
How the online hate mob set its sights on me - philangist
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/dec/20/social-media-twitter-online-shame
======
ttctciyf
Maybe stating the obvious, but it's fascinated me for a while how online
interactions with high affect content are almost exclusively aimed at the
interactors' imaginary constructions of each other - there's so little of a
person in their tweets or forum posts that imagination ('fantasy',
'projection', or whatever) is required in considerable degree for there to be
any realistic sense of the interactee in the interactor's mind.

And yet, perhaps especially in online 'shaming' or targeted critique, the
shamer is (presumably) unable to discern that they are really tilting at an
imaginary person they have constructed themselves from rather scant
information.

Not that it's a new behavioural feature, of course - propagandists and
demagogues have relied on this sort of propensity forever. Maybe it's the
capacity of internet media to 'present' a person by tiny amounts of
information that brings it out.

By 'tiny' we could be talking about a single bit, btw - I've seen plenty of
reactions apparently to individuals fully formed in the reactor's mind,
despite that their information consists only in the fact that someone clicked
'downvote' rather than 'upvote'!

~~~
madaxe_again
That's most social interaction you've just described there. We generally
converse with a projection, an idiopathic construct representative of another,
of their state of mind, so we can interpret and respond to them appropriately.

Issues arise when this projected individual differs substantially to the
actual. On a one to one face to face basis, one typically rapidly readjusts
one's model of another rapidly, as it's free floating and has no broader
corpus to fall back on. This varies when you deal with someone famous (large
corpus, many precepts) or intimate (seemingly large corpus, actually selection
bias and neurosis), and the model usually becomes less accurate.

Where it gets interesting is herd interactions, either on or offline. Lynch
mobs, trial by media, witch burning, Internet hate machine, war - all arise
from inaccurate models of the minds of others, which are reinforced through
perceived (abiline!) collective consensus.

Long story short, there's no good and evil, most narrative is self
constructed, this is as old as man.

~~~
jnbiche
> Long story short, there's no good and evil, most narrative is self
> constructed, this is as old as man.

And cultural relativism is a marvelous excuse for the evil of man.

~~~
mafribe
Cultural relativism is a refinement of cultural absolutism, in order better to
deal with the empirically undeniable discrepancies in moral judgements between
different individuals and groups. Basically:

Cultural absolutism: us good, them evil.

Cultural relativism: under these social circumstances, those moral preferences
are likely to emerge.

Clearly, the former is easier to handle than the latter, which has advantages
in some situations.

~~~
enave
>Cultural absolutism: us good, them evil.

>Cultural relativism: under these social circumstances, those moral
preferences are likely to emerge.

This strikes me as the fallacy of the excluded middle.

Many people believe one culture is better than another without necessarily
believing one is entirely good/without fault and the other is entirely bad.

The problem with cultural relativism as I understand it is that it denies me
the right to make any judgement. I mean, you phrased as opposing "they're bad"
but in practice it opposes "they're worse"

~~~
mafribe

        fallacy of the excluded middle.
    

I'd say I was being terse, and trying to boild down the matter to its essence,
so as to enable clear thinking. Naturally, positions we hold are more complex.

    
    
       it denies me the right to make any judgement.
    

I don't think a mature cultural relativist denies you any judgements, it's
more an invitation to investigate more nuanced positions.

------
omginternets
My rule for social media is the following: only go when you know exactly what
you're looking for.

The academic community on twitter is very active and the content is very good,
so I go to twitter to keep up with the latest cogneuro trends. This having
been said, I'm now clearly in a professional environment, so I think about
what I'm writing.

I walk through twitter in the same way I walk through the ghetto: mouth shut
and head on a swivel. I'm not going to start disseminating my political
opinions as if the average twit gave a damn.

~~~
drcongo
Some of your political opinions just disseminated out right there.

~~~
garrettgrimsley
This is not Twitter, and the poster is utilizing a pseudo-anonymous handle,
perhaps unlike on Twitter. They don't care about disseminating their beliefs
here because they won't be attributed to their "real" identity.

~~~
jschwartzi
Or maybe they're willing to disseminate some of their opinions because they
trust HN to not hang, draw, and quarter them.

~~~
garrettgrimsley
HN is not a black hole, information can flow out of it just as easily as it
flows in. If they are careful to not disseminate their personal views on one
public internet forum they should be just as cautious about voicing them on
another. I believe that the pseudo-anonymity is far more important than the
platform.

------
dennisnedry
Social Media seems like the adult version of high school all over again. You
have the bullies and popularity contests. Jon Ronson was one of the
unfortunate who tried to tell the crowd that they shouldn't judge, and instead
became one of the kids being picked on.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
High school, or middle school is not materially different than the rest of the
world.

The idea of "The adult version of high school" for situations that involve
bullies, ingroup/outgroup and pettiness etc... is silly because it assumes
that those things are only relegated to children.

Case in point: The G20 in Australia[1]. All the cool kids sit with Obama,
Putin ate lunch alone and was on the outside of the class photo. If the
highest level of political diplomacy is also "the adult version of high
school"...well then I guess the whole thing is just high school.

[1][http://www.pbs.org/video/2365401766/](http://www.pbs.org/video/2365401766/)
time:50:08

~~~
Kristine1975
Except for Dilma Rousseff, president of Brazil, by the way:
[http://www.stefan-niggemeier.de/blog/wp-
content/g20_2.jpeg](http://www.stefan-niggemeier.de/blog/wp-
content/g20_2.jpeg) (the picture belongs to an article of a German journalist
about misleading pictures in the media: [http://www.stefan-
niggemeier.de/blog/19865/super-symbolbilde...](http://www.stefan-
niggemeier.de/blog/19865/super-symbolbilder-putin-einsam-und-verlassen/))

------
Kristine1975
This seems to be a follow-up to his earlier article
[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-s...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-
shaming-lindsey-stone-jon-ronson) (and also his book "So you've been publicly
shamed").

~~~
garrettgrimsley
Discussion of the that piece [0] and a much larger discussion [1] of the
excerpted chapter of his book.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085680](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085680)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039274](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039274)

------
rl3
I will relish the day when the Internet Outrage Machine becomes sloppy enough
to fall on its own sword, repeatedly.

When that happens, we might see a countervailing trend wherein the internet
largely turns against that type of behavior—likely via way of directing
outrage and shaming towards those who engage in outrage and shaming.

Ideally, the dynamic would be kind of like a snake eating its tail.

~~~
zo1
It will fall the day that we're able to link the comments and accounts across
multiple sites/services together to actual individuals. The "shaming"
mentioned will continue for the culprits, just like it did for the victims,
into their real-life.

I am actually torn about this. On the one hand, I understand and value that
anonymity (at least, superficially) is big part of what makes the internet
great. But on the other hand, I can't help but believe that we'll be in a
completely better society if people _didn 't_ have a space to vent their rage
in some sort of wide-reaching, public arena. Leaving their only recourse for
dealing with such rage to be actual manifested "rage/hate/racism/sexism/other-
ism", which is pretty darn easy to point out concretely, and to ostracize.

~~~
scholia
I'd like to think you're right, but there are plenty of people who seriously
believe hateful or frankly stupid things. Which is to say, there are people
who are _proud_ of being racist, sexist, creationist or whatever, and services
like Twitter enable them to find lots of other people who share their views.
Rather than being ostracized, they get support, and that results in mobbing.

The use of real names on Twitter, Facebook etc doesn't actually stop this,
though I presume it moderates it somewhat. (The "secret sympathizers" may be
less likely to join the mob.)

------
jacquesm
The Justine Sacco story has an interesting follow up here:

[http://gawker.com/justine-sacco-is-good-at-her-job-and-
how-i...](http://gawker.com/justine-sacco-is-good-at-her-job-and-how-i-came-
to-pea-1653022326)

~~~
Kristine1975
_It was a natural post. Twitter disasters are the quickest source of outrage,
and outrage is traffic. I didn 't think about whether or not I might be
ruining Sacco's life._

That's Gawker for you. They never care for the people they write about, they
only care for the clicks. Just like when they outed the CFO of Condé Nast:
[http://www.salon.com/2015/07/17/gawker_drags_media_coverage_...](http://www.salon.com/2015/07/17/gawker_drags_media_coverage_to_a_new_low_outing_an_executive_just_because_they_can/)

And who could forget the time when they filed the sexual assault of a guy
under "first world problem":
[https://archive.is/f0ZbV](https://archive.is/f0ZbV) (archive link because no
traffic for Gawker).

------
Chris2048
Just a point - let's not call 'shaming' what might be 'harassment' or worse.

Shaming someone attempts to make them feel bad about their actions. Attempting
to get someone fired, and spamming them with threats is not shaming...

------
6d0debc071
I've been on forums where people said the most atrocious things to each other.
But there was never any come back from it because A) The audience was
relatively limited and B) None of us used real names or spread out ID around
too widely.

You could pay me to use social media, but considering the potential
reputational costs I'd have to be paid a lot.

------
13thLetter
Ronson's a cogent writer, but I can't help think he's suffering from cognitive
dissonance. Perhaps because he still clings hopelessly to the idea that the
modern concept of "social justice" is somehow beneficial, he keeps trying to
find excuses for why mobbing, shaming, hate mobs, rushes to judgement and so
forth could theoretically be okay in some situation and so we shouldn't
consider such behavior automatically bad.

To his immense credit, he doesn't go around defending specific instances of
hate mobbing, but his reluctance to fully commit to opposing the technique
hampers whatever it is he's attempting to accomplish.

------
EGreg
I find similar things in youtube comments, facebook threads etc. A facebook
page or youtube video with, say, pro Israel message gets a mob of commenters
shouting down anyone who speaks about the plight of Palestinians. Meanwhile a
page or video about "occupation" will have a mob shouting down anyone who
speaks about Israel's right to exist. Very few in the mob actually make point
by point rebuttals or even actual sense.

The same can be seen in religious forums, atheists, etc. Try to post in a
religious stackexchange - with the notable exception of
judaism.stackexchange.com your post is likely to be censoredor heavily
modified if it's too critical or raises inconvenient issues.

At least, sites like quora and stackexchange have rules that tend to promote a
clean end result, with quality answers. On social sites like facebook,
however, things usually devolve into over 90% "bad" argumentation as defined
by paul graham.

I think there is some internet study that anger and outrage motivates people
to respond more than good things.

On Twitter, where people shout into the void and most people in the mob don't
have a reputation to carefully manage, you can attract even more angry crap.

On YouTube it's the same principle - comments are public so the angry
confrontations with low wuality argumentation are more likely.

The design of the site makes a huge difference. Which is why libertarians are
just wrong, there is no "free market", every game has rules. You hear that
libertarians? I am waiting for you on this thread!! :-P

~~~
zo1
>" _The design of the site makes a huge difference. Which is why libertarians
are just wrong, there is no "free market", every game has rules. You hear that
libertarians? I am waiting for you on this thread!! :-P_"

Oh, we hear you. We, or at least I, am just not quite able to parse what
you're saying.

Are you implying that Youtube is supposed to enforce some sort of "free-
market" on the comments? Or are you baiting for some sort of "mob shouting"
reply that you reference in your post? Do care to elaborate, as we
Libertarians (and anarcho-capitalists), are listening.

~~~
EGreg
Well, it was a bit of a joke, at the end of the post... showing how inflaming
comments or outrage makes people comment more than nice stuff which they can
agree with. Together with the description of public comment systems becoming
proliferated with the negative spirals, it was also a bit meta :)

------
fit2rule
It is pretty clear that as a species, our group dynamics have both pro- and
contra- modes that can be applied by the group towards the individual. Its a
sliding scale .. we eat our martyrs and pamper our sinners, alike.

Its cases such as this one that remind me personally that you cannot trust a
mob, a crowd can be as banal and base as any wild animal, and groups need
guidance to be of benefit to the individual cells which form the whole. There
are no guarantees with the mob - strength, unity, enterprise - these must all
be applied towards the effort to prevent the mob from consuming itself. Humans
are cannibalistic - if not digestively, at least figuratively - and we form
whatever cultures we can select from the infinite void in order to undo this
cannibalistic urge. But yet, still it persists.

------
nefitty
Twitter, Reddit, 4chan... They're all starting to look more like each other
every day.

~~~
nih0
Nobody on 4chan would roast you for writing "Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get
Aids. Just kidding. I’m white", they roast SJWs, feminists...

~~~
mcherm
Quickly denouncing anyone who expresses certain sorts of opinions thus
preventing certain sorts of discussion seems much the same to me regardless of
which opinions it is aimed at.

~~~
Kristine1975
4chan isn't really for discussion, though. It's for pictures, palaver and
pissing matches.

~~~
garrettgrimsley
And Twitter, with its 140 character limit, is for discussion? I've seen _far_
more productive discussion on 4chan than on Twitter.

------
wobbleblob
Welcome to twitter. It's completely unclear to me why anyone would use it,
especially after writing a book about how using it wrong can get you fired and
ruin your life.

------
musesum
What is twitter's TOS for General AI? Would like to enlist a brutalironybot
for trending shame tweets.

------
tarsinge
I dont't see how there is more outrage and shaming on social media than in the
real world. Empathetic and benevolent behaviour could be expected when Twitter
was a small community. Would everyone get Justine Sacco "joke" if she was
yelling it in the streets ?

~~~
smt88
Social media has far more vitriol and shaming because it is radically
different in very important ways:

1\. Anonymity

2\. Mixing of cultures that rarely (if ever) meet in the real world

3\. Loss of nuances when speech is converted to text

4\. Loss of context due to text constraints (can't write many complete,
complex thoughts in 140 characters)

5\. Less potential for physical consequences

------
randycupertino
Sometimes shaming is good. The drought shaming in California actually helped
the biggest wasters cut down on their water use more than any fines would
(they are too rich to be disuaded by fines).

------
herbig
He should actually just give this a rest. The article does not contribute to
the discussion, it just further plugs his book.

She was terribly wronged but no one else keeps bringing her up except him, for
obvious financial gain.

If he has something new to say then great, but cherry picking ridiculous
tweets out of thousands of them, many of them complete trolls, only gives
voice to an obviously ignorant minority.

------
bertil
I am really bothered by the expression ‘the online hate mob’, as if this was a
consistent and coordinated group of people who have an active and positive
role in hatred.

It’s just a set of people who a. had a bad day; b. disagree; c. have
arguments, or agree with people who do, and resent the fact that those
arguments were openly dismissed.

“Troll” was an expression used by feminists (Ellison) 20 years ago, when they
switched from presence-based meetings to on-line forum. They were confronted
to dissent for the first time, didn’t know what to do with it. And roll all
dissent into a intentionally de-humanised collective, where counter-arguments
were gladly mixed with abuse to discredit them.

That kind of conflation became so prevalent, that is –ironically– also what
drove people to miss Sacco’s cynicism.

~~~
vcjohnson
Do you often get death threats from people who are simply having a bad day and
disagree with you? Trivialization of the horrific elements of online
interaction is just as bad (if not worse) as conflating them with legitimate
dissent.

~~~
bertil
Yes. I ride a bike in London, and taxi drivers tend to act on it too. I’ve
been agile enough to avoid the worst, but my bike was smashed more than I can
count (I use city-wide bike scheme). I’ve ended in the hospital twice: I got
my front teeth smashed once; I also got my knee busted another time.

I am not trivialising threats, just arguing that putting them in context would
help _solve_ the issue — a lot more than putting thousands of teenagers in
jail just because they didn’t mesure the consequence of their anger.

