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| Get back under your fucking bridge. |
In some parts of the internet there is a prevailing
atmosphere of nasty. Have a look at the less salubrious areas of Facebook, twitter or in
the comments section of any news organisation and you’ll get the measure of the
beast. Highly misogynistic, racist, bulling, territorial, hate filled garbage.
It’s unpleasant to stumble into accidentally, like something nasty you scrape
off your shoe into the gutter on a hot summer day, it’s a lot scarier,
threatening and horrible if directed at you, like the nastiness on your shoe is
replaced with an industrial scale muck spreader on auto-feed.
Typically those it gets directed at are the more vulnerable,
the less empowered or simply those brave enough to ask for “difficult” things, like basic
equality and human dignity. It often starts with one nasty comment “can’t you
take a joke man”, “for laughs man” or “it’s freedom of speech man” and then
spreads like a particularly virulent infection. It’s a gestalt beasty powered
by some of the less pleasant parts of the human psyche, feeding off itself as
participants try to outdo one another in the horrible stakes. Call it trolling,
call it bullying or call it a damning indictment of human nastiness. It’s pretty
honking and I’ve stopped using a lot of web services because they don’t control
it properly or seem to actively encourage it.
I suspect a lot of people stop using web/internet services
for similar reasons and this gives the genesis of how to make corporations take
notice and fix it. Initially many corporations encouraged this sort of
behaviour as it drives traffic towards their services and develops a sense of territorial
brand “stickiness”, the trolls love to own a place and keep outsiders away.
This is great for fledgling services but causes problems when they want to
scale to address mass audiences. The territoriality gets in the way of new
users (basically a learning curve is generated which ruins your customer
experience) and trolls don’t tend to as buy much from advertisers being more of
an outsider occupation.
The challenge is that the web/internet service now has a problem or two. They
may have the wrong metrics measuring their site, “clicks are gold man, they’re
gold!”, they may rely upon long term users to moderate or control parts of
their site and fear control would lead to lack of free work/content, or they may rely
upon an anonymous contributor model which divorces the virtual identity from
the web identity. Problems 1 & 2 are addressable, new metrics can be used,
(like how much money do we actually make?) and the content model can be moved
away from reliance upon key individuals to a more balanced approach. The last
one is an issue though.
People do tend to believe in internet anonymity, they think
it’s a right, they think it’s something intrinsically good. They think they
earned it.
I think they are wrong on all counts.
It’s not a right, it’s not even a reality. This playground of
the mind was built to carry the instructions for Armageddon for the US
military. The soul of the internet is a controlled, audited, resilient, highly redundant
control system for nuclear weapons. To think you are anonymous here is
laughable. The only anonymity you have is in obscurity. If the police want
you, Twitter, Facebook, Google and your ISP will hand over your details in
about a flat minute. Think those burner accounts and one shot comment accounts
will protect you because they don’t hold any identifiers? Think again, the
firewall of the organisation you’re commenting on has your IP, match it with
the time of your comment and if your crime is serious enough to warrant the
hassle of getting the subpoenas together you’re out of luck troll boy. And don’t think
your proxy service or TOR gateway will protect you either, I’ll just throw a
decent pattern matcher at the gateway inputs and outputs and correlate your sorry
arse into resolution. Internet anonymity is just a function of the scale of the offence, opportunity
or value of the transaction. Get above a certain scale and you are owned, doxed
and burned. Man.
It’s not a good thing. Freedom of speech is freedom to go
around saying “what a crap government we have” it’s not shouting fire in a
packed theatre and it’s not freedom from the consequences of your words neither.
Internet pseudo anonymity empowers the braggart and the bully, the screen isn’t
going to punch your face in when you are horrible to someone and the occasional
whistleblower, the value of anonymous whistleblowers at all is debatable
anyway, is rather outweighed by the potentially paying customers you might
scare away. Even if your business is content, edgy and annoying content, then
your advertisers might be scared away as well. If you are too mean to pay your correspondents, you better control your commentards otherwise your business model is about to go bye bye when they piss off your consumers enough.
And you haven’t earned it either. Why do you need to be
anonymous? It’s highly likely you aren’t in a war zone protesting against the
horror of an evil government. It’s highly likely you aren’t blowing the whistle
on cancer chemicals in baby milk or corruption in high places. It’s highly
likely you aren’t crying for help from an abusive partner or desperately confessing
your sins in hope of redemption.
You’re commenting on an article about cats.
- It’s not freedom of speech to bully, threaten and harass someone.
- It’s not a laugh to scare someone and make them fear for their safety
- It’s not edgy to pick on someone for gender, sexuality, creed and throw them to the baying crowd.
- You aren’t anonymous, if you piss someone off enough, they can and will hunt you down and in the current mood, the courts will throw the book at you, if you’re lucky, if you’re not, Guantanamo beckons.
My view is that if you removed supposed anonymity from the commentard
bits of the internet, trolling of this nature would simply cease to exist. The
limited benefits of anonymity are outweighed by the overwhelming cost in human
misery and general incivility it creates. The use of anonymity should immediately
relegate the service to marginality and irrelevance unless there is a bloody
good reason for it. Few of the nasty brigade have the guts to stand up to
public opprobrium and face the consequences of their hate speech. It’s easy to
be a hateful braggart from your basement, less so when employers, friends,
family and potential partners know about it. Who would be laughing then I
wonder?
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