Interesting. Do you have experience moderating a comparable community, or what leads you to believe that it's not as much of a problem as they make it out to be?
I'm sure it will always be possible to find a way to harass someone. But do you believe putting barriers in place has no effect on the amount of harassment that targets have to endure? What do you think of the computer security concept of "defense in depth"?
"The discussion" really needs details on any concrete proposals for combating this problem. This is not a social problem - harassers are a tiny minority. The fundamental problem is managing fan-in. Since we've all become micro-celebrities, we've all got miniature versions of the problems famous people have always had but without the resources to protect ourselves (PR agents, bodyguards, etc).
It behooves the people proclaiming "something must be done" to detail what exactly they'd like to see happen. Otherwise we just have an emotional mob seeking any convenient scapegoat.
Specific constructive ideas appear to be lacking, and in their place vague allusions and shouting down of people who do concretely point out how individuals can try to protect themselves. I think what most "detractors" are worried about is an alignment with the government desire to remove anonymity from the Internet, which seems to be implied as some kind of solution even though it should be a complete non-starter.
Er, what? The harasser is aggressive and bitter? They harass people in real life? It sounds like they have some problems. Maybe they can go work on themselves and come back to the community when they're ready to be civil.
We wouldn't tolerate sexual harassment, etc., in the workplace or in civil society. I don't see why we wouldn't expect a basic level of decorum in respectable online communities.
The problem from Koster's perspective is that when the target of harrassment/abuse/etc. turns off the source feed the feed still goes into the target's community. The communications analogy is not hanging up the telephone. The harrasement/abuse/etc. is delivered in public. Even if the target does not see it, the target's community does.
Perhaps an analogy is that one afternoon all of the target's neighbors opened their mailbox to find a flier falsely asserting that the target was a child molester. Most of the intended effect stems from the target's neighbors reading the flier. It doesn't matter much if the target read it. And in conversations with neighbors, "no I did not read it" does not make it better...and the fact that there are conversations with neighbors means that not reading the flier is not a way of avoiding the harassment/abuse/etc.
Being the target of sustained harassment is a real world problem. You can't ask the women (And, sure, some men) who have been subjected to the troll-rage of the internet to just shake this off. What online harassers do needs to be treated as what it is: a deliberate attempt to harm another person. It needs to be subject to criminal sanctions.
That doesn't mean I think websites need to become an arm of the state, it means I think the state needs to get a whole lot more tech savvy and figure out how to find and prosecute these idiots.
I will say this, from the perspective of someone who has been around online communities for approaching 20 years and moderating in various online mediums for 10+ years - women get harassed online far too much in most communities. The extent some of the harassment goes is mind boggling.
One of my good friends had a beastiality erotica written about her as part of a campaign to defame her, where the people involved went as far as taking the ip addresses of the moderators and redirecting them to a harmless image whenever they attempted to load the actual image. The primary reason is because a group of people didn't like how she acted, including dating the founder for a short while of the site the community was based on.
Another member of the community was naively coaxed into sending someone else some pictures of her naked, which was then gathered up and used to slut shame her - she was not even 18, which made it distribution of child pornography.
I have had to ban countless harassers who would go on a public TF2 server I run and immediately try to harass the women who had the gall to use a microphone - I take a zero tolerance attitude towards this behavior, harassment of any kind is unacceptable. Whatever positive contributions some of these people might have, it certainly isn't worth accepting that sort of behavior as the norm, driving away good people who did nothing wrong.
The proposed solution: "societal pressure". That certainly seems innocuous enough. But online harassers are a tiny group already-marginalized people (asserting otherwise is willfully ignoring obvious numbers, and that should make anybody wary). Increasing the scorn is not going to change them! When this approach inevitably fails, then this same "societal pressure" will be parlayed into the newly-created common wisdom of outright censorship of the Internet.
I think unfortunately, in this particular case, you can't fix what seems to be the single biggest problem--- one person who is already widely condemned, banned from forums/IRC when people see him, but nonetheless persists, and keeps reappearing in new guises.
I can imagine fixing the more common problems, like pervasive stupid sexist comments everywhere, and inappropriate content in conference presentations, but stamping out every single rare-but-extant crazy stalker seems unlikely. A number of high-profile bloggers, Usenet posters, and forum admins of both genders have attracted unhinged people of that sort, and discussion about what to do about the problem dates back at least 20 years.
The problem as I see it is social and solved through policing as we do with other anti-social behaviour.
All of the best online communities I've been part of have had strong moderation including here on HN. So that's one example of how people can take social responsibility at the level of the platform holder. Twitter is a great example of inadequate time and money spent on that problem.
Where things are complicated right now is in the legal sphere where we have a global entity but many fractured jurisdictions. This prevents the problem being tackled at the right level causing it to persist. This isn't even an issue unique to online harassment.
Mollifying and modifying behaviour as an individual is an admission to being in hostile territory. I'd rather we acted together to bring justice and freedom instead.
I think it is more of a social problem we can’t solve with code.
As methods of communication get cheaper and more accessible, it opens the world up to see what humanity is, not what humanity wants itself to be.
People that maliciously attack those online are broken people. Broken people exist in reality, thus broken people will exist online.
Google and Facebook can write code to stop harassment, but they can’t do so without marginalizing people who are already on the fringes of society. Plus, their system can be gamed. The output of such changes would mean that it would stop some harassment at the cost of losing accessibility for everyone and a meta game playing in the background that costs the corporations engineering resources.
The best answer right now, in my opinion, is to create tools to fight harassment, but give those tools to the users of the site rather than automated algorithms. A good example of this is a mute feature. Other tools like customized word filters, block lists and safe lists can also help empower users.
Moderating a general-purpose forum for the world is intractable, either automatically or manually. That's just a fact. Acknowledging this fact does not need to be understood as a defense of Meta.
I cannot offer any solutions for tackling this issue internationally, especially in cases such as genocide. The issue seems hopeless and not particularly unique to the internet (see: previous genocides and their use of new mass media such as newspapers in Germany, radio in Darfur).
However, in the United States, I think the solution is ultimately local. Making specific and credible threats against someone is crime in all jurisdictions. Harassment using a telecommunications device is also a crime in most jurisdictions. Combining harassment with either vague threats or hate speech is sometimes its own crime.
I've found, to my surprise, that the legal system is interested in internet harassment/threats even if the harassment/threat is "obviously trolling" by internet standards. The bad news is that there isn't a bright line and the bar is high. The good news is that the type of internet behavior that's been normalized in the past couple decades is so far beyond the pale that a bright line isn't even needed in many cases. E.g.,
- sending dozens of unrequited and extremely angry/hateful DMs to multiple unlinked accounts over weeks/months, even after requests to stop contacting the person, is clearly a criminal act called harassment, punishable by fines and jail time.
- Doxxing a person who one has previously made threats against is clearly a criminal act called stalking, punishable by fines and jail time.
- Telling someone that you think you know who they are, that you will figure out their IRL identity, and that you will then harm them in a specific way is clearly a credible threat. Again, a criminal act punishable by fines and jail time.
These are all very common types of trolling. I would have thought that the lines were fuzzier from my long tenure on the internet, and that courts/police would respond with their equivalent of "ignore it and don't feed the trolls". But it turns out that these anti-social behaviors are not normal outside of very specific internet subcultures, and judges/detectives/DAs have spent approximately zero hours in internet cesspools. To them, all of the above are alarming, obviously criminal, and not examples of cases where one should simply ignore the behavior and go on with life.
I've found that even respected moderators of respected forums will disregard as "just trolling" behavior that my DA's office and local detectives describe as "obviously criminal". Facebook and Twitter will also refuse to ban accounts that are engaged in harassment/threats/stalking behavior that the local DA is interested in prosecuting.
I'm also working a few attorney friends -- and spending some change -- on developing a repeatable, low-cost, DIY-as-possible civil strategy for unmasking and obtaining restraining orders against John Doe harassers.
The days of "threatening and harassing people on the internet" being "normal troll behavior" are going to come to a rude close for US residents over the next ten years, mostly on the back of serious misdemeanors and innovation in the use of civil lawsuits.
I did read that in your prior comment [0]. And I fully agree.
But I will say, despite my agreement with it, that post of yours does not actually address this current subject of outrage. It is true that one component of harassment is the pervasive social attitudes held by the majority, and thus can be changed through social integration. But concentrated harassment also comes from a small minority that are either deliberately trolling, or so socially mistuned as to use a comments section as if it were a bar. All of the outreach and awareness is not going to change this latter group - think of Pascal's Wager for a date.
It's not that I don't "want" a solution to the latter. It's that I don't see how one, as envisioned, can exist. Education and awareness can shrink the quantity. Centralized sites with heavy moderation can shrink the quantity [1] [2]. Maybe even personal filtering-assistants could shrink the quantity. But at some level of fan-in it is still going to be present and require that people build their own mental defense.
[0] FWIW, I clicked the up arrow on that comment, and this one as well. But my votes don't actually count because it was determined that I upvote "low quality" comments - a year or two ago, anti-circlejerk comments were forced to really snipe.
[1] You have a post about rejecting offers for dates on HN. I don't believe I have ever seen such a proposal on HN (and I'm showdead=yes). I'm not refuting your experience, just contrasting - an event can be objectively extremely rare, yet still quite personal, intense, and resentment-forming.
[2] Furthermore, this ignores alternative avenues of contact - I don't think Medium passed along all this harassment itself. Which is why ambiguous "something" can't not imply some greater control over the wider Internet.
I wouldn't go that far, though I am generally sympathetic to your overarching argument.
I wouldn't go that far in part because I'm a woman and women seem to attract stalkers a lot more than men. I was a homemaker for a long time and had a very private life. Trying to figure out how to interact effectively in the public sphere has been a struggle for me.
Part of that is me. Part of that is other people. People react differently to a woman than to a man.
So, on the one hand, I needed to figure out what I was simply doing wrong. On the other hand, I needed to figure out how to effectively navigate a situation that can, at times, be actively hostile and dangerous, even if I am not doing anything wrong. Those two things confound each other and I don't know of any good sources of instruction.
This has helped make me very aware that sometimes people get into real trouble and need extraordinary measures to help extract them from the mess.
I think those extraordinary measures should be made available at times. But I also think it should not be the default solution.
I generally agree with you that there are other approaches that we need to be pursuing that are more nuanced and that try to balance different concerns. I think gutting the value of a forum so that people can remove all their content at will on a whim can readily go bad places. I am not crazy about it as a policy/law.
We've just been through it. Yes it exists and yes it is.
What's more, you and are the ones derailing MY point about harassment online. So if you care about derailing a conversation I started with Jerf, please don't simply restate what we've already been over.
First you identify the real problem. The root problem is not that people are harassing women, the true problem is people are harassing people online. You can argue that you think it is worse when women are effected but that distinction does not get us closer to a solution and only serves to drive a wedge between people. Arguments about who is victimized more are useless.
If you're in a marginalised community then the objectional content comes to you and can't be avoided. We simply aren't provided with the tools to block this.
There is a fundamental asymmetry in harassment.
My account is important to me; I don't want to abandon it or give it up. If my account is under attack I cannot continue to use the site as I would like.
The accounts used for harassment are either disposable and it doesn't matter to the harasser whether they get blocked or banned. And non-disposable harassing accounts that get blocked can either just move onto the next target or continue to direct the harassment through screenshots etc which encourage the disposable accounts to do the dirty work.
The cost to the victim can be meaningful, but the cost to the harasser is non-existant.
And this isn't just applicable to concerted harassment campaigns.
There is also a lot of "drive-by" harassment from accounts who will just reply to any black/trans/queer/woman who posts online.
Most people are not idiots enough to hang at notoriously neo-nazi filled irc channel and argue with them. Most people don't get death threats at internet.
So internet is not lead plumbing. It's more like early electric grid, where lightning could burn a house nearby. It's not going away, it will just get better.
That being said internet harassment is a genuine problem. And I don't have solution for it.
It's not like this is really new. The problem is generally the online social services we use and how they allow others to be harassed online. I doubt they really care if the violence goes out onto the streets; as long as it's not on their lawn right?
This is the general problem; and over-reaction from social networks from either not doing enough or doing too much.
If you want to avoid online harassment avoid those sites that don't do anything to protect you.
Good moderators can go bad; so regardless if it's facebook or some small dinky online forum... they can be aggressive at moderating and also silence people for no good reason
A broad brush[1] is acceptable if you're unable to use the Internet without being harassed by "contrarians".
I am someone who is not often harassed online, but I am involved with people who frequently experience harassment. I've been using Twitter block lists[2] and have noticed a great absence of hateful responses. This is not a long-term solution, but it lowers the number of times a day that my heart sinks. I accept any incidental losses.
The article suggests a finer brush using something like crowdsourcing. Perhaps harassment targets could pay to submit their profiles for monitoring, and the resultant block list could be made public for subscription by anyone on Block Together[2].
It would be nice to see networks take a stand against repeat harassers, but clearly people are tired of waiting around for that.
I'm sure it will always be possible to find a way to harass someone. But do you believe putting barriers in place has no effect on the amount of harassment that targets have to endure? What do you think of the computer security concept of "defense in depth"?
reply