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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, @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!