A few minutes reading /r/The_Donald shows that there is a vast difference between saying "that guy on the internet hurt my feelings" and "this is a threat to civil society."
It’s telling when people are more scared about some people being banned from a an online forum than they are about an insurrection and death threats toward the Vice President and members of Congress.
Keep in mind that a lot of the offense-taking you see happening publicly is done entirely on purpose. Think of it as adult/Internet equivalent of a child throwing a tantrum to see if they can manipulate their parents into getting what they want. In both cases, bowing down to the threats is not the right answer.
Well said. People mostly want to avoid hurting others feelings, but that opens us up to an attack vector where a person or group demands that others change their behaviour so as to respect their feelings, but in bad faith a means of subjugating others. The Crybully exploit if you will.
This has become such a common feature of every debate that the angry mobs on the internet are a greater threat than government to freedom of speech.
This article is about several types of real danger, one of which is the vitriolic online comments themselves. It doesn't have to escalate to a crime to be a problem.
> These people are just as noxious in real life even if some of them hide it when their identities are known.
I don't think so. A lot of people, and this is especially true with Twitter, get noxious because they found an audience there to "amuse" and entertain, which might amplify the temptation for "troll behavior", especially when that audience is of the same political/cultural leaning as the speaker. Social media inflate egos. Some people who might feel insecure in real life find a community there where they can feel like someone, not by doing something positive but by being mean and condescending to whom they deem their ennemy.
However social media didn't create these divisions, they just amplify them.
IMHO Twitter is a proof that even with real identities, people will engage in toxic behavior provided they feel supported by a large audience. Of all the social media I found Twitter to be the nastiest of all.
By contrast, aside from a few brigading, Reddit communities are often isolated, self contained and don't "leak". It takes a user to actively go on a sub to see its content, while Twitter is constantly pushing stuffs to its users, even the nastiest ones.
I don’t disagree with your above claim of people trying to get a rise out of others with inflammatory speech online. I have seen it too but... it sounds like the rest of your argument is very politically motivated (and anecdotal).
Yes, we tend to underestimate just how much energy, time, and money people are willing to contribute to harassing someone whose ideas they disagree with. Many times I find myself wanting to debate something online but the consequences of accidentally stepping on someone's toes who is willing to dedicate their life to destroying mine makes it just not worth the risk.
Agreed with the article. I'm especially worried about the third vector of attack on speech that they describe: individuals censoring other individuals in the name of "not being offended". This is a big issue, so I just wanted to share a few observations that worry me. Neither is brand new, I'm sure, however I believe they are worth talking about.
One thing I noticed a few years ago is that if a person has any level of social media presence and they're either outspoken or unlucky then they risk an internet mob being turned against them. Sometimes this "only" results in harassment and death threats. Other times this has real-world consequences such as for Gregory Elliott[1]. We've had mobs attacking individuals since forever, but the internet makes it much easier and almost consequence free to dog-pile the "offending" view and shut the person down, or even hurt their livelihood. Ex: it's much easier to send a threatening DM or doxx a person than to go outside and protest. The lesson here is: either keep quiet, don't have a social media presence, or firewall your more outspoken social activity from your "real self".
The other case I noticed is the radicalization of thought in the "you're either with us or against us" approach. Instead of explaining their position or answering a person's online question (even by dismissively linking them to Wiki or LMGTFY), people choose to attack them as a path of least resistance. As anecdotal evidence, I've seen people belittled and harassed on facebook, reddit and twitter for asking any of the following:
* Why should we legalize Marijuana?
* Why is BLM important?
* Why should I care about ${cause}?
Some folks try to answer and educate, but they're far in the minority from my casual observation. Overall, I'm concerned that as the amount of distractions in our lives increases our capacity for opposing views or meaningful conversations decreases because there's simply way more for us to do that is more fun or important to us.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Elliott : There are many more examples of this. I'll avoid posting them because nothing in life is clear cut and I want to avoid derailing my point.
"Is hate and ridicule expressed publically and unchallenged not just a DDoS against a group of people's right to expression?"
The way I see it, the internet has enabled entirely new categories of negative behavior, using that term as a wide umbrella.
Half the things people say on Twitter, if you'd say them to someone's face in a bar, would make you wake up in the hospital. On the internet though, you can get away with it. Worse, you can organize a large amount of people to target an individual, organization, group of people, etc. This capability is near-impossible in the physical world.
These new ways are seized by hysterical activists on both extreme ends of the political spectrum and over time further normalized into the mainstream. These people feed on polarization and absolutely cannot be trusted to have the power to shut down infrastructure.
A lot of people are straight up _raging jackasses_ - or worse and/or their work is repulsive - and at a certain point, wind up getting to be the target of an Internet Hate Mob. Note that in a perfectly just world, these people might be in prison or have otherwise major life consequences applied by the designated authorities - yet they have not had consequences.
And there are, of course, people who simply say something that flips the bit of the online mob and becomes the target of an Internet Hate Mob. Someone ran their mouth and said something dumb. Oops.
It is critical to consider that both of these cases are true, and the outcome, in the moment, doesn't per se look different without a careful attention to the ground facts. Much of the social media system has been unintentionally engineered to be an outrage machine. Shockingly, outrage results. I suggest not having outrage before reading facts.
It is, of course, the case that immature activists are immature, that is tautological. I share the national eyerolling when it makes the news. Thank you for reading my TED talk transcript.
I have very little fear of young literary authors self censoring. Self censoring is a conventional part of basic society and something we teach children from a very early age. Understanding the difference between a thought useful to express and something vomited out of the id takes time and some level of maturity.
Having to have a basic understanding of what you're talking about and taking on as a topic shouldn't be controversial, yet it seems to be.
If you said things to me / my family in person, there is the added threat of violence.
Online, there is no such threat. You could just as easily be a bot spewing hate, as a real human being. And being offended by a bot is pretty irrational.
Online, there is "data". If I know you, or have formed attachment to you via ongoing conversations etc or divulging details about myself, then the data becomes more meaningful and has emotion attached to it. But random data? No point being offended by that.
FWIW If someone I didn't know said that to my wife/mother/etc we'd just ignore them and walk away.
It's amazing: 20 years ago, we went online to debate at will with people we would never see and who had no power over us. Now online we have to be super careful about everything we say lest someone who can make a decision over us be offended.
You're discounting the possibility that there's a difference. There's varying levels of harassment, and it should be up to the victim's discretion as to how severely it should be treated. If person A calls person B a jerk on Twitter, that's easily enough ignored (unless there's a pre-existing personal or parasocial relationship between persons A and B that would make "jerk" sting more than it otherwise would), but if person A organizes a campaign involving all of their followers whose sole intent is to make person B feel threatened then that's an entirely different matter.
The hardest part of dealing with online harassment and "trolls" seems to be drawing that line, or even acknowledging that it exists.
"They aren't, nobody get's physically damaged by a weapon."
Err, I know what you tried to say there... but you're still wrong, because "physically" hurt is not the only relevant type of hurt.
You are not a robot. You are an emotional being, and you can be emotionally hurt by things that perhaps wouldn't hurt Spock but do hurt you. Your threshold may be much higher than many other people's. As it happens, mine is too.
But that doesn't make us "right", or better, and it doesn't mean that people don't get really hurt on the Internet when thrust into a world their brain is quite literally not prepared for. If anything, we are the freaks of nature.
Also note I didn't even limit it to insults... just perfectly normal social interaction can be quite draining. The realm of "negative feedback" is far richer than just "insults". Just receiving 4000 emails on a topic is an astonishing experience that I have but put my toe in the water of, and have little desire to experience the full blast.
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