The Troll Taunter
June 6, 2017 3:10 PM   Subscribe

A young Wikipedia editor withstood a decade of online abuse. Now she’s fighting back — on Wikipedia itself.
Emily Temple-Wood's Women Scientists WikiProject. [WARNING: Violent, sexist, and homophobic language]
posted by Joseph Gurl (70 comments total) 44 users marked this as a favorite
 
As with any large and intellectually robust online community, an undercurrent of hostility is never far away. Minor disagreements can flare into harassment if they’re not dealt with promptly and transparently.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:31 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


That's...no, Emily Temple-Wood.. is awesome. I went dark when I came under attack. More power to her. I don't really know much about scientists, but I do know a lot about women in literature and comics. I wonder if they need help in either of those areas.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 3:32 PM on June 6, 2017 [23 favorites]


I am glad that this article focuses on a positive response to harassment, but I really want some of the harassers to face legal and social consequences.
posted by bq at 4:11 PM on June 6, 2017 [33 favorites]


Yes. This is going to continue to be a normal part of online interaction until trolls face actual consequences for their behavior. And we'll continue to fruitlessly wonder "why women just aren't interested in editing Wikipedia."
posted by faineg at 5:05 PM on June 6, 2017 [21 favorites]


What gets me is how half the people in the entire fucking world are women, and always have been, and there are still so many fields they're underrepresented in. Considering why that is was an eye-opener for me, politically.
posted by JHarris at 5:21 PM on June 6, 2017 [10 favorites]


What a total badass. With that said, it's really mind-blowing how much testosterone-fueled hate has been harnessed by the internet. Also, sad.
posted by photoslob at 5:22 PM on June 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


testosterone-fueled hate
Its not genetic, its a role. Genetics we can do nothing about. Unfucking minds should be our waking priority.

A++ Shows determination, guts, patience. Found her place and stuck to it. I hope she does more great things.

Bullies are cowards.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 6:09 PM on June 6, 2017 [6 favorites]


I am glad that this article focuses on a positive response to harassment, but I really want some of the harassers to face legal and social consequences.

Yes. This is going to continue to be a normal part of online interaction until trolls face actual consequences for their behavior.

It is telling, perhaps, that the featured response here is essentially orthogonal to the trolling. It’s nice to read Temple-Woods’s logic about how trolls don’t like to hear about strong women, but in practice few, if any, of the trolls are likely to encounter her articles directly except to vandalize them. They might provide some good inspiration for other women down the line (and we can hope that they do!) but they in no way touch the men who seem to hate her - and, of course, her own increasing prominence will surely just make her more of a target. The article briefly touches on internal Wikipedia discussions about limiting harassment, but if you actually wanted to discuss how to deal with trolls in the environment, it seems like that material should go in the foreground. (Why, for instance, could vandals desecrate her own “About” page? That seems to be locked now, but was it always so? How was that change enacted?)

I am, of course, essentially demanding a complete rewrite of a brief article about one woman and her demonstrably good project about increasing the representation of women in Wikipedia. But given her position in the community, it seems like lauding a woman for bearing up in the face of verbal assault is to crack open a whole can of worms about why she felt like this was the only option she had available to her - and to raise the specter of all the women who left. “Adversity begets strength” is a premise that often takes it as read that the adversity is, in some sense, a positive thing. That’s a frame that deserves some push back.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:46 PM on June 6, 2017 [28 favorites]


Exactly, Going to Maine. So often this sort of harassment is presented as a Tragic Yet Unchangeable Reality, as if it were akin to thunderstorms or earthquakes.

When in reality - there are all kinds of possible solutions that involve finding and punishing trolls. We just as a society have chosen *not* to pursue those solutions.

I admit I find this extra infuriating because I've found it's usually trivially easy to find the real names and personal information of most online trolls - and if I can do it, surely the police and online platforms could do the same. If they *wanted* to.

Yet you still hear so many stories about women reporting cyber harassment to confused police officers who aren't even aware of what Twitter is, or social media platforms claiming it's simply too difficult to prove that harassment took place. If law enforcement won't take this problem seriously, and platforms won't take this problem seriously, what do you do?
posted by faineg at 7:00 PM on June 6, 2017 [15 favorites]


These asshats are we can't have nice stuff.

(Happily visualizing an 80's VHS film called "Troll Force", where an gender-agnostic elite strike force hang out in a space station, and use drop pods to land in Troll housing, shooting them in the head with lasers fired from terrifyingly shiny sidearms.)
posted by Samizdata at 7:07 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


Also, are why we, even. My fingers are possessed.
posted by Samizdata at 7:13 PM on June 6, 2017


surely the police and online platforms could do the same. If they wanted to.

I haven’t seen a really thorough investigation of this, but I’ve seen smaller ones suggesting that technical skills are distributed in very unbalanced ways across police departments. That doesn’t make it right, but it raises questions about their capabilities in this area, I think.

That said, I would also suggest that the police are a bit of red herring. How many of these threats would be considered actionable, as opposed to simply awful? I really don’t know, and examples in online spaces seem to vary. (When Brianna Wu’s house was posted online, when that crazy guy posted a video on YouTube about going after her - that seemed actionable. But with the threats mentioned here, it’s harder to tell if Temple-Wood felt in danger or just that she was being run off of a website- something that might not matter so much in a court (IANAL). (Wu, I recall, made the point that in many ways Twitter was part of her livelihood and this it mattered that she could be active there. I’d be interested to know how that would play out in front of a judge.)

Really, this is about Wikipedia and the norms that websites allow. The law should probably stay away.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:11 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


Metafilter: These asshats are we can't have nice stuff.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 8:26 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


I think that should be more up to the sites to police than the police, there's the whole range of trolling - to me someone threatening to rape you should be actionable by law, but there's a wide range of not-nice things that can make for a hostile environment while not being an actionable personal threat.

The crazy thing is that she's 22 and has been receiving vicious emails for a decade. Who's trolling 12 year olds? My daughter is almost 11, I think I'll have to push email access back another few years.
posted by Hazelsmrf at 8:58 PM on June 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


If someone followed you around town and yelled threats at you, or organized people to hold signs up near places you frequented with threats on them, or anything similar in "real" life, even if the police judged that the people doing it weren't "seriously" going to rape you or beat you up, you'd still be able to get a restraining order and it would be legally actionable. As more and more of our lives are online, I don't see why the online equivalent is tolerated. The point isn't usually to actually physically assault the target (though you can't know for sure). It's to harass the target until they stop doing normal, acceptable activities.
posted by R343L at 9:21 PM on June 6, 2017 [15 favorites]


We don't have the equivalent of internet restraining orders because the internet is male dominated, and being made more so. And the guys in charge don't think it's a problem. And at this point, I don't see it getting better any time soon.
posted by happyroach at 10:53 PM on June 6, 2017 [6 favorites]


So, where does Wikipedia stand on harassment? What do they do to prevent it?

I like her response to trolling. It's great to have more content about women but it seems way inadequate.
posted by shoesietart at 11:34 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


The reason I don't think it should be law is that it's subjective, where should the line be drawn between trolling that is serious enough to be illegal and trolling that isn't? And wouldn't that line be different based on the person or even how they're feeling that day? How would you implement such a law?
posted by Hazelsmrf at 11:35 PM on June 6, 2017


If someone followed you around town and yelled threats at you, or organized people to hold signs up near places you frequented with threats on them, or anything similar in "real" life, even if the police judged that the people doing it weren't "seriously" going to rape you or beat you up, you'd still be able to get a restraining order and it would be legally actionable. As more and more of our lives are online, I don't see why the online equivalent is tolerated.
I couldn't agree more. It's positively infuriating that internet abuse is so consequence free for so many shitheads out there. It's constant, it's everwhere, and it should be punishable. My heart goes out to women on the internet who have to deal with this almost invariably. Makes the blood boil.
The reason I don't think it should be law is that it's subjective, where should the line be drawn between trolling that is serious enough to be illegal and trolling that isn't?
This isn't trolling, though--it's harassment and abuse, and it should be prosecutable as hate speech.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 11:37 PM on June 6, 2017 [8 favorites]


Yes, I did agree that I think rape threats and other threats of that nature should absolutely be prosecutable, I was agreeing with Going to Maine that the law isn't the right place to deal with a lot of online abuse, though as you say some absolutely qualifies as hate speech. This isn't trolling, but where is the line between trolling and harassment, where is the difference between "this is illegal" and "this is you being a horrible human being". Most people seem to have differing opinions on what is actionable (or should be).
posted by Hazelsmrf at 3:26 AM on June 7, 2017


I was agreeing with Going to Maine that the law isn't the right place to deal with a lot of online abuse

What makes online abuse so different than other types of abuse? We already have laws against harassment that limit behavior that crosses a line. And there are borderline cases there too.

Demanding that the line always be clear, that there be no borderline cases before we come up with rules or laws addressing the problem, means we would have to chuck out a lot of laws. The world is rarely divided into neat categories like that. And deciding borderline cases is one of the things the courts do. ("Did what this person do meet the definition of this crime?")

But this is kind of a side point, because so many of the things that happen to women online would already be actionable under existing laws, but are ignored because law enforcement doesn't take harassment of women seriously. We have had to fight tooth and nail to get them to care about rape and domestic violence - and look at the continuing problems we have with how those things are handled.

They can write off internet crimes because they haven't been made to care, and they haven't been made to care because we don't have the political will, and we don't have the political will because we don't really care about women. We just like to give lip service to the idea that we should, but when caring demands real action, real change that might be uncomfortable - there is always an excuse.

We could start with fucking enforcing existing laws instead of debating about how harassment and threats against women intended to drive them from the public sphere shouldn't be illegal because sometimes it might just be "trolling."

Not that this will happen any time soon, not in this political climate.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:50 AM on June 7, 2017 [10 favorites]


I'm pretty sure I didn't lock my car last night, not rushing down to check even though I live blocks from "projects", nice projects, but stuff has happened. Why? An active polite yet effective police presence. The internet perhaps does not need vast troll prosecution/litigation but there should be some equivalent to a "cop on the beat" that lets the folks that do not have internal ethical control that external controls exist and there is active monitoring of good behavior.
posted by sammyo at 3:53 AM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


I think I'll have to push email access back another few years.

And here is a stark example of what I mean. I'm not criticizing your decision, hazelsmrf, but the fact that you feel you have to make it to protect your daughter's safety, and thereby deprive her of a basic communication tool. Email is necessary to do a lot of things online, including educational things, like signing up for online code schools.

But leaving email isn't enough to protect her, because harassment can occur in any platform where users are able to contact other users. What if Temple Wood had left Wikipedia? It sounds like she might have had fewer bad days - but also, you can tell it is something she's passionate about.

(Have you considered an email account with a whitelist so she can talk to known/trusted friends and family, but strangers can't contact her? Though, if she's 11, most of her friends probably aren't going to be using email anyway...)
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 4:00 AM on June 7, 2017 [6 favorites]


Who's trolling 12 year olds?
Well, in her case, the people who were trolling her probably never guessed that she was 12. And that was the appeal of Wikipedia for a nerdy, bullied 12-year-old: it was a place where she could be respected and included based on the quality of her contributions, not on her age. She contributed like a grown-up, so people treated her with the respect they would give a grown-up. That's really rare and amazing when you're a pre-teen. And if she'd been a pre-teen boy, she could just have had that amazing experience, which would have helped her take herself seriously and see herself as someone who could contribute to the world. But once people figured out she was female, they treated her the way they would treat a grown-up woman, with all the ugliness that entails.
My daughter is almost 11, I think I'll have to push email access back another few years.
That's not really a solution, because there are little boys whose parents will not have to protect them like that and who will therefore have lots of opportunities that your daughter will be denied.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:25 AM on June 7, 2017 [10 favorites]


My daughter is almost 11, I think I'll have to push email access back another few years.

I completely understand your fear, but I think the answer to this kind of thing should never be "deprive girls of access to important tools and resources for their own safety." Protecting women by keeping them away from things has a long and nasty track record, even when done with the best of intentions. (If it makes you feel any better, I was given completely open Internet access when I was around that age and never experienced issues like those described here - though times may be different now).

How many of these threats would be considered actionable, as opposed to simply awful? I

I was thinking of threats that could be considered legally actionable in my original post. I've seen plenty of those directed at people I know.

But I completely agree with those who've pointed out that the real world equivalent of a lot of this threatening online harassment would *absolutely* warrant a restraining order in the Real World. One big issue here is that a lot of people in law enforcement haven't quite realized that the line between The Real World and The Internet has essentially vanished.
posted by faineg at 5:46 AM on June 7, 2017 [9 favorites]


The reason I don't think it should be law is that it's subjective, where should the line be drawn between trolling that is serious enough to be illegal and trolling that isn't?

Most if not all law is drawing bright shining lines in arbitrary/subjective places.
posted by solotoro at 5:54 AM on June 7, 2017 [8 favorites]


I kind of want an article created that is "List of Wikipedia editors who said that they want to rape an underage girl." This is a project where the created names, while anonymous, have a certain weight that will be lost if the account is lost. I'm not sure how one would go about doing this, perhaps some sort of "catch a predator" type system?
posted by Hactar at 6:11 AM on June 7, 2017 [10 favorites]


Most people seem to have differing opinions on what is actionable (or should be).

This is a generically true statement and yet somehow we manage to still have laws.
posted by PMdixon at 6:16 AM on June 7, 2017 [7 favorites]


How many of these threats would be considered actionable, as opposed to simply awful?

The reason I don't think it should be law is that it's subjective, where should the line be drawn between trolling that is serious enough to be illegal and trolling that isn't? And wouldn't that line be different based on the person or even how they're feeling that day? How would you implement such a law?


Isn't that how current real-world harrassment laws are enforced? If I go up to someone on the street and threaten to kill them, it is up to them whether they want to go to the police and then the police investigate, the prosecutor puts together a case, and a judge/jury decide my fate. I don't get a say in whether or not the police bring charges against me, once the words are out of my mouth, it's up to the victim to decide.

Is the worry that someone who was "just kidding" might be prosecuted? Then they shouldn't threaten people, joking or not, just like in the real world with our existing laws.

Also, maybe if people were actually held accountable for their online actions, people wouldn't feel free to "joke" about it so often to strangers and the overall effect would be a decline in abusive behavior online.
posted by LizBoBiz at 6:28 AM on June 7, 2017 [8 favorites]


I am glad that this article focuses on a positive response to harassment, but I really want some of the harassers to face legal and social consequences.


The solution that repeatedly comes to mind is an end to anonymity on the internet.

Can't really think of any good reason not to save for whistle-blowing, which could be done on the appropriate platform and without personal attacks.
posted by Laotic at 6:58 AM on June 7, 2017




IS there any organized effort to expose online trolls? I know, I know, slippery slope, we need anonymity for political dissent, yadda yadda yadda. But can't we take a few people who send rape threat to women and share their comments with their own mothers or wives? I am thinking most are not bright enough to cover their tracks very well.
posted by LarryC at 8:33 AM on June 7, 2017 [4 favorites]


The solution that repeatedly comes to mind is an end to anonymity on the internet.

No, absolutely not. This is a terrible idea.

First, it's a terrible idea because it won't actually solve the problem. People still abuse using their real names, and many of those using pseudonyms can be uncovered with minimal work. The problem is that no one thinks online abuse is serious.

Yes, if someone knows how to cover their tracks, it can make it difficult or impossible to take legal action against them. But these are the same people who would also know how to get around rules requiring real names.

Second, it's a terrible idea because the collateral damage would be massive and would hit hardest the people you're trying to protect. Vulnerable people need anonymity online. Anonymity is a tool they use to protect ourselves. Like any tool, it can also be used for bad ends - but taking it away would stifle the speech of vulnerable people.

I use anonymity to protect myself from abuse, from discrimination on the job market, from my friends or family finding out about sensitive hobbies/interests, from being undervalued or treated differently because of my gender, etc etc.

If I was required to do everything under my real name, I wouldn't be writing this comment because I wouldn't be on MetaFilter. I'd probably be a lot less technically inclined; I would have used computers much less because I wouldn't have built the social networks I did. People like me - people who face more negative consequences for who they are or what they believe - would be preferentially driven into quiet, resulting in even less balanced user populations online.

Imagine if Temple Wood had been required to use her real name when she first started editing Wikipedia. She might very well have had to decide that the risk of someone targeting her offline was too great to continue. Now she's an adult, and has made the choice to use her real name - but not everyone can do that.

When someone says that they don't see any reason for anonymity, I see someone who paradoxically does not understand the seriousness of the problem he (usually) is trying to solve; he doesn't imagine the backlash people might face because of their identities, beliefs, or interests to be all that serious.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:52 AM on June 7, 2017 [12 favorites]


(Have you considered an email account with a whitelist so she can talk to known/trusted friends and family, but strangers can't contact her? Though, if she's 11, most of her friends probably aren't going to be using email anyway...)

She's had a Maily account since she was about 5, it lets her email her grandparents and some family friends. I also have a Gmail account that I opened for her as she needed an email address to sign up for some things online, she just doesn't have the password, for now. But I've already had to teach her the normal rules like "don't read Youtube comments" and to stop doing "trust trades" on Animal Jam because she was getting scammed left and right. Sad that she's had to learn to not trust anyone online, but better that she learns that now!
posted by Hazelsmrf at 9:01 AM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Larryc, they almost never cover their tracks in any meaningful way (in my experience). And outing them and shaming them can be very effective. There are a number of cases I've seen where the troll was identified and their comments were shared with employers or family members. I've seen cases where simply letting the troll know that you know who they are and could out them if you so desired is enough to stop the harassment.

But there aren't enough of these cases: these efforts to unmask and shame trolls aren't concentrated or organized insofar as I'm aware. Some people who are harassed aren't in favor of these efforts, and are concerned they could just result in even more abuse coming their way. Others find them morally distasteful.

One could certainly argue that the vigilante justice approach isn't a good one - albeit the only one that seems to be available in most cases right now. It will remain the only imperfect solution until law enforcement and/or online platforms decide to start taking harassment and threats seriously.

Ending anonymity is not the answer and I think would make things worse. You still see trolls and harassers who use their real names all the time (sometimes unknowingly, admittedly, but often not). And it takes away an important tool for many, many vulnerable groups.
posted by faineg at 10:19 AM on June 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


For what it's worth, here is the English harassment policy. I'm glad the author decided to stay in the community working against the bad apples and the author of the piece is someone with whom I have spoken for similar pieces on Wikipedia: he is an excellent journalist and a fine person.
posted by koavf at 11:20 AM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


Rather than actively link accounts (on twitter, Wikipedia, etc.) to real people who wish to remain anonymous, why not simply make acquiring an account a difficult proposition? Not onerous, but make it so that an account is muted for the first 48 hours it exists? I like Metafilter's $5 policy, but that would get expensive if needed for every online service.

There are already filters that block twitter accounts less than a week old. Make the policy of all of twitter. Prevent Facebook accounts from messaging people or writing on their timelines for three days. Make everyone who wants to edit a wiki page have an account registered for two or three days before they actually can. Don't demolish anonymity, it is too important for vulnerable people. Instead, have blocks and bans that result from harassment actually mean something.

You could even extend this to email systems. Make it only 24 hours, but if you can only receive mail and not chat with anyone during the first 24 hours of a gmail accounts life, it could conceivably help slow harassment. Blacklist sites that do not force a wait period, but allow people to whitelist them if they want.
posted by Hactar at 2:10 PM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


English Wikipedia has multiple different page protection types -- while most English Wikipedia pages are open to editing by anyone, including people who aren't logged in at all, there are some levels of protection that require the user to be logged-in and to have a certain number of days and a certain number of edits under their belt. There's also a "pending changes" mode where anyone can submit an edit but "edits by unregistered and new contributors are not visible to readers who are not logged in, until the edits are approved by a reviewer or administrator." It's not an easy, automatic, self-serve option to get some level of protection on your own user page or user talk page; I'm not sure whether that's also true on other Wikipedias that aren't English Wikipedia, or other Wikimedia wikis like the Wikisources.

I've met and (in a very small way) collaborated with Temple-Wood. I appreciate her work and am glad it's coming to wider attention.

Here's an column she wrote in an English Wikipedia community online newspaper, and here's the next; they highlight "awesome articles and other content created or expanded to fight systemic bias" and are fun reads.
posted by brainwane at 3:04 PM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


Hazelsmrf supported GamerGate. Of course they don't think trolling should be actionable.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:16 PM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


Hazelsmrf supported GamerGate. Of course they don't think trolling should be actionable.

I find this to be very sad, especially since they now think they have to remove some of her daughter's online privileges in order to protect her from the same kind of gendered abuse. It's the girl, again, who is made to be responsible for ending it, by being removed and losing out on the opportunities that others have.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:46 PM on June 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


Its not genetic, its a role. Genetics we can do nothing about. Unfucking minds should be our waking priority.

It is important to remember that genes are not destiny.

We correct vision. We have step stools for short people. We have shelters because we have no fur. The genetic limitation of not being able to lift a car is corrected with a jack. The lack of wings is addressed with airplanes. The genetic limitation of not having unlimited time, energy and skill is overcome by having a society. We routinely correct for our deficient nature practically every second of every day.

If there are asshole genes lurking on the y chromosome that is really irrelevant. We are modern humans. We overcome these kinds of obstacles all the time.

When we want to.

So absolutely we must unfuck minds and the first step is to take away pathetic and ridiculous excuses like "genetics" or "boys will be boys".
posted by srboisvert at 4:25 PM on June 7, 2017 [5 favorites]


Hazelsmrf supported GamerGate.

Holy shit
posted by Joseph Gurl at 8:53 PM on June 7, 2017


The obvious solution is that straight white men must pay $5 to open an account on any internet service, and all men must wait 24 hours before posting. That should drastically reduce the trolling - slow it down, because sockpuppets aren't fast, and reduce it, because those with the most privilege actually have something to lose if they violate the rules enough to have an account banned.

Of course that's ridiculous. But it's comparable to Golda Meir's solution to a rape crisis: Ban men from the streets after hours.

We may need to quit thinking, "what could we possibly do that only catches the Bad People and doesn't infringe on anyone else's rights?" and switch to, "what level of restrictions would be minor for the innocent who fall in the same group as the problem makers, and prevent or heavily curtail the guilty?" - the same way we add speed bumps to roads where drivers aren't careful enough.

We have plenty of laws that are enforced as, "well, no, you weren't doing anything wrong, and we don't exactly think you were going to, but... a lot of other people who match your general description have caused problems with this before."

Law enforcement has no problems with demographic profiling for potential criminal behavior... as long as the profile doesn't point to straight, white, middle-class, English-speaking male.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:07 AM on June 8, 2017 [4 favorites]


I was agreeing with Going to Maine that the law isn't the right place to deal with a lot of online abuse

What makes online abuse so different than other types of abuse? We already have laws against harassment that limit behavior that crosses a line. And there are borderline cases there too.

My particular concern here, in the context of the article, related more to actionability, and the idea that a lot of online threats don’t necessarily seem actionable - they drive people off of websites, but that isn’t necessarily considered severe enough to be “harrassment”. I’m not a lawyer, but my impression was that Elonis (USA Today coverage) last year had some ramifications for this, and not in a way that would make most participants in this thread happy. But I’ve never gone to a cop about this, so I know from nothing. As is, it seems like the online harassment that goes after community members still seems like it’s better solved through improved community design, not legal action; certainly Wikipedia should be getting the jump on shutting down threats and bad behavior first.

I am, of course, assuming that the harassers that Temple-Wood were dealing with were asshole men, saying threatening things at a remove with no ability to follow-up; the article doesn’t seem to suggest otherwise, and if the threats had been more serious (vs. being cruel), I sort of suspect that would have been mentioned. This is again contra Gamergate, where the threats got real, quite fast. An interesting point here - my assumption has been that harassment is primarily actionable when it interferes with your ability to work; when does it become actionable when it interferes with your pleasure? (e.g. if you edit Wikipedia for kicks, or you use Twitter for fun.) My assumption has been that that’s just too bad, but given that catcalling is illegal in some states per Emily Badger, I could well be dead wrong on this and it just depends what state you’re in. And, again, see Elonis.

Not that people shouldn’t go after abusers by calling the cops when under threat, but it seems like saying that a victim should be able to call the police is a way for communities to deliberately overlook the size of the burden that requires, or the potential inability of the police to do anything. (Imagine if your harasser is located across state lines. Imagine if they are located outside of the country. Even if the cops possess the know-how to identify them, doing something about it becomes harder.) It is, on the other hand, easy for Wikipedia to suspend an account, or block an IP. The police should be a last resort, and the community itself, ideally, should be a first resort. Gamergate was an excellent exemplar of a breakdown at each level.

Hazelsmrf supported GamerGate.

It is easy to read this sentence, taken in isolation, as a maximum damnation; “support” is a broad phrase, and folks should feel free to read through old threads and determine on their own what they consider to be the extent of it. I will say that the most extreme parsing doesn’t seem correct. (I remain amazed that other users can remember each other for more than five minutes, but that really says more about me than them.)
posted by Going To Maine at 12:16 AM on June 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


and if the threats had been more serious (vs. being cruel), I sort of suspect that would have been mentioned.

The article directly quotes a message about raping her, and mentions that she's received multiple death threats. The fact that you think these are just "cruel", and not serious, is exactly the problem.

my assumption has been that harassment is primarily actionable when it interferes with your ability to work

I'm not sure where you're getting this from. Here's a page on US harassment law. Harassment laws do vary by state, but the state law that they quote as an example makes no mention of the workplace, only "a public place or places."

Note that this law already covers some of the behavior described in the article. The things you say shouldn't be made illegal are already illegal, but not enforced.

Imagine if your harasser is located across state lines.

What do we do if someone sends rape and death threats by mail? Throw our hands up in the air and say "too bad, get over it?"

I absolutely agree that (a) communities need to be more responsible for preventing this kind of behavior, and (b) that in some cases it will be hard to prosecute. But we're not even to the point where that is an issue, because people are too busy finding all kinds of excuses for why it should be perfectly legal to do online what would be illegal offline, including sending women rape and death threats.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 2:23 AM on June 8, 2017 [6 favorites]


An interesting point here - my assumption has been that harassment is primarily actionable when it interferes with your ability to work; when does it become actionable when it interferes with your pleasure? (e.g. if you edit Wikipedia for kicks, or you use Twitter for fun.) My assumption has been that that’s just too bad
You know, I find this endlessly frustrating. I don't believe that women's ability to exist in public is some unimportant side issue, some frivolous thing that we insist we should have because we're just kind of silly like that. (And I mean, I don't want to draw false equivalences, but there have been major struggles in the US over people's right to do non-work-related things like eat at lunch counters. Access to public accommodation in a thing in the history of civil rights movements.) And I also don't think that it's separate from our ability to work. I actually think this discussion is a really good example of that. When you talk to dudes in tech about why there are so few women in that field, they go straight to the pipeline problem. "We, the dudes who run tech companies, can't solve this problem," they say "because by the time we're hiring people, it's already too late. Real programmers start when they're 12. If you want more women to work at our companies, you need to figure out why little girls aren't programming when they're 12." And here we have a parent who is going to cut their daughter off from the internet to protect her from online abuse, which makes it a lot less likely that the daughter is going to start coding when she's 12. This is the pipeline problem, right here, playing out in real time. But when you point that out to dudes in tech, they say "well, there are really important issues at stake here, much more important than some silly 12-year-old's hobbies. We need to focus on important stuff, like people's work lives." It's irritating as fuck, and I'm at the point where I think that if you point out that something isn't a good solution, I'd like to hear from you what you think is a good solution, because "you're just going to accept that you're not fully human" is not cutting it for me anymore.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:23 AM on June 8, 2017 [19 favorites]


I don't believe that women's ability to exist in public is some unimportant side issue, some frivolous thing that we insist we should have because we're just kind of silly like that.

Thank you thank you thank you thank for this comment and the rest of it.

This isn't about hobbies. This is about our right to exist in public spaces as more than bodies for consumption. It isn't trivial.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:07 AM on June 8, 2017 [6 favorites]


My Metafilter life is complete. Had some comments favorited by klangklangston, and now a comment nominated for fake tagline.

swoons
posted by Samizdata at 11:25 AM on June 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


Also, I would love to tell her she is awesome and seriously badass, but isn't that sort of the flipside of the problem?

(Not joking here. This stuff confuses me.)
posted by Samizdata at 11:26 AM on June 8, 2017


The article directly quotes a message about raping her, and mentions that she's received multiple death threats. The fact that you think these are just "cruel", and not serious, is exactly the problem.

A rape threat, defined with no other context, is harassment and awful. It is potentially quite scary. But a threat in your email is significanly different than a tale threat at your door, or over the phone, and the sticky provides no other context. If those threats were repeated by one individual multiple times or included personal details, I'd be more inclined to say it's serious and not cruel. That said, if the legal protections are there, one should take action against such things, and it should be painless to do so. Again, I don't know the statutes here, just that online speech is pretty dang hard to prosecute and seems to be being harder. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be a law, just that it doesn't seem like there is one.

I'd like to hear from you what you think is a good solution, because "you're just going to accept that you're not fully human" is not cutting it for me anymore.

My stolen, in this case, would be more proactive actions by Wikipedia to limit this harassment. The community should provide the tools to filter out toxic masculinity. The police should provide the tools to process individuals (e.g. folks who persist through multiple pseudonyms) threatening serious harm. To use a GG metaphor, one is an Anime Girl Avatar, the other is Eron Gjoni or The Ralph Retort, who posted pics of Brianna Wu's home. Twitter should be able to eliminate the former, and the police should be able to legally restain the latter. (this is, I concede, sliding the fact that some Anime Girl Avatars engaged in substantial harassment as well.) The fact that Twitter and other platforms will must be dragged, kicking and screaming, into a future where they manage their communities as communities is a problem as well. Indeed, in my ideal world Twitter and other community platforms would liase with the police to facilitate in the arrest and the building of a case.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:56 AM on June 8, 2017


that online speech is pretty dang hard to prosecute and seems to be being harder

The point that I've been making - and which I've stated repeatedly - is that it's "pretty dang hard to prosecute" because people don't take it seriously. And here you are, still making excuses for why it's not serious when women are repeatedly sent abusive, threatening messages that drive them offline.

A related point that I've been making - and which I've stated repeatedly - is that a lot of this behavior is already illegal. I even linked you to relevant law. And here you are, still saying "I don't know the statutes."

Quite frankly, I find the behavior baffling and I keep coming back to the same explanation: A world in which men routinely send messages to women about raping and killing them has become so normalized to you that you don't think they actually deserve legal punishment for it.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 12:32 PM on June 8, 2017 [6 favorites]


The point that I've been making - and which I've stated repeatedly - is that it's "pretty dang hard to prosecute" because people don't take it seriously. And here you are, still making excuses for why it's not serious when women are repeatedly sent abusive, threatening messages that drive them offline.

I’m not making an excuse, and certainly don’t mean to come across as dismissive. Such threats can be terrifying. That doesn’t make them self-evidently actionable or serious though. Indeed, I’d like to think I’m agreeing that this kind of harassment is hard to prosecute. Indeed, I think it’s so hard to prosecute that it’s better to avoid legal mechanisms and focus on silencing the speakers technically.

A related point that I've been making - and which I've stated repeatedly - is that a lot of this behavior is already illegal. I even linked you to relevant law. And here you are, still saying “I don't know the statutes.”

That’s a fair cop! I was in the middle of writing my own tome, and not reading comments at the time. The linked definition and examples are interesting, and I’d love to read about some examples of successful prosecutions under what appears to be New York’s S240.30 for “Aggravated harassment in the second degree”, which seems to have the necessary scope. (Temple-Wood, incidentally, is based out of Illinois, so ILCS 5/12-7.5 would seem more relevant.) And certainly the EFF’s 2015 statement -which I recall getting significant blowback here in GG threads- argued that existing laws are probably sufficient for combatting online harassment.

What I remain suspicious of is the idea that drive-by harassment can be successfully prosecuted. It would certainly be nice to think that it would be an easy citation, akin to a red-light camera, but that would seem to be technically infeasible right now, to say nothing of entailing a degree of surveillance to which people tend to object. A dream of an engineering project, and perhaps something that can be done.

Quite frankly, I find the behavior baffling and I keep coming back to the same explanation: A world in which men routinely send messages to women about raping and killing them has become so normalized to you that you don't think they actually deserve legal punishment for it.

That’s certainly an accusation I’ll mull over. I would say that I tend to be believe in what doing what seems possible, not what is ideal. What seems possible to me for Temple-Wood is Wikipedia’s own policy changes to keep harassment out. Similarly, prosecution for actionable, repeated threats seems possible to me. Prosecution for a lone rape threat does not. Perhaps that’s too pessimistic, and I should dream bigger.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:43 PM on June 8, 2017


I guess what I find galling about the above accusation is the idea that because I don’t consider something possible in our society means that I consider it acceptable.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:11 PM on June 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


That doesn’t make them self-evidently actionable or serious though.

Either women are taking them too seriously, then, or it's not serious when women are driven out of public spaces. Pick one.

Despite the fact that you call my accusation "galling," I was being charitable; I was trying to blame your continued refusal to see these messages as serious to the cultural environment, rather than to some dreadful personal failing. You, the fish who can't see the water - except you're not a fish, you're a man and you have a tank of air and you're watching us drown and wondering what's so serious about it.

Indeed, I’d like to think I’m agreeing that this kind of harassment is hard to prosecute.

I'm not sure what I could say to be clearer, but I literally just had to rest my forehead on the desk for a moment. This is not a point that I am trying to get you to agree with me on. I am arguing against you using this as an excuse. But let me try a different tack.

Look, the only one who is arguing for a choice between technical and legal solutions is you; we need both, and if we had the political will we would have both. But we don't have the political will, in part because people like you continue to maintain that a rape threat being sent to a teenaged girl isn't serious enough to warrant action on its own.

Your remaining argument against legal solutions is that it's just too hard to prosecute. You seem to be basing this on the fact right now, it's rarely prosecuted. But as I've been saying - and as women who have experienced online harassment for a long time have been saying - it's often not because it's impossible, but because law enforcement doesn't care to try. There are many stories of women trying to report these crimes and being told to just turn off their computer.

This is not "the tools we would need to do this don't exist and would be a massive rights violation." This is "we refuse to do this even if the tools we already have are sufficient."

Most of these guys aren't technical geniuses. Some use their real names, which alone can tell you something about how immune from legal consequences they feel. Some are easily unmasked with a little detective work - sometimes by the victims themselves. These are the guys that could be prosecuted, and should be prosecuted, but aren't. Prosecuting them could do a lot to confront idea that online abuse of women is normal and expected, and show that maybe you give two shits about equal opportunity.

Yes, there will be many cases where it's not possible to prosecute. But there are many types of crimes where this is true . You don't have to be able to prosecute all of a type of crime to make pursuing the prosecutable ones worthwhile.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:25 PM on June 8, 2017 [5 favorites]


Going to Maine, I think people haven't been blunt enough with you. So I will be:

YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.

You keep dismissing what people are saying, you keep making arguments for the status quo. That's not the act of an ally.
posted by happyroach at 4:17 PM on June 8, 2017 [6 favorites]


Going to Maine, i remember other MeFites under three circumstances:

1. I pretty consistently think they're outstanding
2. I pretty consistently think they're horrible
3. They clearly think that I'm horrible

(There's no fourth item in this truth table, and there's a reason for that.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:48 PM on June 8, 2017


Hazelsmrf supported GamerGate. Of course they don't think trolling should be actionable.

I don't support GamerGate, if anything I was neutral - I was playing devil's advocate, I was trying to see why people were saying what they were and stuff wasn't adding up on both sides. I don't have a twitter account, and what I read right now on sites like the KotakuInAction subreddit is really not anything that remotely aligns with my thoughts. At all. It seems hardcore alt-right, which I've never been.

I think my seeming "support" for GamerGate came as a push back against the anti-gamergate, which I saw as coming after my husband. He never supported GamerGate or harassed anyone and still ended up on the Twitter blockbot, so I had to wonder if there were other people like him, that were labelled as "harassers" that were nothing of the sort. I have a lot of sympathy for anyone that gets harassed online, I certainly do not condone it whatsoever.

If anyone wants to talk about it or find out why I ended up so contrary to most posters on this site on this one topic, feel free to message me - i'm honest about my beliefs, and I'd like to think that my post history supports that even if I sometimes think differently, my heart is in the right place. I stick my foot in my mouth more often than I'd like, and I get frustrated when the words that I write don't accurately convey my thoughts, I mean - words on a screen, no emotion there. But please believe me when I say that I'm absolutely sincere when I say that I don't think anyone deserves to be harassed online or offline. Maybe I was and am naive about things, and maybe mefi was not the proper place for me to work through my thoughts and conflicts. I really wish to not be labelled as "Hazelsmrf, supporter of GamerGate", I feel that this will make people dismiss me without trying to even understand where I'm coming from, which... sucks. Anyways, I won't comment on this anymore on this site, I just wanted this response out there in my post history as a response to this label I seem to have. As I said, please feel free to message me, I do love to chat, I just don't think this is the right place for it.
posted by Hazelsmrf at 4:50 PM on June 8, 2017


If somebody walked up to me in public and said "I want to rape you, you bitch. Brace yourself. I'm coming for you" the cops would probably take it seriously. (And I'm saying that as somebody who is wary about OPD.) It shouldn't be different if they make the threat online.

The fact that such threats are treated differently depending on whether they happen in person vs online is a problem and reflects an outdated perspective that what happens online isn't really "real". That's not a valid perspective in 2017.

And anybody who argues that I or other people should just put up with threats of rape or physical harm, for whatever reason they want to argue for, is full of shit and needs to shut the hell up.

On preview:
if anything I was neutral - I was playing devil's advocate

Stop playing devil's advocate, then. The devil has more than enough people advocating for him based on sincere belief. If you also speak up on his behalf, people will tend to assume that you're also speaking from sincere belief.
posted by Lexica at 4:53 PM on June 8, 2017 [8 favorites]


He never supported GamerGate or harassed anyone and still ended up on the Twitter blockbot

O the humanity! Won't someone think of the real victims?
posted by Joseph Gurl at 4:54 PM on June 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


He never supported GamerGate or harassed anyone and still ended up on the Twitter blockbot

...If the issue that prompted you to take up verbal arms is that your husband was blocked on Twitter... I don't even know what to say. You do realize that thanks to GamerGate people, almost entirely women, were getting threats that they would be raped or killed? That the bad actors knew where they lived and worked, and told them so? That they were living in fear of having somebody show up on their doorstep and assault or murder them?

And you're upset over a blocklist? SMDH.
posted by Lexica at 4:58 PM on June 8, 2017 [7 favorites]


I'm not upset about him being on the blockbot, but him being on there made me think that there are people being accused of doing a thing that never did a thing, which made me wonder what other things are being said that weren't true. That's the extent of my "support", my seeming support was me refusing to outright condemn the movement without having a bigger understanding of the issues, because I think I made it clear at the time that I knew next to nothing about it. When I looked into it further there was nothing there that made me think "yes, I support this". So it's not correct to say that I'm upset or losing any sleep over this, but it's also not correct to say that I'm a GG supporter, which is really the only point I was trying to make.
posted by Hazelsmrf at 5:04 PM on June 8, 2017


I, quite truthfully, can't even think of a single situation that I could possibly come close to the vaguest possibility that there was the chance I might be able to justify that a rape is anything even in the same multiverse as an acceptable solution.
posted by Samizdata at 6:57 PM on June 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


him being on there made me think that there are people being accused of doing a thing that never did a thing

It's bizarre to think that your husband being blocked on Twitter, which is likely a simple mistake, is an indication of a broader pattern of lying by GamerGate victims and critics. That is one of the reasons we are reacting so incredulously to your explanation.

The most charitable interpretation is that you don't understand Twitter very well and think that being blocked is the same as an accusation (it's not). I hope that's the case, because otherwise you're displaying the same kind of conspiratorial paranoia about feminists that is a hallmark of anti-feminist groups, especially GamerGate.

Hell, I got blocked by N.K. Jemisin. I'm sad that I can't read her tweets anymore, but I'm not going around calling her a liar.

Another possibility that comes to mind is that your husband did something - like playing "devil's advocate" for a hate group - that got him rightfully blocked as a nuisance and a waste of time, even if he has never done anything you would consider harassment.

I won't contact you over PM about this, because the only remotely acceptable explanation would be "I shouldn't have defended GamerGate until I knew more about them. Now that I do, I can unequivocally say that I don't support any of their views or actions." This would be a pretty easy way that for you to repair the damage that defending a misogynist hate group has done to your reputation. But you have stopped short of doing that here, and I'm not so sure that's a simple oversight or omission, because it's such an obvious thing to say if it's true.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:06 AM on June 9, 2017 [5 favorites]


Imagine if your harasser is located across state lines.

Erm... then it's federal jurisdiction and potentially a matter for the FBI, just like any other crime that crosses state lines.

The FBI has a long history of not wanting to deal with any kind of cyber-crimes. (See: Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown," in which IT specialists kept calling to report really bad hacking problems and getting told, "that's not my bailiwick.") (Apparently the FBI in the 80s was comprised mainly of bailiwicks.) They're cops, not techie-geeks, and they don't, as a rule, understand the hardware or software involved, and they really don't keep up on the social habits in online places.

But we do have laws about harassment, and rape threats fall under them; enforcement is just normally limited to celebrity situations. (If Ivanka Trump got hundreds of rape threats on Twitter, the reaction she'd get would not be "just block them, and they won't bother you anymore.")

The FBI's ignorance - and local police departments' ignorance - is not an acceptable excuse for not enforcing the law, and their repeated refusal to take these claims seriously boils down to a statement of, "if women are scared for their lives, that's totally not important."

Living in fear is considered a reasonable condition to inflict on non-celebrity women. It's considered reasonable for some celebrity women, especially if they're not white. It's considered reasonable for teenage girls to live in terror, and to restrict their activities to those that reduce that level of terror.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 4:51 PM on June 9, 2017 [6 favorites]


They're cops, not techie-geeks, and they don't, as a rule, understand the hardware or software involved, and they really don't keep up on the social habits in online places.

Sure, and yet somehow the FBI mustered up the tech resources to make this happen.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 5:12 PM on June 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


Not sayin' the FBI can't do techie things when they put their mind to it, but their ability to take reports on "something probably-criminal is happening on the internet" is limited. (And they don't put any particular effort into changing that, which I find beyond problematic.)

How long did it take them to shut down Silk Road? How many people went to prison for it?

And part of how they succeeded at all, is that Silk Road made a lot of money for a lot of people - there were real-world assets to track. So far, most of law enforcement has bordered on downright incompetence when trying to address online activities that don't tie into bank accounts.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 5:20 PM on June 9, 2017


Totally agree with all of that. My point (well, I didn't really have a point, but if I have to make one now, this'll do) is that the FBI can do what it puts its mind to, and for whatever reason (systematic misogyny and the trivialization of violence against women!) it doesn't give a shit about this stuff. Which is infuriating.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 5:36 PM on June 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


> my seeming support was me refusing to outright condemn the movement without having a bigger understanding of the issues, because I think I made it clear at the time that I knew next to nothing about it.

If you didn't know anything about it, then I don't understand why you would do this:

> I don't support GamerGate, if anything I was neutral - I was playing devil's advocate,

One: "Neutral" is not "playing devil's advocate." Two: The devil rarely needs any additional lawering. Next time you don't know anything about something, try just listening.
posted by rtha at 11:31 PM on June 9, 2017 [5 favorites]


(I have meant to revisit this thread over the past few weeks, but have not, as I have found the prospect painful and awkward for reasons not worth going into here. I still will do so, as a friend whom I trust read over the whole thing and vouchsafed that I was coming across as a real asshole and quite a piece of work. I’d like to apologize for those points right now, and affirm that when someone is harassed online they should be able to take that to the police and have the laws enforced.)
posted by Going To Maine at 12:05 AM on July 5, 2017 [3 favorites]


Apropos of nothing, but there's no such thing as being neutral between a harasser and their victim.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:22 PM on July 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


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