What are the real world consequences to signing up for a Twitter or Facebook account through Tor and spewing hate toward other human beings?
Thanks for this. Iāve been the organizer of a few communities, and in one in particular, Iāve been much quicker with the banhammer recently (ban first, sort it out later, bans can always be removed). It can be hard to be the arbiter of speech, but permitting abusive attitudes and behaviors allows them to infect and destroy the community.
There are real-world consequences to the community, and to the individual doing the negative posting - they include mental and physical health consequences that are real. The larger issue, of course, is that they can destroy a community, especially when they begin to predominate. But one individual can poison the well. We see this everywhere on the āfreeā Internet today - which isnāt really free if it tolerates negative behavior, unless you consider being trapped in a cell with a psychopath to be āfreedom.ā
Iāve lived in small cooperative communities for 38 of my 72 years, and I find that communities where the preponderance of members are positive and constructive tend to be self-healing, in the sense that negative people canāt tolerate positive people after a while - kind of funny, really, how they self-eliminate. Online, the best example I know of a community that cleans itself is the voting system on the sports pages of www.sfgate.com, where readers can thumbs-up/down a comment. Because most readers are positive, fair-minded, and keenly tuned to good sportsmanship, the occasional trolls, psychos, and jerks are so overwhelmingly down-voted that they donāt stay long - or the sysadmin takes notice and bans them. Either way, itās very important to eliminate those whose energy is consistently down-pulling and unconstructive, because they can cause big wounds.
Definitely comes back to a moderator/admin who is active within their own community. I hate redditās up/down vote visibility system because it creates an echo chamber and encourages hive mentality, BUT the idea of mods/admins being able to filter out unhealthy members of the community via these votes is an encouraging system.
I think one of the BEST examples lately is Steamās recommendation system. They donāt show you everything all at once, just a general overview of how positive or negative a gameās feedback is. If applied to users in a forum, this could be rather useful, rather than a reddit style āmake them disappearā or having a well rounded personās comment vanish under hordes of downvotes because of the avalanche affect.
I like redditās system, because just like you said, it encourages the hive mentality. That hive mentality isnāt really the problem, rather its the is lack of attentive moderation - reddit mods arenāt always active, or donāt always enforce positive discussion. Reddit doesnāt do anything to enforce, encourage, or coach the hive to be positive to other users.
The upvote/downvote is a good idea, especially since its a really great way for the community to let a user know when theyāre being a jerk, but it still needs to be moderated well.
Using the community as a gauge of positive or negative effect can be a double-edged sword. It can also be used by negative people to overwhelm the positive (manipulation or vote brigading), or by the community to ignore anything that doesnāt agree with their world view (the filter bubble effect). If the majority have absolute power then things like gay rights, african-american rights, female rights, and so on and so forth, become harder to change.
This isnāt to say that negative influences should be allowed or that all opinions should be treated equally, but that care should be taken in how this is done to try to balance between the two extremes. I otherwise agree with everything else said about victim blaming and addressing problematic behavior. Itās a novel view of the standard tools available to communities that I think should be explored more to find a better solution.
The problem is also the product might be renamed from Discourse to Propaganda based on ātruth in labelingā.
āBad Behaviorā can mean lots of things, including simple disagreement or dissent upon the conclusions - even from the same data or facts but with a different interpretation.
Same with āHateā. If I disagree with your opinion, you may label me a hater. Or harasser.
You donāt bother defining any of these things clearly in the post, so that is left open, but is the essence of the problem.
Since I received online death-threats for citing that I think house cats should stay in the house and not in your neighbours garden Iāve given up on all online discussions.
@tomz: Iām not sure, to quote from the example given in the post: āThen she can cry about misogyny in hell while being raped by a pack of feral* demonsā is really an āeye of the beholderā type thing. Its not hate because of a different interpretation of facts or whatever. Its just hate.
Obviously people can quibble over where exactly the line should be drawn, but thatās true of pretty much any aspect of human interaction. I donāt think they make it any less true that many online posts and tweets and the like are objectively hateful.
*(are there domesticated demons?)
As to the offensive twitter post, it depends on the context. Was some troll calling the tweeter a mysogynistic racistsexisthomophobic rapist? In response to something like cats?
If the discussion thread is about something technical, then a lot of things are unwelcome. Some people hate First person Shooters because they hate guns. Spam and going ad-hominem are trolling. But if the purpose of the discussion is to express opinions, then the proper counter is āI consider you hatefulā, and the reply āI donāt care what you thinkā are both on topic. Including adding more specific adjectives.
If the topic goes to something political or religious, it will get heated.
One example is the Atheism-Plus where thunderf00t was ejected. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Thunderf00t#At_Freethought_Blogs
Free speech and thought? Not there. He was also banned from Twitter - and reinstated, apparently when they couldnāt find an actual violation of the terms of service.
Right now there is a controversy called #GamerGate which is testing the limits. One side claims the media has a Payola type scandal or worse, the other says they are everyone, just misogynists. But there is content under the mud, and important issues.
If it is āyour homeā, fine, but do not advertise an āopen houseā then object to who shows up. If all you want are people to say you are right that is ok, but few are likely to join such discussions.
Twitter and Facebook advertise themselves as open. As did 4chan and reddit, but they started politically motivated banning and censorship. Hence 8chan and others.
It is important to remember the freedom and right to speech and expression is to cover things which are detestable, not likable.
The only thing Iām intolerant of is censorship.
Agreed. Muting and ignoring jerks on the 'net is not a very good solution. But until someone invents a way to punch someone in the face through the Internet, our options are limited.
One idea that might be worth considering is public shaming. A good example of this is Jimmy Kimmelās āCelebrities Read Mean Tweetsā videos. This could work on Facebook: any comment or post could be flagged as mean/hateful/etc., which would make it appear on a special page that everyone can see. Anyone would also be able to vote for any of these posts/comments, and the meanest item of the week would be promoted across the entire site for everyone to ridicule.
Right now there is a controversy called #GamerGate which is testing the limits. One side claims the media has a Payola type scandal or worse,
the other says they are everyone, just misogynists. But there is
content under the mud, and important issues.
The problem is that because of a lack of policing, all thatās left is the mud. The originating question of journalistic ethics having been resolved, the question has moved onto the ethics of a sustained campaign of abuse, in which multiple journalists have been threatened, forced to cancel appointments, and in some cases leave their homes.
Now, you can argue faults on both sides, but frankly, that incident shows how vital community policing is, and how a lack of censorship often leads to ācommunity-led censorshipā, where people are afraid to speak out and become vulnerable to the abusers. You can claim āanyone can speak outā, but some people are vulnerable to abuse and some are not; for example, if you are a public figure or have a family, you are more vulnerable than an anonymous conspiracy theorist.
And āIntolerant of Censorshipā is too often a synonym for āTolerant of Abuseā.
Right. Okay, so only the owner of the account targeted by the mean post would be able to nominate that post for public shaming, and they could choose to do it anonymously. Also, they would be able to control how much context is included.
Disclaimer: this idea is far from perfect. I just think it merits discussion.
Abuse seems also to be a very general term. In a deminimus way, your post is abusive to me. Random, anonymous, amorphous threats are also abusive, but still just talk. Or as children are taught āSticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt meā. That is true except for slander and libel. To continue with the cliches, āPeople who live in glass houses shouldnāt throw stonesā.
I am not tolerant of any PHYSICAL abuse. Iām not sure virtual abuse is real. No one I know is going to some ladyās Facebook page where she has uncontroversial pictures and discussions on things like kitchen utensils and party decorations and making death threats.
However there are men and women who arenāt merely trying to discuss #GamerGate, but they want to sling not just mud but stones (virtual stones?). Some enter into the discussion, and they ought to be wearing appropriate attire. It is something like playing paintball, then complaining your clothes get dirty and you get a small bruise from a direct hit. I know of no one who has not intentionally entered the fray who has been subject to āabuseā, and what would you might label as āabuseā occurs on both sides. But on reddit and 4chan only one side has been censored. That is fine, but āfree speechā v.s. āonly politically correct pro-gender-feminist speechā are different policies, and they seemed to change toward the latter recently.
This even applies to something purely technical. Code reviews can be brutal, and maybe ought to be. If you will be reduced to tears when someone finds a critical bug, then the problem is with you, not with the reviewer.
If you wish to do battle, you should wear armor and shield. Many places require helmets when riding a motorcycle. You donāt have to ride a motorcycle. And if you run barefoot, you need to develop a thick skin - callouses - there.
I donāt think oversensitivity and fear on someoneās part makes ordinary aggressive and even tough discussion āabuseā toward them. Victims donāt get to define the crime, the law, the rules, must be objective and enforced equally.
Here is a case of āif a Man said itā¦ā http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/11170286/Why-Britains-women-are-allowed-to-sexually-objectify-men.html It cannot be equality, the rule of law, or āabuseā if it is only wrong if men do it to women, but not when women do the IDENTICAL thing to men. And that is my problem - I donāt tolerate or am intolerant of anything different based on the sex, gender, race, creed, or whatever of the person. Either the act itself is abusive or it is not. If the place is supposed to be āpoliteā, then rudeness on the part of anyone and everyone should not be tolerated. Instead, I find excuses being made for one party or the other party, persons, not actions.
I agree, too often I see people claiming victim blaming/shaming when the person decided to air various topics in a public forum. Public forums encourage public discussion. There are often ideas and angles that will in fact, point out that circumstances can be mitigated or entirely altered via a number of variables. The idea, especially in the US, that people who are victims of a crime are always 100% dissociated with the acts the led to the crime being committed is absurdly high.
Each case should be taken under individual inspection, rather than broad strokes of completely removing responsibility from the harmed party. It seems to be very hard to get across the point that what people deserve, not being victims of crimes, is not related to the reality of what you can do to mitigate becoming a victim.
The summary of what Iām trying to say is, armor is necessary. Both virtual and in real life. Not only that, but sometimes even as a victim, you can learn new mitigating factors that might actually prevent or up your chances of not being a victim a second time from the very people who are attacking you.
Odd that Facebook is the primary example of offensive comments, when Facebook is the only venue where Iāve never seen one, as opposed to Usenet newsgroups, YouTube comments, and numerous news sites. I think thatās because every comment I see on Facebook is from either a friend of mine, or a friend of a friend, or possibly a friend of a friend of a friend (but still linked to me in some traceable way). All my Facebook friends are people I know in real life, and it seems that most of them appear to also have only real-life acquaintances as their Facebook friends. I do receive friend requests from people I donāt know, but I ignore them. Iām curious how Bob Beschizza is linked to Gerald Witt (the two people in the Facebook example).
I believe the majority of hateful people are unlikely to let loose their inner vitriol unless they are either in a circle of similarly-inclined friends, or in an anonymous forum, but that they are usually restrained when they are in a heterogenous group of acquaintances. Therefore a social network such as Facebook is uniquely positioned to squelch such comments simply through its structure rather than any active reporting system, but it would be difficult to replicate this effect in a community such as, well this one on Coding Horror, where many commenters are unlikely to know anybody else in the community in real life.
[quote=ātomz, post:16, topic:2681, full:trueā]
Random, anonymous, amorphous threats are also abusive, but still just talk. Or as children are taught āSticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt meā. That is true except for slander and libel.[/quote]
Actually, āSticks and Stonesā is a complete fiction. Itās an attempt to dismiss attack on a person, the equivalent of āSuck it up, pussyā when youāre subjected to physical abuse. Words have power, specifically the power to define relationships and attitudes. An anonymous threat is not just talk, it is an attempt to alter someoneās behaviour by instilling fear of what might happen to them. False accusations, when believed, affect your ability to function in society. And anyone who was bullied or who deals with the bullied will tell you that the non-physical abuse has a far more long-term effect than the physical, in terms of the future behaviour of the bullied.
Basically, my claim is that the people making these threats are well aware of the power of words, and thatās why theyāre using them in a way which is defined as abuse in the same way that we separate physical violence and abuse by the way that violence is used. By saying āIām not willing to judge whether this is abuseā, you are not supporting it, but you are certainly tolerating it. You can substitute the term abuse for whatever term you like, but you are certainly tolerating the actual actions.
And thatās fine. You can tolerate that, either because it doesnāt affect you personally, or because you are emotionally safe from criticism. But if you then say āitās wrong to protect people against this and put structures in place to prevent itā, you are like a prizefighter saying itās fine to beat up people because he can take it. Again, thatās fine, and I doubt I can convince you otherwise.
But I can at least draw to your attention that that is what you are doing, and argue that tolerating such behaviour is not as ethically sound as āintolerant to censorshipā appears at first sight.
Iām not sure the distinction of āignore bad, moderation goodā is as clear-cut as this post makes it sound, either - the problem of ignores being āsilentā is not inherent to the idea, but rather an implementation detail.
In fact, over two years ago I suggested an extension to XenForoās ignore system, which would make it considerably more useful for encouraging good behavior by hybridizing it with Hellbanning:
The core of the idea is that you have a āloserboardā (c.f. leaderboard) of those who are āmost ignoredā, and when they hit a threshold they are hellbanned. That provides a social cue of āYouāre being a poor citizenā without forcing the people hitting the ignore button to de-anonymize themselves. In addition, mods can examine the āloserboardā proactively to find problem users.
The actual post has a number of other things in order to make it actually work, but I think it illustrates that āignoreā can be turned into a useful tool for exactly the kind of environment Discourse is trying to support.
And by analogy with it being āyour houseāā¦ If you see all of your guests ignoring a few others pointedly (and with the above, it is pointed), thatās a hint to you as the host that something is up - without them coming up to you-the-mod and complaining, which can in some circumstances be stigmatized (that, too, is a problem, but one thing at a time 
)
The use of āyour houseā in this article makes it clear that this is being written to discourse site administrators, not to users of those sites, which really makes the situation no different than it is with Twitter or Facebook or any other specific site controlled by the whims of its administrators.
Regular debates, such as this one, are attempts at altering peopleās behavior as well, with an appeal to logic, rather than an appeal to survival. They do the same thing in different ways. Itās clearly socially acceptable to appeal to logic, and sometimes emotion, but not survival unless you arenāt the one threatening them directly (āmove or youāll get hit by that car!ā).
Youāre conflating most attacks with survival though, and thatās simply not true. The vast majority of things people are calling attacks on each other are not death threats, they are using emotionally charged words. This is important to note, because the people who are being emotionally attacked are using emotional appeals themselves as well. Obviously not all debates are emotional, but a great deal of back and forth is entirely an emotional battle.
Person 1 - āThese words make me feel bad, nobody should do/say thisā
Person 2 - āIt makes me feel good, you should understand my feelings/thoughtsā
Person 1 - āMY wants and needs are more important.ā
And so goes the argument (downhill usually). Person 1 and 2 BOTH have valid points, but in nearly every debate one of these people is demonized and a āwinnerā is picked. Itās ridiculously rare that Person 1 or 2 wants to actively harm or hold privilege over the other (although this is a highly used demonizing tactic, especially in war).
What you are doing by saying people shouldnāt tolerate certain āattacksā is not protecting people, but really āpick a winner, and make sure itās the one I agree withā.
Addendum: This is one of the reasons I largely disagree with publicly viewable open forums that define themselves as āsafe spacesā. Pick one, a public forum, or a safely moderated private one that only accepts opinions from people they already agree with.