Since the article's headline doesn't reflect its contents (and would likely lead to definitional debates), we changed it to a sentence from the article that does.
Threatening reprecussion also doesn't stop prejudice, discrimination, or harassment - it just makes it happen behind closed doors or within closed minds. It's the cultural shift of ethics and values that changes things. That's something people have to learn for themselves though, through the experience of changing, and the only person that can judge whether that change results in positives, benefits or gains, (or just something outside of what they currently experience) for the individual is the individual themselves.
The proposed solution: "societal pressure". That certainly seems innocuous enough. But online harassers are a tiny group already-marginalized people (asserting otherwise is willfully ignoring obvious numbers, and that should make anybody wary). Increasing the scorn is not going to change them! When this approach inevitably fails, then this same "societal pressure" will be parlayed into the newly-created common wisdom of outright censorship of the Internet.
I would agree increasing the scorn is likely to have the opposite effect. It would seem these type of people feed off such things. Increasing the level of response, even if it is negative, will only further one of the goals of the harassers; getting the attention of people while they commit the harassment. Anonymous-based movements on the Internet are just the feeding trough for these type of people, regardless of the alleged motives of the movement.
The article likens societal pressure to sexual harassment in the workplace. However, the power structure is not the same. In the workplace, bosses/admins had to be convinced to treat the problem different, then the wielded the power to make people cooperate.
Online harassment doesn't feature an authority figure who can cutoff the access of the harassers though.
What is the solution? I don't know. I think the death threats are a result of the self-hatred and sense of disposession our consumer society creates. We are motivated by the fear of not having enough and therefore our primal minds are constantly threatened. The people at the bottom have little to lose and act out.
>When this approach inevitably fails, then this same "societal pressure" will be parlayed into the new common wisdom of outright censorship of the Internet.
I don't think it's possible to say that social pressure, or in other words, education, is definitely going to fail. Harassers are people. We need to teach boys that they are not, in fact, entitled to women's bodies, and hopefully then not just online harassment but also street harassment, sexual harassment, and sexual assault will decrease.
But what's wrong with blocking 4chan, or gamergaters.com or whatever else? These are sites that are demonstratably, reliably causing people gross personal distress and sometimes egging people on into massive acts of violence. Notably, the UC Santa Barbara shooter was a 4chan member, and almost certainly was radicalized there.
It's easy to say that "free speech" or "censorship-free internet" are good things; it's much harder to look at the actual statistics and realize that every post on 4chan is a little piece of an inevitable hate crime. The average is the total over the number; regardless of the small average contribution of each 4chan post to harassment and violence, the end result is GamerGate and mass murder.
Ironically, when it comes to Muslims doing the same thing as white men on 4chan, the media and hacker news is united in wanting to shut down "radical Islamist forums."
At the end of the day, you have to decide what's more important: an internet where no website is blocked, or the safety of women. If you decide the former, you are every bit as responsible for the deaths of women as the people who physically pull the trigger, because you said nothing and did nothing when you could have stopped the root cause.
As another point, there is massive value to the survivors in making it absolutely clear that what happened to them is not okay; that they did not deserve it; that they should be outraged and that the perpetrators, when caught, will be punished and ostracized. The only way to do this is by actually condemning, punishing, and ostracizing perpetrators. The benefits of solidarity are very real; women who experience victim-blaming after sexual assault have vastly higher rates of PTSD.
So societal pressure in favor of feminism and away from male entitlement seems like a fine way to address this problem, and if it leads to the death of websites that organize harassment campaigns so much the better.
All fine in principle. But can you really kill a website? The internet is as close to be an ideal marketplace of ideas as we've ever gotten. What's suppressed in one place will thrive in another.
Its not wrong to want to suppress hate speech; its not misguided to suppress radicalization of young people. Its also unlikely that 'shutting down websites' will succeed at either of those.
Absolutely horrific. Every post over there is a little piece of an inevitable hate crime. The safety of women is too important to let them get away.
Apologies for being blunt and sardonic, but seriously? Your preconceptions of 4chan are so horribly skewed and your saying that the UC Barbara shooter was a 4chan reader is an incredibly stupid justification. I'm sure Facebook radicalizes people every day. Ban Facebook?
It seems you were right. I impulsively clicked that link and was promptly greeted with several graphic pictures celebrating murder. But still I'm wise enough to understand that I will never convince anyone to become vegetarian by preaching at them or controlling their discussion.
Wow that's some strong assumption that you got there. If you believe you can stop that using censorship, you can't be more wrong. If they wan't to do that, they will simply find somewhere else, and then somewhere else, and somewhere else. Hollywood invested ton of money in censoring content and have you seen what they were able to do? Absolutely nothing. Government invested tons of money in stopping drugs dealer, again with not too much result.
The only way we can do anything is using education. It's not completely effective, but it's the only way that can actually do something. We teach people to respect other people (not only women, everyone), we teach people to react against bullying, together, as a group, and we provide support and ways to deal with to victims.
We can't stop every perpetrators but we can at least be strong together.
'the media and hacker news is united in wanting to shut down "radical Islamist forums."'
I honestly have no strong sense of the "opinion of HN" (insofar as there is such a thing) on this topic. I strongly suspect there is at least a minority that opposes that.
> We need to teach boys that they are not, in fact, entitled to women's bodies
Growing up 20 years ago, I do not feel this way. Neither does anybody I associate with. So either "teachings" have wildly changed, or just as I said you are painting a broad generalization on innocent people using the actions of a few. This is a great way to turn people off to any validity your message did have.
> every post on 4chan is a little piece of an inevitable hate crime ... the end result is GamerGate and mass murder
Censorship is always advocated as being a necessary imperative to prevent greater harm.
> hacker news is united in wanting to shut down "radical Islamist forums."
Nope. Maybe you got this impression because the only people commenting on banal agitprop aren't hackers, but hipsters who view this site as a juicy target for political discussion.
> an internet [sic] where no website is blocked, or the safety of women.
And here's the heart of the problem - you think the Internet is made up of websites. How quaint (don't worry, so do VCs). Maybe I should applaud comments like yours - the sooner we get off of HTTP, the better.
> We need to teach boys that they are not, in fact, entitled to women's bodies
It was my understanding that most harassment and abuse is about dominance of the mind rather than physical. It's not about exercising entitlement, it's about establishing ownership. Subtle, but different.
In that regard, I feel like blocking websites would just be transferring the power from one dominating force to another. Alone, I don't think this would solve much since it ends up punishing the platform instead of the participating individuals. Killing 4chan would be like dropping a brick on a piece of shit - you don't have any less shit, just scattered.
>It was my understanding that most harassment and abuse is about dominance of the mind rather than physical. It's not about exercising entitlement, it's about establishing ownership. Subtle, but different.
Well, yes, abuse is about power and control, certainly. But an abuser exerts power and control in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. The root cause of street harassment is certainly for men to exercise power and control over not just a specific woman, but over the class of women as a whole; however, a factor that enables this is the narrative that men are entitled to women and women's bodies. This is why there are "nice guys" -- because men are taught that women are vending machines, fed tokens of chivalry and dispensing sex as a result. I wouldn't call the abusive pattern of "nice guys" about specifically women's minds vs. bodies, but rather that "nice guys" seek to exert dominance, power, and control over women by punishing women that do not behave according to the rules of the game that they set.
So, subtle, different, but not wholly distinct either. In a phrase, why do men feel entitled to own women's bodies?
>Killing 4chan would be like dropping a brick on a piece of shit - you don't have any less shit, just scattered.
But there's a lot of value in scattering the shit:
* You immediately damage the command-and-control system, fragmenting it into many subforums that are less individually efficacious for at least a period of time before a spiritual successor emerges
* You send a message to everyone involved that what they are doing is not, in fact, okay. This is very important. Most 4channers/GamerGaters/men feel that it is normal to want the things they want and to do the things they do. Feminism is a dirty word and feminists are an aberration. Everyone imagines themselves the hero of their own story, but it's hard to maintain that image if the world denounces you. Heroes are not often denounced by the world.
(Further, I personally care nothing for the implications to the platform. If you allow this filth on your platform you deserve what happens to you. You can't hide behind the actions of users when this is what you're actively profiting from -- the vast majority of 4chan ads are violently misogynist Japanese sex toys.)
We also need to move away from female entitlement. Roughly half of all rapes are female-on-male, but this is pretty much invisible in our culture, partially because the CDC doesn't define what women do to be rape: It's "being made to penetrate", which isn't counted the same way. This isn't even getting into the problem of America's true rape culture: Male-only prisons.
Gendering sex crimes, making it seem as if it's a female problem, erases those experiences, and denies the suffering of the people who went through them.
Even if male rape was rare, it wouldn't matter. Rape is a problem regardless of how often it happens. I'm amazed I have to say this, but feminists apparently aren't saying it, so someone needs to.
>The bundle of nightmares that is the GamerGate movement, an amorphous collection of gamers largely focused on harassing feminist game developers and critics, managed to make the front page of The New York Times.
Why did I know this article had to do with #gamergate, can we get this shit out of here? This is a highly politicized and uninteresting topic.
GamerGate is merely a symptom of a society that allows online harassment (or at least doesn't sufficiently persecute it), and it's currently a very visible example.
Of course there are assholes in the movement, there are in any side of any movement. The problem is that they've got access to weapons which are largely unregulated.
I don't care about GamerGate, what I care about is that every single media outlet is spamming this topic and it would die a lot faster if they ignored it. I can go to any other website for social commentary, do we want Hacker News to be a battleground for social justice or do we want it to be a place where we can actually discuss something interesting.
Almost every other discussion website had the good sense to ban this topic because it only leads to flame wars and name calling.
Our psyches are tuned for a world where a village of several hundred people is pretty big. No matter how rational you may think you are, when stepping into a "village" of millions just getting normal, non-harassing feedback that happens to be partially negative can be overwhelming to your emotions, even before we discuss people systematically abusing negative feedback.
The worst thing about the "weapons" is that they aren't even "weapons"... they're just... communication. How can we fix harassment when just plain normal usage of the relevant channels alone can be emotionally overwhelming?
Serious question for serious thought. I've got no practical answer and I've been pondering this question off and on for at least 15 years now.
The only way to stop online trolling is by educating people to ignore stuff on the internet. If some anonymous nobody starts saying weird stuff to you, ignore them. If they threaten you, call the police and ignore them. It's that simple.
"They aren't, nobody get's physically damaged by a weapon."
Err, I know what you tried to say there... but you're still wrong, because "physically" hurt is not the only relevant type of hurt.
You are not a robot. You are an emotional being, and you can be emotionally hurt by things that perhaps wouldn't hurt Spock but do hurt you. Your threshold may be much higher than many other people's. As it happens, mine is too.
But that doesn't make us "right", or better, and it doesn't mean that people don't get really hurt on the Internet when thrust into a world their brain is quite literally not prepared for. If anything, we are the freaks of nature.
Also note I didn't even limit it to insults... just perfectly normal social interaction can be quite draining. The realm of "negative feedback" is far richer than just "insults". Just receiving 4000 emails on a topic is an astonishing experience that I have but put my toe in the water of, and have little desire to experience the full blast.
>In a broader context, weapons may be construed to include anything used to gain a strategic, material or mental advantage over an adversary.
Harassment goes beyond just "insults", and coordinated targeted harassment campaigns against an individual are absolutely capable of inflicting severe mental trauma.
If you disagree, consider the difference between me calling you a "poopy head" (insult), and me organizing a group of people to call the cell phones of you and several members of your family, multiple times per day for the next several months and leaving aggressive or threatening messages.
This is part of a larger attack on anonymity online. That piece from Pacific Standard mentioned in the OP certainly was[1].
Before, it was "think of the children" used by politicians to justify various censorship measures[2]. Now, it's "think of women" used by the media to undermine anonymous communication. They cannot profit from it therefore anyone who doesn't post banalities under their real name, so they can be safely adorned with ads, is a troll and an abuser.
Or, you know, alternatively, maybe online harassment is actually a problem.
But you're right, a massive government/capitalist co-conspiracy working to end your right to anonymity is definitely the more reasonable explanation...
How much does it really effect you? Is anyone besides you even going to notice it? I'm just not really aware of where this is an issue, isn't a ban/block/ignore significant enough to stop just about any attack? If someone's getting around those, they're spending a considerable amount of effort...
32 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 68.0 ms ] threadAnyone familiar with the history of Usenet will know that real name policies aren't an effective approach.
Online harassment doesn't feature an authority figure who can cutoff the access of the harassers though.
What is the solution? I don't know. I think the death threats are a result of the self-hatred and sense of disposession our consumer society creates. We are motivated by the fear of not having enough and therefore our primal minds are constantly threatened. The people at the bottom have little to lose and act out.
I don't think it's possible to say that social pressure, or in other words, education, is definitely going to fail. Harassers are people. We need to teach boys that they are not, in fact, entitled to women's bodies, and hopefully then not just online harassment but also street harassment, sexual harassment, and sexual assault will decrease.
But what's wrong with blocking 4chan, or gamergaters.com or whatever else? These are sites that are demonstratably, reliably causing people gross personal distress and sometimes egging people on into massive acts of violence. Notably, the UC Santa Barbara shooter was a 4chan member, and almost certainly was radicalized there.
It's easy to say that "free speech" or "censorship-free internet" are good things; it's much harder to look at the actual statistics and realize that every post on 4chan is a little piece of an inevitable hate crime. The average is the total over the number; regardless of the small average contribution of each 4chan post to harassment and violence, the end result is GamerGate and mass murder.
Ironically, when it comes to Muslims doing the same thing as white men on 4chan, the media and hacker news is united in wanting to shut down "radical Islamist forums."
At the end of the day, you have to decide what's more important: an internet where no website is blocked, or the safety of women. If you decide the former, you are every bit as responsible for the deaths of women as the people who physically pull the trigger, because you said nothing and did nothing when you could have stopped the root cause.
As another point, there is massive value to the survivors in making it absolutely clear that what happened to them is not okay; that they did not deserve it; that they should be outraged and that the perpetrators, when caught, will be punished and ostracized. The only way to do this is by actually condemning, punishing, and ostracizing perpetrators. The benefits of solidarity are very real; women who experience victim-blaming after sexual assault have vastly higher rates of PTSD.
So societal pressure in favor of feminism and away from male entitlement seems like a fine way to address this problem, and if it leads to the death of websites that organize harassment campaigns so much the better.
Its not wrong to want to suppress hate speech; its not misguided to suppress radicalization of young people. Its also unlikely that 'shutting down websites' will succeed at either of those.
Just look at these mass murderers in training over at /ck/: https://boards.4chan.org/ck/
Absolutely horrific. Every post over there is a little piece of an inevitable hate crime. The safety of women is too important to let them get away.
Apologies for being blunt and sardonic, but seriously? Your preconceptions of 4chan are so horribly skewed and your saying that the UC Barbara shooter was a 4chan reader is an incredibly stupid justification. I'm sure Facebook radicalizes people every day. Ban Facebook?
It's a fact that 4chan is directly related to harassment and mass murder. I don't know why you'd dispute this unless you agreed with it.
That's what 4chan is. It's a memetic slaughterhouse.
The only way we can do anything is using education. It's not completely effective, but it's the only way that can actually do something. We teach people to respect other people (not only women, everyone), we teach people to react against bullying, together, as a group, and we provide support and ways to deal with to victims.
We can't stop every perpetrators but we can at least be strong together.
I honestly have no strong sense of the "opinion of HN" (insofar as there is such a thing) on this topic. I strongly suspect there is at least a minority that opposes that.
Growing up 20 years ago, I do not feel this way. Neither does anybody I associate with. So either "teachings" have wildly changed, or just as I said you are painting a broad generalization on innocent people using the actions of a few. This is a great way to turn people off to any validity your message did have.
> every post on 4chan is a little piece of an inevitable hate crime ... the end result is GamerGate and mass murder
Censorship is always advocated as being a necessary imperative to prevent greater harm.
> hacker news is united in wanting to shut down "radical Islamist forums."
Nope. Maybe you got this impression because the only people commenting on banal agitprop aren't hackers, but hipsters who view this site as a juicy target for political discussion.
> an internet [sic] where no website is blocked, or the safety of women.
And here's the heart of the problem - you think the Internet is made up of websites. How quaint (don't worry, so do VCs). Maybe I should applaud comments like yours - the sooner we get off of HTTP, the better.
It was my understanding that most harassment and abuse is about dominance of the mind rather than physical. It's not about exercising entitlement, it's about establishing ownership. Subtle, but different.
In that regard, I feel like blocking websites would just be transferring the power from one dominating force to another. Alone, I don't think this would solve much since it ends up punishing the platform instead of the participating individuals. Killing 4chan would be like dropping a brick on a piece of shit - you don't have any less shit, just scattered.
Well, yes, abuse is about power and control, certainly. But an abuser exerts power and control in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. The root cause of street harassment is certainly for men to exercise power and control over not just a specific woman, but over the class of women as a whole; however, a factor that enables this is the narrative that men are entitled to women and women's bodies. This is why there are "nice guys" -- because men are taught that women are vending machines, fed tokens of chivalry and dispensing sex as a result. I wouldn't call the abusive pattern of "nice guys" about specifically women's minds vs. bodies, but rather that "nice guys" seek to exert dominance, power, and control over women by punishing women that do not behave according to the rules of the game that they set.
So, subtle, different, but not wholly distinct either. In a phrase, why do men feel entitled to own women's bodies?
>Killing 4chan would be like dropping a brick on a piece of shit - you don't have any less shit, just scattered.
But there's a lot of value in scattering the shit:
* You immediately damage the command-and-control system, fragmenting it into many subforums that are less individually efficacious for at least a period of time before a spiritual successor emerges
* You send a message to everyone involved that what they are doing is not, in fact, okay. This is very important. Most 4channers/GamerGaters/men feel that it is normal to want the things they want and to do the things they do. Feminism is a dirty word and feminists are an aberration. Everyone imagines themselves the hero of their own story, but it's hard to maintain that image if the world denounces you. Heroes are not often denounced by the world.
(Further, I personally care nothing for the implications to the platform. If you allow this filth on your platform you deserve what happens to you. You can't hide behind the actions of users when this is what you're actively profiting from -- the vast majority of 4chan ads are violently misogynist Japanese sex toys.)
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_...
Gendering sex crimes, making it seem as if it's a female problem, erases those experiences, and denies the suffering of the people who went through them.
Even if male rape was rare, it wouldn't matter. Rape is a problem regardless of how often it happens. I'm amazed I have to say this, but feminists apparently aren't saying it, so someone needs to.
Why did I know this article had to do with #gamergate, can we get this shit out of here? This is a highly politicized and uninteresting topic.
Of course there are assholes in the movement, there are in any side of any movement. The problem is that they've got access to weapons which are largely unregulated.
Almost every other discussion website had the good sense to ban this topic because it only leads to flame wars and name calling.
The worst thing about the "weapons" is that they aren't even "weapons"... they're just... communication. How can we fix harassment when just plain normal usage of the relevant channels alone can be emotionally overwhelming?
Serious question for serious thought. I've got no practical answer and I've been pondering this question off and on for at least 15 years now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon this is what the word weapon means
The only way to stop online trolling is by educating people to ignore stuff on the internet. If some anonymous nobody starts saying weird stuff to you, ignore them. If they threaten you, call the police and ignore them. It's that simple.
edit: changed weapon to comment
Err, I know what you tried to say there... but you're still wrong, because "physically" hurt is not the only relevant type of hurt.
You are not a robot. You are an emotional being, and you can be emotionally hurt by things that perhaps wouldn't hurt Spock but do hurt you. Your threshold may be much higher than many other people's. As it happens, mine is too.
But that doesn't make us "right", or better, and it doesn't mean that people don't get really hurt on the Internet when thrust into a world their brain is quite literally not prepared for. If anything, we are the freaks of nature.
Also note I didn't even limit it to insults... just perfectly normal social interaction can be quite draining. The realm of "negative feedback" is far richer than just "insults". Just receiving 4000 emails on a topic is an astonishing experience that I have but put my toe in the water of, and have little desire to experience the full blast.
>In a broader context, weapons may be construed to include anything used to gain a strategic, material or mental advantage over an adversary.
Harassment goes beyond just "insults", and coordinated targeted harassment campaigns against an individual are absolutely capable of inflicting severe mental trauma.
If you disagree, consider the difference between me calling you a "poopy head" (insult), and me organizing a group of people to call the cell phones of you and several members of your family, multiple times per day for the next several months and leaving aggressive or threatening messages.
Before, it was "think of the children" used by politicians to justify various censorship measures[2]. Now, it's "think of women" used by the media to undermine anonymous communication. They cannot profit from it therefore anyone who doesn't post banalities under their real name, so they can be safely adorned with ads, is a troll and an abuser.
[1] http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children#As_justi...
But you're right, a massive government/capitalist co-conspiracy working to end your right to anonymity is definitely the more reasonable explanation...
*edit - more to the point