The Steiners, the newsletter’s publisher and editor, have also sued the e-commerce giant in federal court, describing how cyberstalking and upsetting deliveries of anonymously sent packages upended their lives.
Ina Steiner received harassing and sometimes threatening Twitter messages as well as dozens of strange emails from groups like an irritable bowel syndrome patient support group and the Communist Party of the United States.
Along with a box of live spiders and the cockroaches, the couple had a funeral wreath, a bloody pig mask and a book about surviving the loss of a spouse show up at their door. Their home address also was posted online with announcements inviting strangers to yard sales and parties.
The harassment started in 2019 after Ina Steiner wrote a story about a lawsuit brought by eBay that accused accusing Amazon of poaching its sellers, according to court records.
A half-hour after the article was published, eBay’s then-CEO, Devin Wenig, sent another top executive a message saying: “If you are ever going to take her down … now is the time,” according to court documents. The executive sent Wenig’s message to James Baugh, who was eBay’s senior director of safety and security, and called Ina Steiner a “biased troll who needs to get BURNED DOWN.”
Stochastic terrorism is spreading hatred and fear that is likely to make someone, somewhere, commit a violent act against the targets (or individuals within the targeted demographic). In this case, specific eBay employees were told to target this specific couple to shut them up. I don’t know how precise the instructions were but the targets, and the people told to target them, were not random.