Slashdot Mirror
Korea's Online Aggression a Taste of the Future?
DerGeist writes "Imagine your life ruined by an organized mob that convicts with scant, unreliable evidence. Fueled only by hearsay and rumors, an invisible horde of your fellow citizens begins bombarding your snailbox, email, phone, work, school and family with threats, insults and general harassment. You are forced to drop out of school and quit your job as a result of constant attacks. You are shunned and ridiculed in public as anywhere you go, you are instantly recognized. Although it may seem to be just a second-rate Hollywood nightmare scenario reminiscent of "The Net," this sort of "organized mob" justice is being dealt out freely in South Korea where net usage is booming. So freely, in fact, that almost 1 in 10 of 13-65 year-olds has felt its sting. Could this trend hit the U.S.? Will policing net behavior eventually become necessary?"
The U.S. citizen has lost all notion of public shame. What in South Korea gets you ostracized, in the U.S. get you on "Entertainment Tonight".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It's just a larger scope than it used to be.
Small towns used to be this way (and still are) where every small little thing get talked about and blown out of proportion.
In the town I grew up in merely having a young males car parked outside a young females house while he goes and visits another young male across the street will spawn all kinds of rumors and anger.
Television has been doing this for quite a while, just take the recent developments in the Jon Benet Ramsey case. I can't even remember at this point why everyone threw so much anger at the parents.
Until people stop hating at first site this won't go away.
The nannies, values police,and the do-gooders will do anything to get the cops policing our wild-west network into some surburbaned picket-fenced wasteland. This excuse seems as useful as all the "for the children" excuses.
I'm trying to visualize "1 in 10 of 13-65 year-olds" being "instantly recognized" and "shunned and ridiculed in public" anywhere they go.
While an amusing image, I'm having a hard time believing it.
Harassment is harassment, whether it takes place in person or over the net. Stalking is stalking, online or not. The laws we have are already adequate to cover these scenarios. The only problem, of course, is identification, but no law will help solve that.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Are that words can be agression or thoughts can be a crime.
Some rich, white girl is killed? Everyone cares. Dozens of Lebanese children killed by a bomb? Meh.
THAT'S the problem with the news media -- not that they accused someone of a crime. I don't give a shit about who they think killed her or if it was the parents. Just shut up about it and get to the news that actually matters.
The U.S. citizen has lost all notion of public shame. What in South Korea gets you ostracized, in the U.S. get you on "Entertainment Tonight".
I can think of several examples where spammers' personal info was posted to Slashdot, and the (alleged) spammer was subjected to harassment in virtually all of the ways described in the article.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
For instance, you can get on places like MySpace or USENET, pose as your victim, and start saying crazy things that will eventually find its way to future employers.
Or you can pose as other people saying nasty things about that person and make it sound like a large number of people hate this person.
Using anonymous proxies (or remailers on USENET) will make you increasingly resistant to being discovered and punished; but even if you are, that person will still have to clear their name with employers and such that don't know the "rest" of the story (such as, it's all a lie and perhaps their attacker is now in jail). The thing is, employers would rather not hire people mired in that kind of drama; so even if God tells them the truth, that only bolsters their decision not to hire the victim of such online malevolence.
This has all the elements it needs to be the next wave of domestic terrorism in America: anyone can do it, and the damage can be overwhelming. Plus, law enforcement is typically too slow and unconcerned with dealing with people who do this, and when this wave of terrorism hits its stride, civil courts will be crushed by all the thousands - or millions - of court cases, as every Tom Dick and Harry in the world takes advantage of what will be seen as the most powerful weapon of mass defamation in history.
I say "in history" because it's super cheap (free), super easy, super effective and super devastating, if the harasser knows how to do it right in the correct forums where information will propagate far and wide.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
People are always into drama, especially online. They are hiding behind their computers and believe they are anonymous.
They believe they are anonymous on the highways in their cars! Look at the assholes cutting people off, tailgaiting, passing on the shoulder, cutting people off, etc..
Our fellow humans do not act civilized unless you can reach out and smack them... Then they act civilized.
in a car, online, they act like assholes. Always have and always will.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The gist was: the vast majority of people are children, and children like to exaggerate and tell lies.
I don't think adults exaggerate and lie less than children do, but I do think that they're much more sophisticated and subtle at the insidious craft. A great deal of nuance goes into grown-up lies.
There is no way of knowing the truth.
On the contrary! Everyone knows what Truth is. Bad guys are liars and and propagandists, and good guys are truth-speakers and educators. Those last two statements are valid for all value systems that my limited mind can recognize or imagine.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Don't place 100% o the blame on the cook when the customer orders a pile of fried shit.
Honestly, this case and many like it should have never made national media level attention.
We have people like that. For half a decade Internet sites and journals have been raided by vigilantes. Years ago Something Awful would promote an offensively stupid website and encourages users to 'visit' its guestbook, invariably flooding the guestbook with spam and Goatse, or crashing the site with their own Slashdot Effect. Unprotected LiveJournals were obliterated under the mass flood of Tubgirl. It was both terrifying and awesome, in its Internet-limited no-one-gives-a-rip scale.
/b/tards have stalked accidental celebrities with nigh-disturbing fervor. Cracky Chan and the like. They've moved up to destroying deviantArt accounts, recently having suggested one user change her password to something a /b/tard suggested... social engineering for dummies.
/b/ is the next level up. All forced anonymous. They've brought moronic commercial services like Habbo Hotel, Furcadia and Second Life to a halt, overloading servers and disrupting legitimate users. The
Now, when tens of thousands of these people are concentrated in one small country, they seem to reach mass and their actions spill into the real world. They also become shielded from internal conscience. When the legions of American vigilantes want blood they tend to restrain themselves from crossing into real world criminal behavior, and a sane few have shown they can temper the mania of the masses. In America, cliques of vigilantes are seperated and mingle little. Single system administrators like SA's Lowtax, YTMND's Max, or 4chan's Moot can kill their isolated mobs. South Korea seems to present a more united front - hell, even their search portals name the most popular target/victim of the day. Their culture isn't strikingly different from American online culture. Their fanatic individuals are far more common, however, and their offensive actions are coordinated across servers, while voices of reason are fractured and lost.
My problem with spontaneous human combustion is that never seems to happen to the "right" people.
If they actually believe a message on Myspace, she needs to get better friends. If some random jackass called me or walked up to me on the street or wrote me a letter telling me someone to whom I was close had an STD, I would not believe it. I have very little confidence in the truth of the things strangers tell me, and even less confidence in strangers that are on the internet.
Whoever wrote this article has obviously never used Usenet before. If they had, they'd know that was the original home of net vigilantism. If you got someone angry with you there, getting cancel requests sent out after your original post was a *best* case scenario. Worse things involved massive cases of libel, people publicising contact information, (such as phone numbers/snailmail addresses) people issuing death threats, and in the very worst scenarios, people attempting to actually carry said death threats out.
It's not so true now...but years ago, a person had to be very careful what they said online. You'd never know what unhinged lunatic might see your words, take them personally, and then decide to do something about them.