The Inevitable Death of the Internet Troll

HughPickens.com writes James Swearingen writes at The Atlantic that the Internet can be a mean, hateful, and frightening place — especially for young women but human behavior and the limits placed on it by both law and society can change. In a Pew Research Center survey of 2,849 Internet users, one out of every four women between 18 years old and 24 years old reports having been stalked or sexually harassed online. "Like banner ads and spam bots, online harassment is still routinely treated as part of the landscape of being online," writes Swearingen adding that "we are in the early days of online harassment being taken as a serious problem, and not simply a quirk of online life." Law professor Danielle Citron draws a parallel between how sexual harassment was treated in the workplace decades ago and our current standard. "Think about in the 1960s and 1970s, what we said to women in the workplace," says Citron. "'This is just flirting.' That a sexually hostile environment was just a perk for men to enjoy, it's just what the environment is like. If you don't like it, leave and get a new job." It took years of activism, court cases, and Title VII protection to change that. "Here we are today, and sexual harassment in the workplace is not normal," said Citron. "Our norms and how we understand it are different now."

According to Swearingen, the likely solution to internet trolls will be a combination of things. The expansion of laws like the one currently on the books in California, which expands what constitutes online harassment, could help put the pressure on harassers. The upcoming Supreme Court case, Elonis v. The United States, looks to test the limits of free speech versus threatening comments on Facebook. "Can a combination of legal action, market pressure, and societal taboo work together to curb harassment?" asks Swearingen. "Too many people do too much online for things to stay the way they are."

Comments

Death?

[excelsior_gr]

Judging by this summary, the trolls are alive and well, I'd say.

Re:Death?

[Pino Grigio]

The one thing that impresses me most about the female sex is their unending ability to think up new ways to undermine each other. So I think you'll find plenty of women busy trolling other women.

Re:Semantics

[PvtVoid]

The definition of harassment, at least where I live, is "unwanted sexual advances", meaning the distinction between flirting and harassment is purely based on subjective experience. Good luck trying to find a girlfriend without "harassing" anyone!

Here's a hint: don't do it at work. Definitely don't do it at work if you are in a position of authority over the recipient.

See? It wasn't that hard, was it?

This is really about controling the internet

[argoff]

This isn't about sexual harassment, but controlling the internet, and implicitly people in general. A lot of the powers that be have decided that, like other forms of media, they need to sanitize it in the name of control. (even with games, google gamergate) They want a name and an ID behind every post, they want to create "accountability". They gleefully ignore the fact that any woman, gay person, person of color, persecuted minority can take on an anon alias and argue their beliefs, do their work on merit alone. Seriously, how do we even know that Satoshi, the bitcoin creator, isn't a black lesbian? The internet frees productive people from race and gender in a way that before was never even remotely possible.

So maybe, just maybe, the people who want to make it an issue now, are the doing it not because of some high morality, but because they are discovering they can't compete on merit. But the issue is way deeper that that. In today's world, a lot of media and games are controlled via copyright, but copyrights by their very nature require centralized control by those who control them to work. Yet the internet is doing just the opposite, it is moving into the direction of decentralized control, threatening a lot of people, who happen to have a lot of money.

Men are the victims

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the actual study, men are the most common victims of trolls. Only if you restrict yourself to looking at sexual harassment, are women more likely to be targeted, and only by a small margin (3%).

Online men are somewhat more likely than online women to experience some level of online harassment overall. Some 44% of men and 37% of women have experienced at least one of the six types of harassment. Men are somewhat more likely than women to experience certain less severe forms of harassment like name-calling and being embarrassed. At the same time, online men are also slightly more likely to have received physical threats. While the differences are small, women are significantly more likely than men to report being stalked or sexually harassed on the internet.

Re:Automated hate?

[jzilla]

With civil asset forfeiture they do arrest, and have trials against non-humans.

Re:Automated hate?

[meustrus]

The First Amendment to the US Constitution is designed to keep the government from censoring unpopular speech. It's not because it's a slippery slope. It's because free speech is the underpinning of democracy, and allowing a democratically-elected government to limit it allows the government to alter the basis of its own existence. In essence, the threat is that corrupt politicians would alter the balance of power in their own favor.

With that as the basis of our right to free speech, the government does still have the power to punish certain speech in very focused situations. For example, you will go to jail if you shout "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater. That situation is limited to "causing immediate panic likely to result in injury to others", and with that limitation the law does not infringe upon our right to express our opinions.

Harassment is not expressing an opinion, it's expressing that you're an asshole. If speech were expressed with paint on canvas, harassment would be throwing the paint in someone else's face. The only way that the right to free speech protects assholes is that it forces prosecutors to prove they are really just being assholes. That's a good thing; there's a difference between throwing paint and painting a picture with it, even if the picture is on someone else's face. But that doesn't mean that shouting "SHITCOCK!" just to piss people off is somehow protected.

Re:No chance

[tylikcat]

Hear, hear.

Trolling is obnoxious, and different forums can have different ways of dealing with it - and there are and should be forums where it's just ignored and tolerated. (Because dealing with idiots is part of free and open communications. And going into walled gardens to get away from idiots is always an option.)

Stalking, harassment and threats are a bit more than that, and confusing the two does a disservice to both - but more importantly, to all of us.

Re:Slashdot, Stop Spinning the GamerGate Content

[AmiMoJo]

Here is a very short but accurate summary for you. Feel free to repost it.

Some guy broke up with a girl and posted some unverifiable and irrelevant stuff about her on his blog. This started a campaign against her, with increasingly outrageous lies. It was said she slept with a journalist in exchange for a favourable review of her game, but the review doesn't exist and the journalist in question didn't write anything about her after they got together. The GamerGate keeps trying to claim it is interested in journalistic integrity, while repeating this lie over and over again.

Another women, Anita Sarkeesian, made some videos about how games tend to have fairly poor portrayals of women. She was careful to point out that most of it was due to laziness on the part of the developers, even calling the series Tropes vs. Women to emphasize the fact. Even so, this sparked a campaign against her by self-described "gamers" who thought she was attacking games and gaming culture. GamerGate supporters have tried to distance themselves from some of the worst of it (doxing, rape and murder threats, and recently a bomb threat against a university she was due to speak at), while posting conspiracy theories about she sent all these threats to herself... in order to lose money by not being paid to speak or something.

Other female developers who dared to speak out have received similar treatment, such as Brianna Wu. GameGate supporters have also organized somewhat successful campaigns to get advertisers to stop supporting web sites which condemned the treatment of these women. The label "gamer" has come to mean a misogynistic, unpleasant fanboy who masturbates over pixelated tits and nude patches, and should be abandoned by normal people who like games, half of whom are women.