to “threatening communications to commit violence.”
Hanson has a long history of aggressive online behavior, extending back to 2005. On December 30, 2004, at the age of 16, he created a Wikipedia account by the name “JarlaxleArtemis.” At first, he was a good-faith contributor, but by the summer of 2005, he quickly turned uncooperative. During an arbitration case, it was discovered that Hanson had created almost 50 accounts to harass or impersonate other Wikipedians. In September 2005, he was banned from all Wikimedia projects, but he was allowed back in on probation two months later. User “Linuxbeak” tried to mentor him, to no avail. Hanson often used multiple accounts, including lots of throwaway or sleeper accounts, to harass others, post others’ personal information, and abuse the “password reset” feature at very high rates to flood the network. In September 2006, Hanson was community-banned due to his continued misbehavior. The following month, a “long-term abuse” page was created about him. Despite this, Hanson continued to create new accounts to disrupt Wikipedia to unprecedented degrees. In 2007 and 2008, he frequently vandalized Wikipedia articles by renaming them to disruptive or inappropriate titles (known as “page-move vandalism” in WMF terms), and an edit filter had to be created to stop him. He would also spam using external links to websites, such that, when opened, infect the user’s browser with malware, effectively crashing the browser. Unfortunately, his personality today is fairly similar to what it was nearly two decades ago; even in 2021, 2022, and 2023, he still makes hateful attacks against organizations, including his recent actions that led to his arrest and, now, sentencing.
- Long-Term Abuse: Jarlaxle Artemis — Wikipedia, March 31, 2011
- Nick DeGray. “Motivated by hate, to intimidate others,” man indicted for anti-LGBTQ threats against Merriam Webster — WWLP, May 5, 2022
- Phil Helsel. A man who threatened Merriam-Webster over gender-inclusive definitions was sentenced to prison — NBC News, April 14, 2023
- California man Jeremy Hanson sentenced for making anti-LGBTQ threats against Springfield-based Merriam-Webster, Inc. — CBS News, April 14, 2023
