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

Define "harassment"

[Iamthecheese]

The route from "this is harassment that should be censored" to "this is something we 'all' disagree with so it should be censored" is a very slippery slope and the internet is piled high with the bones of dead forums who fell down that path. What is harassment? I can't say, "I'm going to kill you" but can I say "I wish you were dead"? Can I say "I hope your dog dies"? "You are an idiot for these reasons"? Can I say "Go play in traffic"?

There are various hug boxes on the internet where even vigorous disagreement backed with reason is seen as harassment. A more appropriate question than "should harassment be stopped" is "Who should be permitted to define harassment for a community"?

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.

Symptom, not cause

[Sir_Substance]

Online harassment is a symptom of a larger problem.

Time was you could deal with online harassment by clicking the block button. The ability for someone to follow you across forums and services was limited. Today, we insist that people use their real names, link their accounts and allow friend-of-friend connections on modern web services. We make them input their phone numbers, of all things.

We say to people "if you don't like it, don't use it". But there is no good reason for people to insist on these functions. They insist on them only because people have always been singularly identifiable, and some people find it odd to operate in a space where that might not hold true.

However, there is a good reason to insist we trash them: cyberbullying.

It's far easier to to dox people if you can google their name and get dozens of results. Far easier to follow people if they're linking their facebook account to things, and you've got a clandestine link to their facebook account. Automatic stalking.

Yet, when people like me suggest that this "publicity by default" concept is bad, and say that people should be allowed to delete accounts when they no longer need them, we are told "it's a post privacy world, deal with it" and "everything on the internet is pubic and permanent, deal with it".

Maybe that's not a good paradigm?

Re:There's a bigger challenge...

[ShanghaiBill]

Are we to assume that because France is having trouble, the EFF should stop and we should just not bother?

Of course not. But the EFF is treading on dangerous ground. Up to now they have mainly defended individuals against government attempts to censor or stifle speech. Now they are talking about going after individuals, for what some consider to be speaking freely. Many people that have supported the EFF in the past, may not be so supportive of this mission creep. Some of the harassment has been egregious, but that doesn't mean the EFF is the appropriate organization to "fix" the problem, or to even say what the "fix" should be.

Offense or defense?

[fyngyrz]

Say, for whatever reason, valid or not, you perceive me as annoying and contrary and generally pin-headed, and you undertake to call me truly despicable names in the most contemptuous and filthy manner imaginable. Every day. Until you expire. Are you harassing me? No. You aren't. It wouldn't even rise to the standard of mild annoyance. Why? Because I am immune to such rhetoric under all but the most trying circumstances, and even were you somehow to reach such a malodorous level of offense, you're still 100% within the bounds of acceptable speech in my book; I just have to cope with it (which would require just about zero effort, I assure you.)

But the next person in line? They might break down into tears, wander off into the nearest bathtub, and slit their wrists if you simply called them a douchebag or implied they had too many pimples.

Whose fault is this? What is our responsibility in the matter of such weak, unprepared, or broken personalities? Should we pad the very walls and take out all the tubs and razors and knives and muzzle each and every one of us to prevent poor Cluetard McDimwit from wrist slitting lest something rises to the level of offense in the dim, dysfunctional reaches of what passes for his mind?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

No one has the "right to not be offended." Being offended is subjective. It has everything to do with you as an individual, or as part of a collective, or a group, or a society, or a community; it varies due to your moral conditioning, your religious beliefs, your upbringing, your education; what offends one person or group (collective, society, community) may not offend another; and in the final analysis, it requires one person to attempt to read the mind of other persons they do not know in order to anticipate whether a specific action will cause offense in the mind of another. And no, codifying an action in law is not in any way sufficient... it is well established that not even lawyers can know the law well enough to anticipate what is legal, and what is not. Sane law relies on the basic idea that we try not to risk or cause harm to the bodies, finances and reputations of others without them consenting and being aware of the risks. Law that bans something based upon the idea that some individual or group simply finds the behavior objectionable is the very worst kind of law, utterly devoid of consideration or others, while absolutely permeated in self-indulgence.

Prepare your kids, and yourself, for exposure to the opinions of others, and gird yourself appropriately lest there is (gasp) an encounter with differing opinion, surprising and/or not-to-your-taste behavior, or OMFG, someone intentionally being nasty, crude or stupid. Or all or the foregoing. It is not anyone else's job to do this for you or your children; and it is not anyone else's responsibility if your failure to do so causes unrest, or worse, in minds you failed to prepare. Including yours.

In order to have freedoms, we must be educated well enough, and prepared well enough, to deal with them. If the fact that some cannot deal with them is sufficient to the cause to limit those freedoms, then eventually, they will erode away to nothing. Likely there will always be some personality on the borderline of collapsing at some provocation, imaginary or otherwise. Should we really attempt to tune our whole society to the lowest possible standard of discourse as a result?

Think very carefully before you endorse force of any kind as a remedy for "offense." To borrow somewhat from Jefferson, if it does not pick my pocket, break my leg, or falsely portray my reputation in some measure likely to cause material or financial consequence... then no remedy is called for; no coercion of law appropriate; and no sympathy required.

Having said that, the owner of any private venue has every right to set arbitrary limits on speech and behavior within the venue. You don't like it, leave. End of story. Such r