
Solidarity against online harassment - dsr12
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/solidarity-against-online-harassment
======
comex
I see three different top-level comments suggesting that this post is an
oblique announcement of some kind of censorship or banning system being
developed for the Tor software. It is clearly nothing of the sort, and Tor
developers value the system far too much to try to shoehorn a backdoor into
it. Respond to it for what it is - a statement of social principles.

~~~
exstudent
I wouldn't say "clearly". They make reference to doing something about
harassment but give no outline what that might be. The post is tagged
feminism. Believe it or not, not everyone supports this type of feminism. I'm
not comfortable with Tor being so overtly political.

~~~
MeadowTheory
You mean some people are uncomfortable in having their place in the social
pecking order challenged? News at 11.

~~~
exstudent
No. First of all you're being pretty rude. Secondly, I don't want ANY pecking
order in Tor. They should just focus on making privacy tools and leave the
unrelated political messaging aside.

~~~
angersock
You are posting an unpopular position, and are going to get flamed for it by
people who won't articulate why they think you're wrong.

For what it's worth, I think you're right about the common-carrier argument.
If that's not the argument you're making, disregard my support.

A lot of these folks, in their reasonable zeal to prevent somebody on the
internet having their feelings hurt or being made to feel scared, are ignoring
the global costs to their chosen fuck-you-got-mine strategies of selective
communications. A minority would be even happy to let, say, a misogynist with
a cure for cancer be panned or banned irrespective of their other positive
qualities. They can be hard to reason with.

------
tonysuper
I really hope this blog is only talking about Tor the community and not Tor
the technology. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to ban people who are
harassing others without storing some identity information, which completely
defeats the purpose of Tor.

~~~
0x5f3759df-i
I don't think this is anything other than a public condemnation of the people
who use anonymity to harass people.

>This declaration is not the last word, but a beginning: We will not tolerate
harassment of our people. We are working within our community to devise ways
to concretely support people who suffer from online harassment; this statement
is part of that discussion. We hope it will contribute to the larger public
conversation about online harassment and we encourage other organizations to
sign on to it or write one of their own.

Key word is "declaration". I don't think this will effect the tor technology
in any way.

------
curiously
what was nature of the harassment that they were getting that warranted such a
strong response?

------
exstudent
What exactly does this mean? Are there new centralized control mechanisms in
the works for Tor? This seems like a really bad idea TBH. I don't want my
privacy tools to come with some strangely ambiguous "political" feeling
sentiment. Focus is the key to success and this doesn't seem like it.

------
thrillgore
What movement is being used to harass whom again?

------
bobcostas55
Just gonna leave this here:
[https://twitter.com/fucktyler/status/285670822264307712](https://twitter.com/fucktyler/status/285670822264307712)

I can't wait until this outrage culture fad is over and we can collectively
move on to more interesting things.

~~~
rmc
You can't walk away from threats to be shot.

~~~
meowface
Who was threatening to shoot who?

------
foragerone
Why is this tagged with "feminism"? I'm really uncomfortable with that. I
don't want ideology (of any kind) in my technology.

~~~
johnloeber
>I don't want ideology (of any kind) in my technology.

That too is an ideology, and it's not a trivial one.

~~~
foragerone
Thinking about it, I'll concede that it is an ideology. One I'm proud to hold
and I think is very tech friendly and progressive. I'll restate it: I think
tech should be tech. I don't want privacy tools to contain censorship
mechanisms because I believe in free speech.

~~~
JackC
So, just more food for thought: this ideology (that it's bad to look at your
tech through a feminist lens, or any other random social lens) tends to be a
conservative force, not a progressive one.

Tech has to be built for _someone_. You build for people you (probably) assume
have eyes and ears and hands and written language and a financial system and a
predictable reward mechanism and a notion of privacy and on and on and on. The
only thing that makes a product "good" or "bad" is its interaction with a
massive stack of assumptions you're making about the user.

But you only know like 0.000002% of the possible users of your product. So
really you're extrapolating wildly from a tiny set of clues about your user,
based on signals sent to you by your culture. (Where "culture" is just the set
of stuff that filters through to you about the people around you who you don't
know personally.) And that culture holds some people to be more "normal" than
others. Consider (as just some examples) that test subjects start to see a
crowd as half women when it's much less than half. A movie poster with women
on it is intended only for women; a poster with men on it is for everyone. A
movie poster with only black people is intended only for black people; a
poster with white people is for everyone ...

So the product you build is based on a dirty signal -- it incorporates a
massive stack of assumptions about the user, derived from a culture that you
know is lying to you about what a normal person is. If you build for your
internal idea of a "normal" user, letting tech be tech, then you reinforce
whatever happened to be handed to you without realizing you're doing it.
That's why this is a conservative ideology.

"Feminism" in this context is a progressive tool -- it's a way to look at your
product with fresh eyes. How do anonymity tools look if we assume that all
users are equally important, focusing on the experience of men vs. women? Huh,
it seems that the user base includes a significant number of men who are
hateful toward women, and that has a big impact on who participates in
anonymous forums and how men and women experience them. Now we have a lot of
different options for dealing with that (censorship being only one, and
obviously not one the Tor project would choose). Before we* used this lens,
our only option was to ignore it and preserve the status quo.

Other "-isms" are just other tools. Anything that your culture cares too much
or too little about -- and therefore tends to lie to you about -- is a
possible lens to learn about users you're ignoring, because your mental model
of "normal" doesn't match reality.

(* Note I'm not at all affiliated with Tor, just using "we" generally here.)

~~~
iza
I agree with what you're saying, but I'm skeptical about how "significant" the
"number of men who are hateful toward women" really is. It's hard to tell a
troll from a misogynist. I've seen a lot of assumptions that because the
victim is female, and the harassment contains sexist language, that the
harasser is therefore a misogynist. Or that the harassment is _because_ the
victim is female (as opposed to something she said). But when the troll's
intent is to offend, obviously he will use language to that effect.

~~~
jacalata
It sounds like you think that trolls are not hateful towards women because
they don't 'mean' the hateful things they say and do. I disagree - I don't
care what you 'really believe', if you do and say hateful things towards
someone then you are hateful to them and you should be counted in the group.

------
gnu8
Don't be too quick to dismiss this harassment as part of the gamergate-style
nonsense that has been going on as of late. This type of thing is typical of
the frat boy intelligence community. It's considered the height of their
tradecraft to anonymously harass opponents with facile mockery and threats.
Recall the FBI's campaign against Dr. Martin Luther King:
[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-
dr...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-
luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance)

~~~
krakensden
I'm pretty sure it's just more of this slapfight:

[http://pando.com/2014/11/14/tor-smear/](http://pando.com/2014/11/14/tor-
smear/)

~~~
psycr
Having just read that article, and also having just learned about Tor's
funding - is there any independent/third party summary of this news?

------
angersock
_We have decided that it is not enough for us to work to protect the world
from snoops and censors; we must also stand up to protect one another from
harassment._

And with that, they've moved from being a dumb pipe to being a force for
censorship. Way to go folks. :(

The big problem we see with the internet, and basically any sort of truly open
point-to-point communication system that is truly unbiased, is that means that
people are able to talk to whomever they want.

True, free, and open communication, with all that that implies.

Personally, I think the only technological solution to this is to make it
expensive enough to send messages that people won't just go and harass for the
lulz. One could even imagine a system where, perhaps using some kind of
bitcoin analogue, additional traffic to a user becomes increasingly
"expensive" unless given specific rebates by the recipient--in effect, the
more messages a user gets, the more expensive it is to message them, unless
they give you permission to do so.

As for non-tech solutions, people need to come to terms with the fact that
others may say terrible and hurtful things to them, and they need to have the
fortitude to deal with it or ignore it (and that's not easy, but it's
essential if you want to be a responsible adult that encourages freedom in
today's world).

~~~
JackC
_And with that, they 've moved from being a dumb pipe to being a force for
censorship._

This has nothing to do with censorship. It doesn't attempt to make harassment
impossible or illegal. It's a social strategy: you can choose to harass people
online, or you can choose to be friends with the Tor developers, but you can't
do both.

For that matter, harassment is _also_ a social strategy to discourage unwanted
activity: you can choose to be a high-profile woman online, or you can choose
not to have tons of strangers hate you, but you can't do both. So if this Tor
statement somehow _was_ censorship, harassment would be censorship as well.

And so would lots of other things people do every day. We're social animals;
we do things to encourage or discourage social participation that we like or
don't like. If you have stinky shoes, we stand farther away. If you say shitty
things to women, you can't be friends with the Tor developers. It's not
censorship, it's freedom of choice.

 _people need to come to terms with the fact that others may say terrible and
hurtful things to them, and they need to have the fortitude to deal with it or
ignore it_

If you need people to do that, you have a problem, because it is not going to
happen. No snark here: if your plan for encouraging freedom depends on people
not walking away from harassment, it is an unworkable plan.

If you walk into a bar and everyone shouts terrible things at you, you are not
going to "deal with it or ignore it"; you are going to leave. Right now big
parts of the internet are like that for (e.g.) women: a bar they walk into,
get terrible things shouted at them, and leave.

The Tor devs here are saying, metaphorically, "hey, cut it out, man. You're
making this bar suck for everyone." To me, that's a responsible way to
encourage freedom in today's world, and more people should do the same.

~~~
angersock
The Tor devs are saying "Hey, somebody has been harassing one of our members,
and _we 're going to do something about it, concretely, and we write tools,
but that's not enough_." So, a casual reading suggests that they are intending
to do something beyond mere blogging to help their friend. Such an action,
unless it's just counter-harassment, could well be censorship. That's how I
read their post. And no, it's not a good thing that their friend is being
harassed.

Basically, as I read it, their post was either feel-good me-too blog support,
or it was a declaration of intent to do _something_ , the nature of the
problem in turn suggesting censorship or mechanisms for censorship.

The whole "If you need people to have thick skins, well, that's a problem"
attitude just isn't supported by the tech we're working with.

Fact: It is possible to send a direct message from one person to another
without any significant intermediary (via email, twitter, etc.). _This is
freakin ' awesome_.

Fact: Some percentage of communications sent will be negative or offensive.

Fact: We can either stop offensive communications in transit, or we can ignore
them at receipt. We can't stop them being transmitted without creating a
mechanism for immediate _de facto_ censorship (hell, consider shadowbans in HN
for an example of this).

Fact: If we choose to stop offensive communications in transit, we are
enabling the stopping of _any_ communications in transit. The same software
that lets us drop messages that say "kill all women"\--or some other ghastly
comment--is the same software that lets us drop messages that say "save all
women". To pretend otherwise is willfully ignorant.

So, it follows (to me, at any rate) that the only way to prevent the
installation of such apparatus is to handle discarding messages at the point
of reception--and that means being able to ignore or filter out things we
disagree with _without_ calling for some central authority to protect us.

I even suggested a nice area of exploration for decentralized handling of that
kind of spamming, but nobody cares about that--they just disagree with
something else and flag to the bottom of the page. There's your system in
action, by the way.

