[Content note: excerpts from vicious online harassment, use of slurs.]
Much of the online harassment problem consists of things that are obviously unconscionable: for instance, doxxing someone, calling someone a ‘fat ugly cunt’, telling someone that they ought to kill themselves, telling someone that they deserve to be raped, etc. However, when I read articles about online harassment, I notice that a lot of the problem is things that aren’t so obviously wrong.
For instance, consider Justine Sacco, who made a dumb tweet about HIV intended for her 170 Twitter followers and accidentally wound up becoming a #1 trend on Twitter. A lot of the hate she got was, well, pretty much just expressions of people’s free speech:
Sacco’s Twitter feed had become a horror show. “In light of @Justine-Sacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @care today” and “How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!” and “I’m an IAC employee and I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever.” And then one from her employer, IAC, the corporate owner of The Daily Beast, OKCupid and Vimeo: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight.” The anger soon turned to excitement: “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail” and “Oh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands” and “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.”
It seems to me that these tweets are mostly reasonable exercises of free speech. Sure, “disgusting” is a bit uncivil, but let they who have never called someone’s blog post disgusting cast the first stone. And “her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News” and “I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again” are just… statements. I am pretty certain you could not come up with any ethical rule that forbade “her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News” that didn’t wind up declaring every political argument that has ever happened or ever will happen to be unethical. Individually, the people were doing nothing wrong.
And yet Justine Sacco was caused tremendous pain. And she’s not alone: online harassment hurts people. At least one person has gotten PTSD.
I think this situation has three causes.
First, public figures wind up getting significantly more hate than they used to. In the old days, if you wrote an article many people disagreed with, they would respond in the form of letters to the editor, which you probably didn’t even read. Now, they email you, comment on your article, and send you messages on Twitter; it can be impossible to escape this while staying online.
Second, there’s a lot more middle ground between public figures and private figures. Consider Milo Yiannopoulos, who wrote an article [cw: misgendering] alleging that Gamergate critic Sarah Nyberg is a pedophile. Now, it is clearly not harassment for a magazine to publish an article alleging that Woody Allen is a pedophile; he’s a public figure and whether he has committed a crime is a matter of public interest. And it clearly would be wrong for a magazine to publish an article alleging that a random citizen who had never been prosecuted was a pedophile. But Sarah Nyberg is in this sort of odd intermediate space which really wasn’t a thing before the Internet. She is an anti-Gamergate activist and a writer, and in that sense is a public figure; on the other hand, approximately 99.99% of Internet-goers– including me– have never fucking heard of her.
Third, people wind up becoming public figures when they didn’t really mean to- that’s what happened to Justine Sacco. Her case is, fortunately, very rare. However, more moderate examples happen every day. For instance, a trans-exclusionary feminist said that she realized a woman was trans because the woman didn’t know how to make a quesadilla; the transgender Internet proceeded to make a bunch of jokes about quesadilla socialization and Assigned Cheesy At Birth and so on and so forth. To a certain extent, one can say “well, if you didn’t want hundreds of people mocking you, you shouldn’t have said that you can tell whether a woman is trans based on whether she knows how to cook quesadillas.” On the other hand, I personally have said a lot of dumb shit on my Tumblr, and I expected it to be commented on by maybe a dozen people, not by the entire transgender Internet.
Some people suggest that the solution is just not to participate in public social media unless you’re willing to become a public figure. I don’t think this makes sense.
In sociology, there’s a concept called the third place. The first place is home; the second place is work; the third place, traditionally, is a diner, a coffeeshop, a bowling alley, a YMCA, etc. Third places allow for community building, political involvement, and the development of social capital in a way that neither home nor work provides.
In the late twentieth century, we experienced a tremendous decline in third places, with a concomitant increase in loneliness, alienation, and anomie. In the twenty-first century, new third places developed: Twitter; Tumblr; Facebook; Instagram; Reddit. If we say “only tweet things that won’t make you a public figure, or you could dogpiled and hated!”, we are destroying their ability to function as third places and consigning people once again to a third-place-less society.
But on the other hand it is not realistic to expect people not to criticize things they read. And it wouldn’t even be desirable: we do want people to disagree with Tweets and Tumblr posts, criticize articles they don’t like, and whistleblow about pedophiliac public figures. That’s how the free marketplace of ideas works. And a rule about “civility” will inevitably be disproportionately enforced against unpopular ideas, no matter how politely expressed.
Thing of Things 
Some thoughts on things you can do about this, on an individual level:
* Don’t tag/target/etc. your comments toward the person in question without good reason. Talking about Justine Sacco is a lot better than talking about @JustineSacco.
* Take into account whether or not a dogpile is currently ongoing, and, especially if your comments are at all likely to show up in searches or inspire further comments, consider staying quiet if so
LikeLiked by 7 people
A technical solution to this would be making online communities less viral by adding a feature that only friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends could see it, limiting the speed at which posts can spread to a point where people no longer become famous overnight for saying something foolish.
Implementing this would still keep most of the “third place” social environment and limit the disadvantages.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I like this solution because it solves the problem without requirement that most people should become better, which probably wouldn’t happen on the timescale of years.
LikeLike
It might help a little but is likely to just mean that offended people 1 node away screenshot it and post it in public to bypass the restrictions. There’s enough small-time bloggers desperately searching for outrage fodder.
LikeLike
I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to ask people to notice ongoing conversations and to consider how their entrance into that conversation fits into the larger scenario.
Especially when it’s transparently obvious that so many of them are motivated not by the desire to speak their mind, but by the cathartic release of engaging in moral pageantry and/or collective hate.
Of course, no one thinks of themselves that way. They’re brave crusaders against pedophiles, racists, misandrists, transphobes, whatever. And a lot of them have tied up large portions of their identity in their moral pageantry. And worse, they have large communities that devote brain space to developing apologetics to help their members recontextualize criticism in ways that will prevent them from accidental self knowledge.
So it’s not an easy sell to the committed.
But it’s a needed one for people at large.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Orthogonal to the post, some of the damage is from the dogpiling itself – many of the people in these cautionary tales would have preferred one or two hateful tweets to hundreds of merely scornful and judgmental ones. It can be pretty miserable to be rejected by a whole community, especially if you think it’s unfair. But no individual dog is the whole pile.
I’m also pretty sympathetic when someone suffers IRL consequences – classically, losing a job. It may be people’s free speech rights, but if one knew one was contributing to getting someone fired, I hope most of us would do some extra investigation first.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I think a big disconnect here is just that different communities have different standards, and some of the things you mention are not, in fact, obviously unconscionable. In at least some groups of teenage boys, for example, shock humor is the most common form of humor, and friends will say things to each other that are very insulting on a surface level, yet no offense is actually meant or taken. In some online communities it certainly seems that the participants are happy with the standard that death or rape threats are commonplace and acceptable jokes. There’s a balance to be struck between “Insiders like the norms of this community” and “Outsiders are hurt by the norms of this community”, but that applies to the communities we like as well as the ones we don’t.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Some people suggest that the solution is just not to participate in public social media unless you’re willing to become a public figure. I don’t think this makes sense.
I do. The argument that something like Twitter is a “third place”, in the manner of a coffeeshop, where you might chat with your friends or acquaintances, and there’s a pretty strong social norm about strangers eavesdropping, let alone injecting themselves into your conversation, is just not correct. It’s much more like wandering around on a street corner with a sandwich board or putting up little posters on telephone polls. It’s much better for people to stop pretending things that are public are private or quasi-private.
LikeLike
Your argument is undermined by the fact that millions of people do, in empirical fact, use Twitter exactly like a third space where only a limited community of people are ever involved in their communication. Violations of this norm are so rare that we can list many of the people to whom it’s happened by name.
LikeLike
“Violations are rare” in the sense that it happens like being struck by lightning, but they’re common in the sense that vast numbers of people participate in them. Indeed, I’d suggest that there’s actually no informal norm at all, but instead people are generally protected because the stuff they say doesn’t attract anyone’s notice.
Alternatively, we could conclude that because what’s going on is so rare that we shouldn’t devote too much concern to it, and that @JustineSacco’s fame is proof in and of itself that we shouldn’t worry about it happening to us, any more than we should worry about being shot by an ISIS member in the US or having a helicopter crash into our house.
I guess I could be fine with that, too.
LikeLike
I agree that we shouldn’t devote *too much* concern to it, but I disagree with what appears to be the implied corollary: that we shouldn’t devote any concern to it.
The difference between your two examples (being shot, and a helicopter crashing into your house) and this, is that those things happen *to* you, whereas these are things done *by* you (and many others), to other people. The responsibility that you have over being shot by an ISIS member in the US is different than the responsibility that you have over contributing to a internet dogpile that results in unnecessary harm.
LikeLike
Well, being shot is very much something that’s done to you by other people, but I take your point. I have no particular objection to arguing that people shouldn’t participate in pile-ons, but I doubt that it will have much effect in the wider world. I think if this is a problem we’re going to address, bendini’s solution is the only one likely to work, and even there, it’s primarily because it would solve other, more significant problems at the same time.
LikeLike
It seems like, there is a big difference between publicly commenting on something and actually harassing the person in question. For example, no one is going to stop me from making quesadilla jokes — since the mysteries of that rare delicacy remain elusive to the transgender brain. But all the same, I have no idea which shitty TERF first made the comment. I don’t know and don’t care. I ain’t going to bother her. Blah.
I have no idea who first made the “down with cis bus” post — but golly it was funny. Again, I’m gonna make the joke cuz sometimes all you can do in the face of relentlessly bigotry is laugh —
— cuz I haven’t figured out how to make jokes out of “bathroom bills” or the “trans panic defence” or that guy who spit on me the other day.
Whatever.
But actual pile-ons — those tend to suck. I don’t think they do much good for anyone.
LikeLike
It’s all very nice to say that dogpiles and harassment are a bad thing, but who has both the ability and volition to make online spaces less susceptible to them?
I’d imagine that for the people who run the platforms, witch hunts and #scandalgates bring in a significant number of clicks, and therefore lots of money.
This will not go away until online harassment threatens to put a dent in Twitter &co’s bottom lines.
LikeLike
I think if you expect the target of your criticism to be aware of your criticism you have a duty to be fair and intellectually honest. This, of course, does not preclude being quite harsh in some cases. But publicly “venting” is not really ok imo.
*There actually needs to be some sort of condition that the target does not go around reading every tiny blog to find criticism.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask people to limit their social media use if they’re afraid of becoming a public figure. Ozy, you equate Twitter and Tumblr with Facebook, which is, IMO, a mistake. Facebook has privacy settings and can be very easily limited to people you actually personally know (I use Facebook in this way myself). Twitter and Tumblr are by nature public and semi-anonymous (although Tumblr’s new chat feature improves its status as a third place tremendously, IMO). I see nothing unreasonable with advising people to keep potentially-controversial statements between themselves and those they trust. It’s the difference between a conversation with your friends at the coffee shop, and posting a flyer on the coffee shop bulletin board.
LikeLike
It’s not like a million people independently just happened to notice Justine Sacco’s tweet. Some specific person noticed it, probably from among her very limited twitter following, and intentionally drew attention to it out of a desire to bring her into ignominy.
The human reality is that so long as te norm and customary function if twitter is that millions of people regularly use it like a third space without problems. Which means they’re going to keep doing that no matter how we admonish them that they ought not to do so. Heck, you’re posting right now on a blog that is technologically equivalent to twitter in all meaningful ways with respect to the possibility of viral outrage, but in practical reality is functioning right now as a third space. The commenters and host mostly recognize each other, conversations have continuity over time, and people regularly say personal things they might not say to the massed general public.
How we think about ethics needs to take into account human custom, not just technological potentiality.
LikeLike
It cuts both ways; millions of people also regularly use Twitter as a medium for piling on people who say things they find stupid and obnoxious on Twitter. Indeed, the whole point of Ozy’s post seems to suggest that it’s a problem primarily because so many people do it. If you’re going to argue about ethics taking into account human custom, I think you should take the good with the bad.
LikeLike
I don’t think you’ve thought this argument through as far as you believe. I’m not just saying that that which has gone before must continue.
I think there’s some pretty straight forward reasons to respect people’s use of things like twitter as third spaces- we apparently want third spaces to exist, third spaces arise where it is functionally possible for them to arise, and empirically they’ve arisen on twitter and other media where statements are technically fully public but practically unnoticed and of a limited public nature.
The specific environments in which third spaces arise, and the nature of third spaces as not actually having full fledged gate keeping, can cause problems. This is hardly new to twitter. But in twitters specific case, the damage can apparently be quite high when the effectively limited becomes fully public. So it makes sense to encourage norms that protect against this, such as norms condemning twitter mobs or norms condemning the use of a big microphone twitter account to name and shame someone smaller.
I would respectfully note that the objections you’re making have been considered and rejected by literally every environment I am aware of in which third spaces flourish. Reddit has norms and rules against one subreddit mobbing another, college campuses generally assist clubs in protecting themselves against converted efforts by outside groups to mass sign up and take over, etc, etc. Even YouTube, which does remarkably little as a company, has a fairly strong communal norm agreeing that callout channels, popular though they may be, are terrible places for terrible people. None of these things are perfect, but norms never are. And if you’re flat out rejecting the idea of managing human interaction via norms, you’ve chosen to be born into the wrong species.
LikeLike
Reddit has subreddits, and clubs on college campuses have a notion of “membership”, often with scheduled meetings and the like, while YouTube has channels. All of these provide an additional structure which allows you to demarcate a space which is quasi-private, which makes the norms much easier to articulate and understand. Twitter seems to provide none of that structure, meaning that it’s difficult to even state what the norm should be–don’t participate in “pile ons” is quite vague, for example.
Saying that we want third spaces to exist isn’t enough, nor is the fact that people use Twitter as a place to establish third spaces. There are other alternatives, because there are indeed other platforms which allow one to avoid or at least mitigate the (small) risk of being the victim of the sort of Twitter pile-on that afflicted @JustineSacco.
LikeLiked by 1 person