EFF Takes On Online Harassment

Gamoid writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has identified online harassment as a major challenge facing free speech on the Internet, and lays out its plan to fix it. They say, "Online harassment is a digital rights issue. At its worst, it causes real and lasting harms to its targets, a fact that must be central to any discussion of harassment. Unfortunately, it's not easy to craft laws or policies that will address those harms without inviting government or corporate censorship and invasions of privacy—including the privacy and free speech of targets of harassment. ... Just because the law sometimes allows a person to be a jerk (or worse) doesn’t mean that others in the community are required to be silent or to just stand by and let people be harassed. We can and should stand up against harassment. Doing so is not censorship—it’s being part of the fight for an inclusive and speech-supporting Internet."

Comments

I moderate a small local community forum

[circletimessquare]

And this is a real and serious problem.

There is one local character with a personality disorder who carefully hides online and constantly, for years, weekly attacks and smears taunts and insults local people just going about their online and offline business.

If it were fair and open criticism, so what.

If it were a national site, so what.

If they were attacking CEOs or politicians or bureaucrats... good!

But for local communities it's a real problem when people with serious asocial problems use all of their efforts, for YEARS, on a weekly basis, to simply do their best to degrade any and all online and even offline interaction and assassinate people's character out of simple avarice. They have a serious problem, and they make us part of it.

Such people always existed. There are people with profound social problems in this world who derive pleasure from hurting others in petty ways. But when you are talking about small communities, and easy carefully protected anonymity, and prolonged sustained effort fueled by a psychological disorder, you have a new phenomenon.

Not even just for the local community. It's not healthy psychologically and socially for the sick person to indulge their bad behavior rather than get help.

This article isn't my location, but here's a good write up from a few years back similar to what I and others in my small city have to deal with:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09...

And in Dee’s Place, people are not happy. A waitress, Pheobe Best, said that the site had provoked fights and caused divorces. The diner’s owner, Jim Deverell, called Topix a “cesspool of character assassination.” And hearing the conversation, Shane James, the cook, wandered out of the kitchen tense with anger.

His wife, Jennifer, had been the target in a post titled “freak,” he said, which described the mother of two as, among other things, “a methed-out, doped-out whore with AIDS.” Not a word was true, Mr. and Ms. James said, but the consequences were real enough.

Friends and relatives stopped speaking to them. Trips to the grocery store brought a crushing barrage of knowing glances. She wept constantly and even considered suicide. Now, the couple has resolved to move.

“I’ll never come back to this town again,” Ms. James said in an interview at the diner. “I just want to get the hell away from here.”

In rural America, where an older, poorer and more remote population has lagged the rest of the country in embracing the Internet, the growing use of social media is raising familiar concerns about bullying and privacy. But in small towns there are complications.

The same Web sites created as places for candid talk about local news and politics are also hubs of unsubstantiated gossip, stirring widespread resentment in communities where ties run deep, memories run long and anonymity is something of a novel concept.

Re:I moderate a small local community forum

[Howitzer86]

Interesting. I live in a medium sized city, and other than a subreddit on Reddit I don't really bother with community forums. But I have noticed the negative impact online chatter can have with my large family. Perhaps there's a perfect size for this sort of thing. Too small, and people are too closely tied. Too big, and people are too anonymous. But at just the right size, you know everyone just enough to snipe at them, and not enough to feel bad about it.

EFF = now tantamount to useless.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are MUCH more important battles to be fought than stuff like online harassment.

Good grief, if someone is harassing you, whether it is online or in the real world, ignore
them and they will go away when you quit responding to them. This is basic behavioral
logic.

Perhaps the EFF has been instructed to stay away from stuff that really matters by those who
could make life difficult for the EFF, namely the US government. Now that would make sense -
the EFF wants to be seen as a crusader for "rights" and a crusade against online harassment
is not anything which will bother those in power. So the EFF can pretend to be useful and get
contributions from gullible idiots while at the same time staying off the turf the government has
made it clear the EFF needs to avoid. I am open to other explanations but the preceding seems
very plausible to me.

Re:There's a bigger challenge...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Freedom of speech is not freedom to be an asshole to anyone at any time. Words can hurt people. You can drive someone to kill themselves with nothing but speech. Happens all the time. Like it or not there are reasonable limits to your freedom when it affects others. The EFF is asking the tough questions here about where that limit should sit. This is not mission creep, protecting electronic rights should ABSOLUTELY include the right to not be systematically harassed, intimidated and threatened by assholes online.

Re:There's a bigger challenge...

[OhPlz]

Anyone can say they feel threatened or harassed by anything. It's the same reason why the FCC never defined what obscene content would be, it's not possible.

Disparity in anonymity is a major factor

[Phil Urich]

A lack of anonymity means people are held accountable, but that "accountability" is in the eye of the beholder, so it cuts both ways, and it definitely cuts against the person who isn't anonymous if others going after them are anonymous. The first thing that comes to my mind, then, is to have some degree of separation between anonymous/pseudonymous areas of communication and debate and "real name" ones. I'm not sure that's feasible (how to really draw such hard boundaries in such an interconnected age?) and I worry there'd be problematic results from such segregation. But it does seem to me like some of the more recent issues have been as bad as they've been due in no small part to a disparity of where the harassers and the targets are on the anonymous->pseudonymous->eponymous continuum.

Re:Offense VS attack

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandate this: if you truly want the government to outlaw things that fit your absurdly ill-defined notion of "hate speech" & begin holding forum users criminally accountable for it, you're nothing more than a mindless cog in the politically-correct censorship machine. Moreover, you seem unable to string a coherent sentence together despite having sixty-odd attempts at it in the course of your worthless long-winded post. Your biased, emotionally-driven excuse for an argument offends me to the core. If anyone should be fined for a forum post, it's you for failing to ever achieve an identifiable point to that mess of non sequitur anecdotes, you sniveling little smurf-dicked assbrowser.