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Jake Swearingen writes at The Atlantic that the Internet can be a mean, hateful, and frightening place - especially for young women but human behavior and the limits placed on it by both law and society can change. In a Pew Research Center survey of 2,849 Internet users, one out of every four women between 18 years old and 24 years old reports having been stalked or sexually harassed online. "Like banner ads and spam bots, online harassment is still routinely treated as part of the landscape of being online," writes Swearingen adding that "we are in the early days of online harassment being taken as a serious problem, and not simply a quirk of online life." Law professor Danielle Citron draws a parallel between how sexual harassment was treated in the workplace decades ago and our current standard. "Think about in the 1960s and 1970s, what we said to women in the workplace," says Citron. "'This is just flirting.' That a sexually hostile environment was just a perk for men to enjoy, it's just what the environment is like. If you don't like it, leave and get a new job." It took years of activism, court cases, and Title VII protection to change that. "Here we are today, and sexual harassment in the workplace is not normal," said Citron. "Our norms and how we understand it are different now."
According to Swearingen, the likely solution to internet trolls will be a combination of things. The expansion of laws like the one currently on the books in California, which expands what constitutes online harassment, could help put the pressure on harassers. The upcoming Supreme Court case, Elonis v. The United States, looks to test the limits of free speech versus threatening comments on Facebook. "Can a combination of legal action, market pressure, and societal taboo work together to curb harassment?" asks Swearingen. "Too many people do too much online for things to stay the way they are."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @12:34AM
> I actually like the idea of accountability for online actions, but not accountability to the government.
Then you should articulate why that is an important distinction. Because from where I'm sitting, any organization powerful enough to enforce effective accountability will have the just as much opportunity to abuse that power. At least with the government there are mechanisms to hold them to account, imperfect as they may be.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday October 24 2014, @01:04AM
I like the idea of accountability to individuals, not powerful organizations. When somebody threatens me with violence over the internet, I tend to respond by posting my home-address. I'm not saying that to sound like an internet-tough-guy, I just can't think of a better example of what I'm talking about. Talk shit, get hit. Maybe this is an unreasonable way to expect the modern world to act, but it's how I'd like it to act.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @01:25AM
> I like the idea of accountability to individuals, not powerful organizations.
You are ignoring the fact that the internet is a force multiplier. The harassed and the harasser don't have equal access to tools and energy. The harasser has nothing better to do than make trouble, but the victim has a life to live.
> When somebody threatens me with violence over the internet, I tend to respond by posting my home-address.
You'll stop doing that the day you get doxed and swatted. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by JNCF on Friday October 24 2014, @02:55AM
Yup, none of us are as cruel as all of us are. I can't disagree with that, though I'm not convinced it's a big enough concern to warrant a federal government and all that it brings. Whether I like it or not the federales already police a lot of the more serious actions that these kids engage in. Do you think we need new legislation targetting any repeat poster of contact meant to annoy? That sounds pretty extreme in the other direction.
You may have a point about the swatting thing, perhaps I need to reconsider this as a response. Personal challenges and calls to authority are two different beasts entirely.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @03:49AM
> Yup, none of us are as cruel as all of us are.
That's not what I am saying. It isn't about ganging up on someone. It is about how one person can use the net to do accomplish a lot. In this case accomplish a lot of harassment. For example creating hundreds of sockpuppet accounts so that the victim must either block all new contact from everybody or accept harassment on a regular basis. Then there are things like impersonating the victim in order to ruin their reputation.
> Do you think we need new legislation targetting any repeat poster of contact meant to annoy?
That's sufficiently vague to be impossible to argue about. There is a line, the argument about is where that line needs to be drawn.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday October 24 2014, @04:38AM
I actually have a solution to this problem, though you may not like it. Sometimes I forget my positions on things, otherwise I probably would have brought this up sooner. I'm kind of stealing it from Thieves' Emporium [amazon.com] (not recommended), though I have no idea if it originated in that book. Basically we split the internet up into a bunch of smaller networks based on trust, so in order to be in a network you have to be invited. The networks are run however they're run, some by community consensus and others in an authoritarian manner. The important thing is that they all have their own message boards (and other services), but whoever runs a network can allow or block other networks from accessing their boards. This means that if a user is being unruly they'll get reported to whoever runs their network, and if the entity running the network lets their users be fucktards then their network will get banned by the other networks. The author of Thieves' Emporium envisions a system where everyone has an individual username, but I think Anonymous Cowards would be fine as long as you could tell what network they're coming from so that the owner of the network would be ultimately responsible for policing them. It's a distributed system based on reciprocity and trust, not a monopoly on violence. I understand the risk of Balkanization, but I think most people would be able to get access to the different divisions if it went that way.
I wasn't trying to be vague, I was trying to ask your opinion of the California legislation I originally quoted from TFA. But yes, it is really vague. We can certainly agree on that.
(Score: 1) by JNCF on Friday October 24 2014, @04:45AM
To be clear, I'm not necessarily talking about physical networks. I'm talking about a system built on top of the existing infrastructure, or better yet on top of a CJDNS/OpenLibernet style meshnet. A network of people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @12:45PM
> I actually have a solution to this problem,
Great theory. If you don't want the government to get involved then it falls on you to make your theory reality so that people have an alternative to government regulation.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday October 24 2014, @04:27PM
I can't disagree, but I don't see turning to the government's monopoly on violence is a valid response even in the absense of such a system.
Thanks for a reasonable and articulate conversation with me, Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @01:53AM
I tend to respond by posting my home-address.
That and your other ideas are provably stupid.
Accountability to individuals who are your friends and relatives is one thing. But accountability to others who you can't elect or choose?
(Score: 1) by JNCF on Friday October 24 2014, @03:02AM
He called me stupid; somebody call the G-men!
...which is why I think we should carve the government up into a bunch of independant villages. Then the only ones capable of any serious threat against you are the folks you see everyday. I'm glad we're on the same page :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @03:34AM
> When somebody threatens me with violence over the internet
[very silly accent]I intend to fart in your general direction![/very silly accent]
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday October 24 2014, @03:45AM
He intends to fart in my general direction! G-men come quickly, arrest this man for word crimes at once!
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Friday October 24 2014, @10:06AM
You forgot "Your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberries"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @03:54PM
Ah, I see, you want to give him cancer protection! [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @11:49AM
Most of us are not Batman. Or Charles Bronson. Most of us know that vigilantes - individuals who enforce accountability - are likely to look like hot-headed assholes after the fact. Members of the KKK often considered themselves to be 'doing the right thing' or holding individuals to account for their disruptive behavior when burning crosses or lynching.
Giving every individual the authority to impose accountability means the trolls win. The trolls start with a fundamental lack of respect for other people's rights, and they will certainly impose stricter accountability to whatever authority they believe to represent.
Excellent example: very 15th century. Other famous phrasings include "Might makes right," "an eye for an eye," and "Pay back into the laps of our neighbors seven times the contempt they have hurled at you." It's an excellent philosophy well enshrined in the Old Testament and Koran. Supposedly, Christian philosophy favors forgiveness and tolerance, but evidence for that is somewhat scarce (hence Tarantino's "get Medieval on your ass").
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday October 24 2014, @03:43PM
Been reading much Klosterman lately? I like his shit, even if he does have a tendency to delve into rock-n-roll analogies too often. We all have our schtick, I guess.
But yeah, that is a problem. We should probably try harder to be Batman.
I think "talk shit get hit" is much more philosophically in line with "an eye for an eye" than it is with "might makes right." The latter is arguing for the use of might to achieve your ends whatever they may be, whereas the other two phrases are advocating violence as a natural punishment for being a dick. You can argue that this is unreasonable or undesirable, but it's certainly different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @07:22PM
I think that depends entirely on whether the evaluator agrees with the hitter. The problem with empowering every individual to use corporal/capital punishment to right wrongs is that humans disagree on right and wrong. If you beat down someone whom you think is being a dick, I may think he was expressing a perfectly valid position and that you're the one being a dick. Government is (supposed to be) a mechanism for reconciling the values of FLDS with Jainists, Aryan Nation, and Nation of Islam so we can all share limited space and resources. No offense, but I don't trust you, or any other random internet person, enough to want you escalating a verbal disagreement to violence without at least some appeal to a third party.
(Score: 1) by JNCF on Saturday October 25 2014, @12:25AM
No offense taken. Do you trust the government? Your parenthetical "supposed to be" suggests to me that you don't.
I think that attempting to make a government balance the values of different people is a horrible idea to begin with. When you have rich white people writing the laws that govern poor brown people you're almost gauranteed to have cultural disagreements. Even if the laws were somehow magically in line with majority opinion this would still be a problem. If a subculture is being policed in accordance with laws they disagree with they simply aren't going to respect the law (nor should they). I think we should let communities govern themselves by their own standards instead of using the government's monopoly on violence to force them into living certain ways. I think this would lead to a decrease in overall violence, though I could be wrong.
I'm okay with the idea of being subject to rules that are written by a government, but not a federal government. Most municipal governments are too large for my tastes. Were I writing the rules for a group, some amount of violence would be allowed. I think violence is used by many social animals, including humans, to establish a pecking order. I'm okay with transhumanism theoretically, but while we're working with these meat-brains I think it's okay to recognise that we're governed by weird impulses from a bygone era and I think that repressing those impulses entirely can have horrible consequences. I see it as a trade-off, a balance. I think violence can be handled in a structured way, by challenge and acceptance.
That being said, this talk of vigilanteism and escalation of violence makes me think that you might have misunderstood my reasoning behind posting my home address (I can't blame you if you did, upon rereading I could take it differently than intended). I don't make threats of violence. I know that might be hard to believe in light of the preceding paragraph, but it's true. The idea of posting my address is that I'm taking a certain level of responsibility for my words. If my words make somebody angry enough that they threaten to kick my ass, I'll let them know where they can find it. If I talk shit, I'm okay with them trying to hit me (even if I don't think my language was unreasonable). If I were making harsher threats back or asking for their address I would consider it escalation, but posting your own addess is simply an acceptance of responsibility. At least that's how I see it. Another AC above has pointed out that such a policy could make me a target for swattings as well, and he has me reconsidering this line of response. I doubt I'll use it in the future. Violence has a very long history of being used to solve disputes, but the power of the state as we know it today (or some semblance of it) only goes back about 5,000 years. Fuck. That. Shit. Keep your jackboots off my door, internet. Kids these days don't play fair!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2014, @03:52PM
And if someone tells you he wants to rob your house, you give them the key?
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday October 24 2014, @04:22PM
Maybe I should have made my motive clearer. If my words make you angry enough that you want to physically attack me for them then I'll let you know where to find me.* That way, I am accountable for my words on some level. I don't think a robbery analogy applies, unless it has a convoluted and unrealistic hypothetical situation leading up to it.
*I'm actually reconsidering this policy due to the arguements of another AC above, but anyone who cares can still tie this account to my actual identity so it doesn't really matter (on this site at least).