
We are in the early days of online harassment being taken as a serious problem - dnetesn
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/online-harassment-is-awful-what-can-we-do-to-change-it/381754/?single_page=true
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spindritf
This is part of a larger attack on anonymity online. That piece from Pacific
Standard mentioned in the OP certainly was[1].

Before, it was "think of the children" used by politicians to justify various
censorship measures[2]. Now, it's "think of women" used by the media to
undermine anonymous communication. They cannot profit from it therefore anyone
who doesn't post banalities under their real name, so they can be safely
adorned with ads, is a troll and an abuser.

[1]
[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children#As_justi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children#As_justification_for_censorship)

~~~
zzalpha
Or, you know, alternatively, maybe online harassment is actually a problem.

But you're right, a massive government/capitalist co-conspiracy working to end
your right to anonymity is definitely the more reasonable explanation...

------
mindslight
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.

~~~
tedks
>When this approach inevitably fails, then this same "societal pressure" will
be parlayed into the new common wisdom of outright censorship of the Internet.

I don't think it's possible to say that social pressure, or in other words,
education, is definitely going to fail. Harassers are people. We need to teach
boys that they are not, in fact, entitled to women's bodies, and hopefully
then not just online harassment but also street harassment, sexual harassment,
and sexual assault will decrease.

But what's wrong with blocking 4chan, or gamergaters.com or whatever else?
These are sites that are demonstratably, reliably causing people gross
personal distress and sometimes egging people on into massive acts of
violence. Notably, the UC Santa Barbara shooter was a 4chan member, and almost
certainly was radicalized there.

It's easy to say that "free speech" or "censorship-free internet" are good
things; it's much harder to look at the actual statistics and realize that
every post on 4chan is a little piece of an inevitable hate crime. The average
is the total over the number; regardless of the small average contribution of
each 4chan post to harassment and violence, the end result is GamerGate and
mass murder.

Ironically, when it comes to Muslims doing the same thing as white men on
4chan, the media and hacker news is united in wanting to shut down "radical
Islamist forums."

At the end of the day, you have to decide what's more important: an internet
where no website is blocked, or the safety of women. If you decide the former,
you are every bit as responsible for the deaths of women as the people who
physically pull the trigger, because you said nothing and did nothing when you
could have stopped the root cause.

As another point, there is massive value _to the survivors_ in making it
absolutely clear that what happened to them is _not_ okay; that they did _not_
deserve it; that they _should_ be outraged and that the perpetrators, when
caught, _will_ be punished and ostracized. The only way to do this is by
actually condemning, punishing, and ostracizing perpetrators. The benefits of
solidarity are very real; women who experience victim-blaming after sexual
assault have vastly higher rates of PTSD.

So societal pressure in favor of feminism and away from male entitlement seems
like a fine way to address this problem, and if it leads to the death of
websites that organize harassment campaigns so much the better.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
I agree wholeheartedly. 4chan is a menace that directly leads to mass murder
and GamerGate.

Just look at these mass murderers in training over at /ck/:
[https://boards.4chan.org/ck/](https://boards.4chan.org/ck/)

Absolutely horrific. Every post over there is a little piece of an inevitable
hate crime. The safety of women is too important to let them get away.

Apologies for being blunt and sardonic, but seriously? Your preconceptions of
4chan are so horribly skewed and your saying that the UC Barbara shooter was a
4chan reader is an incredibly stupid justification. I'm sure Facebook
radicalizes people every day. Ban Facebook?

~~~
tedks
I'm not going to click that link, I'm sorry. I don't know what perverse topic
/ck/ pertains to but there's no way it'd be good for me.

It's a fact that 4chan is directly related to harassment and mass murder. I
don't know why you'd dispute this unless you agreed with it.

~~~
mindslight
It seems you were right. I impulsively clicked that link and was promptly
greeted with several graphic pictures celebrating murder. But still I'm wise
enough to understand that I will never convince anyone to become vegetarian by
preaching at them or controlling their discussion.

~~~
tedks
Bet you could make a lot of people vegetarian by banning slaughterhouses.

That's what 4chan is. It's a memetic slaughterhouse.

------
vezzy-fnord
_Facebook now requires admins of groups deemed to be using hateful or
offensive speech to publicly identify themselves._

Anyone familiar with the history of Usenet will know that real name policies
aren't an effective approach.

~~~
arbitrage
Considering that there was no real name verification built into USENET at all,
and no central authority, this is not an apt analogy.

------
chillingeffect
How come it is only being considered a serious problem _now_? When it was just
men getting harassed, wasn't it serious then too?

------
dang
Since the article's headline doesn't reflect its contents (and would likely
lead to definitional debates), we changed it to a sentence from the article
that does.

------
penprog
>The bundle of nightmares that is the GamerGate movement, an amorphous
collection of gamers largely focused on harassing feminist game developers and
critics, managed to make the front page of The New York Times.

Why did I know this article had to do with #gamergate, can we get this shit
out of here? This is a highly politicized and uninteresting topic.

~~~
delecti
GamerGate is merely a symptom of a society that allows online harassment (or
at least doesn't sufficiently persecute it), and it's currently a very visible
example.

Of course there are assholes in the movement, there are in any side of any
movement. The problem is that they've got access to weapons which are largely
unregulated.

~~~
talmand
Just curious, which "weapons" do you think require regulations?

~~~
jerf
Our psyches are tuned for a world where a village of several hundred people is
pretty big. No matter how rational you may think you are, when stepping into a
"village" of millions just getting _normal_ , non-harassing feedback that
happens to be partially negative can be overwhelming to your emotions, even
_before_ we discuss people systematically abusing negative feedback.

The worst thing about the "weapons" is that they aren't even "weapons"...
they're just... communication. How can we fix harassment when just plain
_normal usage_ of the relevant channels alone can be emotionally overwhelming?

Serious question for serious thought. I've got no practical answer and I've
been pondering this question off and on for at least 15 years now.

~~~
penprog
This is why I hate these articles, we get people like you that call insults
"weapons". They aren't, nobody get's physically damaged by an insult.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon)
this is what the word weapon means

The only way to stop online trolling is by educating people to ignore stuff on
the internet. If some anonymous nobody starts saying weird stuff to you,
ignore them. If they threaten you, call the police and ignore them. It's that
simple.

edit: changed weapon to comment

~~~
jerf
"They aren't, nobody get's physically damaged by a weapon."

Err, I know what you tried to say there... but you're still wrong, because
"physically" hurt is not the only relevant type of hurt.

You are not a robot. You are an emotional being, and you can be emotionally
hurt by things that perhaps wouldn't hurt Spock but _do_ hurt you. Your
threshold may be much higher than many other people's. As it happens, mine is
too.

But that doesn't make us "right", or better, and it doesn't mean that people
don't get really hurt on the Internet when thrust into a world their brain is
quite literally not prepared for. If anything, _we_ are the freaks of nature.

Also note I didn't even limit it to _insults_... just perfectly normal social
interaction can be quite draining. The realm of "negative feedback" is _far_
richer than just "insults". Just _receiving_ 4000 emails on a topic is an
astonishing experience that I have but put my toe in the water of, and have
little desire to experience the full blast.

