Tag: 4Chan

Online Harassment & The Internet Experiment

In last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, staff writer Jenna Wortham asks Why Can’t Silicon Valley Fix Online Harassment? Citing some alarming statistics from a 2104 Pew Research study, she writes …

“… 40 percent of adult internet users have dealt with online harassment. And those numbers go up among young adults (especially women) and nonwhite users. Women are significantly more likely than men to report being stalked or sexually harassed on the internet, and 51 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they had experienced harassment, compared with 34 percent of whites.”

Online harassment is no joke. At scale, it can be emotionally devastating and legitimately terrifying for victims. It has been known to cause economic and social harm and to catalyze both physical assault and suicides. While we extoll the virtues of connectedness fostered by an “open” internet, harassment is the mutant howling in the basement nobody wants to talk about. And Wortham rightly observes that the monster is a byproduct of Silicon Valley’s unique blend of new-money libertarianism built on a foundation of faded, hippie idealism—incongruous doctrines that were, for many, synthesized in the manifesto A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, delivered by John Perry Barlow at Davos in 1996.

But if online harassment is a disease and the first step to recovery is admitting there’s a problem, then perhaps that first step is to properly contextualize Barlow’s Declaration as the naive and petulant outburst it was. A moment of whimsy rather than the foundation for a sustainable, or even humane, proposal. Nevertheless, the belief that cyberspace remains some magical realm beyond the normal boundaries of society continues to delay rational discourse on any number of problems specifically caused or exacerbated by the technology.

Although harassment will occur on a public forum like Twitter, it often begins by brewing on a site like 4Chan, a “discussion” board populated by mostly males from pre-teen to mid-30s, who, in every sense of the cliché, have too much time on their hands. And although everyone on 4Chan is anonymous—it is in fact the site where the hacktivist group Anonymous began—they might collectively be seen as that mutant creature borne by Barlow’s Declaration. Like most adolescents, the thing they seem to hate most is being told what to do—hence the the harassment-filled shitstorm known as “Gamergate.”

Although I would never condone harassment, I think I understand how at least some of it starts. This blog has very occasionally elicited accusations of racism or sexism because there are people in the world who will filter literally any topic through such lenses, even when there is no rational basis for doing so. If I were an adolescent who spent inordinate time among other adolescents in a forum like 4Chan, the temptation to retaliate against these absurd accusations by weaponizing overt racism or sexism—at least for my own amusement—could be very great. And once it begins, it’s easy enough for a little spark to become a flash fire.

In all likelihood, the majority of trolls out there are young men who harass for the lulz—an expression derived from the acronym LOL. Think of this class of trolls as easily excitable chimpanzees who will gather around a target of ridicule and pile on, but who are also easily bored and distracted by the next shiny object. So, if the target of their ridicule or cruelty doesn’t respond, this group usually returns to its natural state of online gaming and metaphorically throwing feces at one another.

But if the target of their ridicule does respond, this only increases the opportunity for lulz, which means the chimps remain engaged and incentivized to keep raising the bar of harassment of their target. Hence, the truly hideous invocations of rape and murder—complete with photographic depictions of these acts—that are so commonly employed by harassers of this nature. From this phenomenon comes the common-sense directive Don’t Feed the Troll, which is fine up to a point but can also be a form of victim-blaming as the volume and virulence of the harassment increases.

Wortham notes the apparent futility of “counterspeech,” which she describes as “the practice of bystander intervention that overpowers aggressors in an attempt to deter them.” I’m not at all surprised the EFF endorses this self-governing tactic as a “solution,” seeing as the organization (co-founded by Barlow) remains mesmerized by the fallacy that the internet naturally enables good to triumph over evil as long as pesky rules don’t get in the way.

I’m also not surprised that the two organizations Wortham highlights as designed to deploy “counterspeech” seem to be finding the method ineffective. If the general rule of thumb is Don’t Feed the Troll, then an attempt to surround a victim in a barrier of Twitter-hugs is like dipping her in chocolate and Cheetos. It’s only going to whip the trolls into a feeding frenzy. As stated above, it is important to remember that a large segment of the people who engage in this kind of harassment HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO. This is a hobby for many a young male, who really needs to get a life; and it is therefore difficult for people who do have lives to outlast or overwhelm the harassers.

Presumably, there are casual harassers as well—people who don’t spend time seething on 4Chan, but who obey an impulse to add their 140 characters of vitriol when they see a trend piling onto a target they don’t like or who has pissed them off. And I suppose we have to assume at this point that people can be harassed by bot swarm as well. But the fact that a real human being can be remotely and anonymously hounded to the point of being harmed or harming herself is a very real problem we have yet to confront in any substantive way. What is the responsibility of one voice in a million that feeds the proximate cause of a suicide? I don’t know, but it sure as hell belies Barlow’s dreamy assumptions.

Of course the thesis question Wortham asks is this: Can Silicon Valley do anything about online harassment? In theory, why not? As stated in several other posts, the internet companies are telling a half truth at best when they claim to have free speech obligations. They may wish to support free speech, and that’s fine, but the individual platforms are no more bound by the First Amendment than a retail store or restaurant in the physical world. Wortham is right to view the deciding factors as both ideological and financial, and in that order—a story of what happens when hippies become billionaires.

The policy positions and Terms of Service that still flow from Barlow’s Declaration have made the internet into a computer model of a social experiment which—to an extent—places people in philosopher John Locke’s hypothetical state of nature. Like Locke, the model then asks whether or not Man really needs to make a bargain with the State in order to protect his sovereignty as an individual. In 1996, Barlow declared the internet to be a “home of Mind,” a place where the legal conventions of statehood (namely law) have no purpose—an ideal based on the assumption that people are basically good and law is exclusively coercive.

But in 1689, in his Second Treatise of Government, Locke argued that Man in a state of nature (i.e. without government) is more free but also more vulnerable to human predators, who may enslave him, kill him, or take his property. Hence, the bargain one makes with the State is to trade as little freedom as possible in exchange for relative security. Thus, if a woman in a Target store were harassed in Twitter style (i.e. told by a swarm of men that they hope she gets raped and killed), the security and police who will soon arrive on her behalf are a manifestation of that Lockean bargain.

In principle, the major platform owners can take steps to mitigate online harassment, and they will likely discover this ability the moment there is a financial incentive to do so. But in the meantime, we might learn something from the computer model, which reveals exactly what can happen in a stateless and lawless “community.”

Consider the rash of hate crimes and threats following the election—all presumably committed by people who believed Trump’s presidency granted them permission to act upon latent antipathy. But how many Swastikas have been spray-painted by committed Nazis and how many by teenagers doing it for the lulz? Hard to say, but it’s likely that both motivations are present and that this is one way in which real life comes to resemble cyberspace rather than the other way around. And that may prove to be the most dangerous phenomenon of all.

Flags & the Tyranny of Quantum Liberty

It has been fascinating to watch the power of social media rapidly catalyze a latent disdain for the confederate battle flag as a byproduct of our outrage over the hate-filled, random murder of nine defenseless people.  I say it’s interesting because I have long-believed that there are perfectly unemotional arguments against any official flying of these battle flags, even if they did not connote racism.  Slavery, Dixiecrats, and the KKK aside, those flags were carried by regiments who fought to sever allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, and so do not belong flown over any institution that now derives its authority, liberty, and security from the power of that same body of law. As such, I have never been able to fathom why any conservative would defend the flag’s use in an official context, let alone anyone who has taken an oath to defend the Constitution.

Of course, these battle flags do connote racism and slavery and hate. In fact, the Stars & Bars may well have become one of the symbols of the early KKK because that group’s first members were supposedly veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia, whose banner that was. And I suspect these flags will soon come down in their official contexts, while private sales of rebel merch will continue to skyrocket, despite mainstream retailers like Walmart and Amazon discontinuing the sale of confederate-themed items. Some citizens who purchase these emblems are, of course, racists and haters, who were doubly-appalled last week by the concurrent hoisting of the rainbow flag with the Supreme Court’s affirmation of marriage rights for gay couples.  (No doubt, It sucks to be on the wrong side of history. Just ask Robert E. Lee.)

But many who will suddenly crave rebel hats, mugs, tees, shot glasses, etc. will do so as a reaction to the feeling that this sudden anti-flag “tyranny” represents another example of federal government overreach. And it is this narrative, often expressed by both the left and the right, that I believe is being overlooked, particularly as it plays out in cyberspace. As Jacob Siegel explains in this excellent article for The Daily Beast, it is a narrative that has been seething in the underbelly of the Internet for years.  And most interestingly, Siegel describes a confluence in which the anarchic sensibilities of the left swim in the same ideological pool that nourishes hate-crimes destined to manifest in people like Dylann Roof. Siegel writes…

“A reactionary, defiantly anti-social politics has been emerging for the last decade. It was well known under the auspices of “trolling” and well hidden by its pretense of trickstersism. It was actually juvenile fascism and vitriolic racism but, because it grinned and operated in cyberspace, it was a sensation when it first appeared less than a decade ago. Excitable theorists, bored journalists and naive political activists looked at its strange, adolescent face and pronounced on its revolutionary potential.”

My fellow progressives look at Dylann Roof, see a racist with a gun and want to go after the racism and the guns.  This is understandable. But it has thus far been anathema to the progressive agenda to look critically at the role of social media itself in helping to foster the seemingly relentless increase in these localized massacres.  Siegel provides insight into the evolution of hate groups, first on 4Chan and now on Reddit, and he describes the split within the “community” of trolls that produced the vigilante-style hacktivism of Anonymous. From Siegel again …

“In 2008 when The Church of Scientology began suing websites, forcing them to remove videos the Church considered private or defamatory, 4chan turned its attention to trolling the Scientologists. Eventually that produced a schism on 4chan. Some members, inspired by their success going after Scientology and the attention it brought, wanted to take a more activist role. The dedicated trolls rebelled. The activists splintered off and became the collective represented by a Guy Fawkes mask, known as Anonymous.” 

Although it is presently a progressive or liberal position to champion an “open” Internet bordering on a lawless internet with an absolutist approach to speech and a professed intolerance for infiltration by intelligence services, we might want to reconsider a more sober and balanced approach to these matters.  Because we can remove all the flags we want and scream for all the gun control we’re never going to get (or isn’t going to work), but what does work from time to time is intelligence gathering and, dare I say it, public demand that owners of businesses not support or profit from hateful, offensive, or criminal behavior. Siegel writes …

“Reddit defends the existence of communities like r/gasthekikes, r/watchniggersdie, and r/rapingwomen on free-speech grounds. That atmosphere has attracted right-wing extremists who left or were booted from other more established sites like Stormfront, where moderators, aware of scrutiny from law enforcement, have stricter posting rules.”

If Arkansas-based Walmart believes it’s time to remove a half-innocuous symbol from its merchandise, does it really make sense that San Francisco-based Reddit can defend hosting platforms that support the encouragement of racists, misogynists, and anti-semites to commit acts of violence?  Even if 99% of the idiots in the rapingwomen “community” on Reddit are not prospective assailants, and their speech is technically protected, that does not mean Reddit can claim this forum serves any social value whatsoever. And when the owner of a site or a publication makes a judgment call to moderate or even delete material that is both offensive and useless, it’s called editing, not censorship. It is the difference between a mature grasp of the contours of freedom and an adolescent penchant for anarchy. Anarchy is an illusion of freedom in which nobody is free except the monsters. Perhaps the most compelling statement Siegel makes is this one:

“What’s long been clear to the fascists has eluded the rest of us for a few reasons. The self-serving deceptions embedded in the idea of trolling, for one. And our persistent difficulty in grasping, despite all evidence to the contrary offered by governments and Silicon Valley plutocrats, that the Internet was not built to liberate us.”

Yes, I’ll be happy to see confederate flags placed in their proper historic context despite the fact that doing so is already amping up racist reaction.  As such, it may be time, while we rebuke the symbols of hate, that we also look more critically at the new mechanisms through which hate preaches, recruits, radicalizes, and activates its soldiers and lone-wolf terrorists. Because many progressive “digital rights” proponents have bought into what I’ll call a quantum view of civil liberty in which the infinite, micro-universe of cyberspace creates infinite opportunities for micro-infringements against an infinite sense of liberty. This mindset cannot help but redefine ordinary boundaries of fairness and decency as censorship. It assumes naively that people left to work things out in the cage-match of cyberspace will naturally produce a collective morality that is somehow more pure than the morality we shape in the physical world and express through the antiquated “rule of law.” Call me a cynic, but as black churches burn once again in the South, I struggle to see evidence of this new, cybernetic enlightenment expressed in the Reddit forum watchniggersdie.

Meanwhile, progressives who buy into the quantum view of civil liberty inadvertently provide aid to domestic terrorists like Roof by demanding policy, which actually makes the job of intelligence services more difficult.  As recently posted, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) stated that Internet-industry funded fears, exaggerating the role of public vs private surveillance of cyberspace has made rational debate in Congress over the proper role of intelligence nearly impossible.  So, while we insist upon the removal of hateful symbols, accepting that this will inspire more hate crimes, perhaps we progressives should also allow for the possibility that there are well-intentioned intelligence experts crawling through threads and chat rooms, who are in fact looking for the next son of a bitch planning another lynching.

When it comes to flags, corny as it may sound, I think about Aaron Sorkin’s fictional President Bartlett from The West Wing, who concluded many stump speeches with the declaration, “This is a time for American heroes, and we reach for the stars.”  The reference to stars is both literal and metaphoric.  Literally, the nation born in science and the enlightenment, and blessed with so many resources, has both the capacity and responsibility to lead the world in grasping the actual stars.  As a metaphor, I think “reaching for the stars” broadly refers to looking with hope toward the future.  The U.S. flag is grounded in heritage, it’s composition a derivative of the British colonial flags, but in place of the Union Jack that once adorned the corner, is the field of stars.  The stripes represent history, but the stars are about the future — about the capacity for the collective states to continually transcend the past, even to defy gravity, as when MIT nerds and good-old-boy pilots once reached for the stars together. Surely anything we call progress must be held to that standard.

Have a safe and happy Fourth of July.

Dawn of the Prankster

About two weeks ago, some disgruntled friends shared a story about Urban Outfitters apparently marketing a faded and blood-stained-looking Kent State college sweatshirt.  Then, in a follow-up story reported by Jordan Sargent in Gawker, an email sent by the retailer’s CEO Dick Haynes explains that the sweatshirt shown in their marketing materials was not representative of a new, purposely designed line of clothing but was a legitimately vintage item purchased at a Rose Bowl flea market and that the red stains on the shirt are not in fact blood.  The photo of the Kent State sweatshirt, according to the email, was being used to promote a new line of faded looks being offered by UO.  Assuming Mr. Haynes is telling the truth about the sweatshirt (and there is no reason to think he isn’t), the story is a pretty good example of so much that is wrong with marketing in the digital age.  In short, does the campaign reveal stupidity or ignorance?  And at what point do such distinctions cease to matter? Do the economics of the Internet expect everyone to become a prankster in order to win?

As Sargent rightly implies, the marketing team at Urban Outfitters almost certainly knew they were courting negative reactions by using the image of this sweatshirt because in the age of social media, controversy can be a great way to get campaigns to go viral. Still, it is not yet clear that “any press is good press” is a universally wise tactic for all brands.  Certainly, a brand can align itself on the side of certain issues, which can be a great link to customers whose values correspond with the brand.  But in the bizarre dynamics of social media, even a hater becomes an evangelist of sorts when he/she shares a story for the purpose of denouncing it.  If the story or campaign offends ten thousand people but appeals to one thousand customers, cha ching.  Not only does this achieve market penetration for pennies, but the people who hate your brand did your selling for you for free.  That said, this can be dangerous territory for a brand looking to build customer relationships over time. Being a shock-jock can backfire.  More importantly, brands and their marketing campaigns are themselves creators of culture and thus feed public consciousness, which is part of why I believe our reaction is so strong against this apparent trivializing of the Kent State shootings.  It becomes a form of revisionist history, which brings us to the question of ignorance in this story.

Jordan Sargent raises the possibility with regard to this sweatshirt campaign that “…various people involved in the transaction were too young to even realize the implications of selling a Kent State sweatshirt that looked like it was bloodstained”  This may be true, and if so, it is yet another unfortunate phenomenon of our times.  Despite the fact that we treated the dawn of Internet access as a great boon to education, we do seem to encounter frequent examples of digital natives achieving adulthood woefully ignorant of some rather significant cultural icons and events.  That anyone in the United States might enter the workforce, let alone in a communications role, without ever hearing of the 1970 shootings at Kent State is both extraordinary and, at this point, not the least bit surprising.  In fact, I personally wondered many years ago whether or not a glut of data (which is not necessarily information) might result in a decline in general cultural literacy.

It was the late 1990s, and I was creative director on a photo shoot in New York.  The photographer and I were joking around, making references to the Marx Brothers, and our comments were sailing over the heads of the models and assistants who were a good decade or so younger.  Who doesn’t know The Marx Brothers, I thought?  Their films were hardly contemporary when I was growing up; they were 40 years old.  Driving home from the shoot, I wondered if the volume and rate at which we were increasingly consuming sounds, words, and images might not have a deleterious effect on long-term memory of important cultural and historical items.  Add to this the ease with which information can be manipulated through the web, coincident with a general distrust of traditional news sources, along with marketers willing to gin up controversy to sell tee shirts, and you get a digital age Tower of Babel.

Perhaps one of the worst phenomena to manifest from all this is that it feeds moral absolutism, which believes the ends justify the means.  For a business owner, those ends might be selling some product, but in the world of civic affairs, this psychology produces more serious results.  We’ve occasionally seen hacktivists identifying as Anonymous meddling self-righteously in politics or in events like the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and they’re free to make a mess of things once in a while because they can’t be held accountable.  It is the same psychology that produces the bottom-feeders at Reddit and 4Chan who would share stolen nude celebrity photos and produce rape and death imagery of Emma Watson in response to her speech at the UN on feminism.  But, interestingly enough, it is also the same psychology that produced a bizarre attempt to attack 4Chan.

In case you missed it, a site was created called emmawatsonyournext.com, which was purported to be the work of anonymous users at 4Chan and appeared to be hosting a countdown to the distribution of revealing photos of the actress.  But according to this story by Rich McCormick in The Verge, the countdown site was in fact a hoax and PR ploy designed to drive traffic toward a campaign to take down the 4Chan site for its exploitation of women.  Now, I personally don’t care if 4Chan disappears; it is of no value to anyone, and the only people who spend time on the site are either losers or FBI agents.  But this hoax of a campaign against the site is likewise exploitative of Miss Watson and the values of feminism, and even if its rather murky ends are anti-misogynist, its means are unacceptable.  Coincidentally, according to McCormick, it was Redditors who apparently identified the companies behind the hoax.

“Some Reddit users were able to sniff out the hoax before its countdown expired, and linked the company behind it to FoxWeekly, a site that plagiarizes from other news sources to solicit views and Facebook likes, and Swenzy, a company that sells followers, likes, and views.”

BUT . . .

According to other sources like The Huffington Post, the organization behind the Emma Watson leak hoax is called Rantic Marketing, except that there doesn’t appear to be any such company because, writes James Cook for Business Insider, “Rantic Marketing is a fake company run by a gang of prolific internet spammers used to quickly capitalize on internet trends for page views.”

So…

I guess what I’m driving at is that the Internet can be kind of a cesspool of idiocy, self-aggrandized hackers, and exploitative opportunists all filtered through the manipulative algorithms of social media’s walled gardens.  And I think the truth is that, even as adults, we are not innately good curators or editors of the fragments of information with which we choose to be bombarded. If nothing else, who has the time?  When I think about the digital native generation growing up in this environment, it’s hard not to wonder if the biggest hoax of all might not be credited to whichever prankster first called this “the information age.”