Government: Don't feed the trolls
March 5th, 2010 by Mark Bahnisch | Published in Authoritarianism, Crime, Ethics, Feminism, Life, Media, Politics, Race, Sociology, The Web | 24 Comments
The last couple of weeks have seen a fair bit of furore about those intertubes. Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook about the defacing of a couple of memorial sites for a child and a teenager who’d been murdered in Queensland. Nick Xenophon suggested an Internet Ombudsperson, a suggestion Kevin Rudd applauded. There’ve also been numerous controversies about high school students posting racist groups, or offensive ones (for instance, effectively calling for attacks on sex workers). All this no doubt warrants condemnation – but it’s also worth observing that only a certain subsection of offensive content (usually involving children in one way or other) comes to the attention of the media and politicians. Little outrage is directed to the much larger subset of racist groups on Facebook (which don’t happen to be set up by high school kids), or the everyday misogyny that permeates much of the online space.
There’s no doubt that there are problems with Facebook’s method of dealing with offensive content. But the fundamental errors in this debate are twofold:
(a) Social networking sites are far more akin to phone networks than a traditional publishing model. A huge multiplicity of users constantly and simultaneously post content. Unlike talking on a phone, it leaves a permanent trace, but it’s a much better analogy;
(b) The direction of causation is the wrong way round. It’s not that the internet encourages people to do dumb and wrong things. It’s that people do dumb and wrong things, and they do them on the internet too.
The noise coming from politicians, and the ‘solutions’, make one wonder whether they understand at all how social networking works. Part of the problem is one very easily resolved through taking more responsibility on the part of group creators for the little bit of the internet they set up, and using privacy and content management tools intelligently.
There’s an interesting take on all this from Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia, from whom I’ve borrowed the title of this post, and for a deeper examination of the issues, I’d also recommend the Oxford Internet Institute’s report on balancing freedom of speech and child protection online, which seeks to find some common ground between interlocutors who often seem to talk past one another.
colin jacobs: “it says something unflattering about our national character that, when something like this comes to light, we turn at once to our politicians to save us. This isn’t a trait one would associate with a mature society confident in its place in the world. It’s a trait one would more likely associate with mollycoddled children.”
yes indeed, i have two children, i have never found it difficult to monitor their intehweb use..as they grow it is up to me to encourage critical thinking, it is up to me to develop their aesthetic learning..so they make informed choices about avoiding the crap…but i work a lot with other parents, and i have to say, anecdotally, their own knowledge and sense of responsibility about the interwebs is simply appalling.
Yeah, there’s an existing leglislative framework for dealing with harrassment, slander, abuse, etc. Why can we not use the existing and proper legal channels for these actions?
I would argue, contra public hysteria, that the problem lies not with the internet, but with the attitudes of law enforcement et al to these crimes on the internet, and more generally an (australia-wide) attitude towards harrassment in general: namely, that it’s mostly A-OK, and people complaining about it are whiners until there’s some sensational think-of-the-children angle.
As you imply, Mark, this is no different to threatening or abusive phone calls, and could (should?) be dealt with in the same way, under existing legislation.
Patrickg lots of people like nothing more than to luxuriate in a good old-fashioned moral panic. It gives focus to their firm conviction that the whole place is going to the dogs. Just ignore them is my advice … eventually they will find something else to get agitated about. Hopefully a kid somewhere will text rude pictures on his mobile phone again soon and they will leave the internet alone for a while.
Brendan Fevola to the rescue!
Ladies and Gentlemen, my horror novel in progress about internet trolls who had it coming / getting “pwned” by a ghostly banhammer of RL, just became relevant as of this day.
Pretty much I don’t trust the government’s motives in anything to do with the internet. Ever. I’m now more terrified of the government than goatse trolls. Because at least you can avoid the goatse trolls.
I reserve the right to be offended on the internet on a daily basis, but it does get annoying at times when there’s a monolithic monument of hatred across the Pacific Ocean directed on us because of the actions of our government.
I’m not saying that trolls are good. Gotrek and Felix, the original Warhammer Troll Slayers and mercenaries for hire, would no doubt find suitable employment as the Internet Ombudsmen. I’m just not convinced KRudd knows what he’s dealing with.
This isn’t about censoring the internet to pretend these problems don’t exist. It’s that the current model of internet moderation and responsibility for places like Facebook and 4Chan don’t really address that trolling is a 21st Century problem on a scale akin to anti-immigration racism in the 1930s and 1940s in Australia and elsewhere.
In short, something has to be done, but KRudd is trying to use a veil to block people seeing the trolls instead of sending a band of bearded barbarians trained in the art of slaying such beasts to kill them with axes. And by barbarians with axes I mean, of course, efficient moderators who are staffed to moderate forums and social networking sites they themselves are responsible for creating and keeping safe and friendly.
The problem isn’t that Facebook is evil. It’s just being used for bad purposes and the people who set up hate groups there aren’t being moderated by the people in charge of Facebook who are there to keep the people who chat to their friends safe.
Sorry if my response seems a bit Gen-Y, but I’m trying to keep it in the mindset of the people our government sees as “the future” instead of condescending to us. They should appoint a bunch of mature Gen-Y’ers to be the Ombudsman, since they would probably understand circumstances of trolling a lot better. Otherwise KRudd is going to find himself, as the saying goes, trolled hard.
Jacob: it’s probably not a good idea to play generation games at this point. My late father was born during WWII, but he grokked the Internet far better that Stephen Conroy (b. 1963) ever did. And after all, it is mainly – although not exclusively – Generation-Xers standing behind this site whose moderation skills keep it on my “check every day” list. (Tips hat.)
I’m also puzzled about your “monolithic monument of hatred across the Pacific Ocean”. From where? Canada?
@7, Jacob is perfectly entitled to make generational comparisons as long as previous generations insist on being infantile about the issues, bar your exceptions. And I speak as a borderline boomer/X’er. You obscure Jacob’s point: it’s the inability of those currently running things to understand the industry, let alone the internet as a medium, that has resulted in inappropriate legislation and ignorant public grandstanding. The rest of the internet may not be talking to you about it but they’re DDOS’ing government sites and yelling about it on forums and news sites to us.
Perhaps Jacob’s American?
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RE “It’s not that the internet encourages people to do dumb and wrong things”
Ay, and guns don’t kill people…?
Indeed, armagny. Guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people. (No intention to derail, but I couldn’t resist. I actually had the same thought myself.)
@7, Jacob is perfectly entitled to make generational comparisons as long as previous generations insist on being infantile about the issues, bar your exceptions.
Of course he’s entitled to make generational comparisons, in the same way that I and others am entitled to dispute them. There are lot of people on and behind Larvatus Prodeo that think that classifying people into Generation X, Y, Z, Д, Ω, and Ự is a mug’s game. There’s no doubt there’s a inverse correlation between age and Internet savvyness – but anyone who thinks there’s a causation is either a fool or someone pimping their own marketing textbook.
You obscure Jacob’s point:
I obscured nothing. I was just puzzled by his insistence on the particular virtues of Generation Y at the end. Having a few Gen-Yers as ombudspeople isn’t a bad idea, but why not have some flamewar-hardened sysadmins from late 80s USENET as well?
I’m surprised that some people think that spite, hate and sickening violence are a new phenomena.
I have heard about this new thing called the telephone.
Apparently, these young people, who for want of a better word I will call “teenagers”, talk on them endlessly! It can’t be good for them and will cause their relationships and conversation to become irrevocably shallow. Whatever happened to meeting your friends face to face after church? I insist that this “telephone” thing be restricted quite firmly!
I quite fascinated by the heightened concern in regards to cyber bullying coming from some, as though bullying was never a problem before. Doesn’t leaving an indelible trail of evidence mean that the appropriate authorities can finally deal with the correct perpetrators? Imagine schools were it is the hyper confident and popular but sociopathic/narcissistic that are finally discovered and sent to counselling and behavioural therapy instead of their victims for a change. But the idiots fight to keep bullying in its traditional more secretive forms so they can pretend it is not happening. Or fight to create a filter that will paradoxically make anonomised internet access the norm and give rise to encrypted private networks that will be much harder to find the perpetrators of abuse.
Thanks for the article and links to the discussion Mark. I’ll take up the issue with your point:
“(b) The direction of causation is the wrong way round. It’s not that the internet encourages people to do dumb and wrong things. It’s that people do dumb and wrong things, and they do them on the internet too.”
There’s a problem here in relation to adolescent developmental psychology which is that adolescent males in particular are very influenced by what they see. They are much less relational than females in terms of learned behaviour and much more experimental so that witnessing someone do something opens the portal to reproduction of that act. This is at the core of the problem in relation to adolescent access to internet pornography. Young males, presumably females as well, are learning about a range of possible sexual practices through visual representations on the tubes. Some of these practices are, to say the least, “extreme”.
Please note: I’m not talking about access to images involving minors and Pr0n but images widely available at the click of a mouse that represent adults and young men and women doin’ a very strange range of things.
It is exactly the availability and ubiquity of this material that has fuelled Hamilton’s expressed reservations and Conroy’s damn filter. We shouldn’t avoid the fact that there appears to be significant support for the filter based on a widespread notion that developing adolescents and younger people ought not to be exposed to that material. Yes, I know that net-nanny software on the home computer is the solution, but not all parents are that responsible and it is easy enough for teenage kids to utilise unguarded computers in mates’ houses to have a look.
At core the point is that for adolescent males visual representations of sex are powerful educators of desire. The problem is that the realm in which their desire is being educated is out of anyone’s social control. It was not ever thus. So far the broad left has not responded adequately to this issue and consequently in failing to do so we have ceded political and moral authority to the moral straighteners at some potential cost to the right to freedom of communication.
I’m as much worried by representations of violence and the way they impact young men as by perverse sexualised images. Youtube is a major offender here: they run anything and searching it for the topics “street fights” and “school fights” will deliver hundreds if not thousands of hits of real and frequently sickening violence. There has already been one terribly tragic consequence from exposure to this material. About 18 months ago in the inner west of Sydney two 14 year old males wanted to experiment with fighting. Real fighting. They went to a park after school and agreed to attack and defend but neither had any self defence experience. They were best friends. They had no grievance with each other. They wanted to fight to see what it was like as they had been watching Y-T vids and after school fighting was getting a lot of airplay at the time. Tragically one of the kids had a clotting disorder and suffered a cerebral haemorrhage after taking a hit from his mate. He died. Many lives broken and shattered from a single misapprehension which is that fighting is groovy and masculinising. Just a couple of skinny little kids reproducing what they’d seen on the tubes.
It’d be terrific if the owners of the tubes policed their own content with some level of sophisticated knowledge about developmental psychology but they haven’t so far and I’m not expecting it soon. In the meantime Conroy is on a march.
some schools have started to ban student access altogether, some schools ban social networking ..this feeds two things: the students sensation that being online is ubiquitously naughty and exciting and the parents MSM tainted view that all of this is “out of control”…rather perhaps better to allow internet use across the board, to actually have teachers join in and thereby promote some sensible and responsible use…it’s the old “don’t promote condoms you’ll insight a sex riot” story…
Erik Sykes: I quite agree that the issue is fraught with difficulties not the least of the sort you mention. My own dealings with my own yoof around internet pa)wn and other tube nasties suggests that within families with sufficient cultural capital there is a strong ‘yuk’ factor response to it. However, my work exposes me to numerous cases of the opposite response whereby what is seen is replicated at least experimentally. In those instances socio-economic class and education appear to be a key factors.
anthony @ 15, I wish (but daren’t hope) that Conroy’s view of internet access was as nuanced as your’s. Thank you for an extremely thought-provoking comment.
Aah, fuckit! “yours”, not “your’s”. I wish there was a [back] button for those occasions when you see a blunder whizzing into cyberspace just too late …
antony nolan: absolutely agree. i would not send a copy of my bank account details to a “friend” in africa either. but many who are, for whatever reason, socially excluded, do. there seems to be no open system of internet use education, you kinda stumble across it, or you play on line all day and all nite with no sense of critical thinking at all…this link is extreme i know…but..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8551122.stm
and i am with helen @13 this is not the tools (telephone, smoke signals) fault…but rather our current inability to de-mystify it ..without the MSM sensationalism on one hand (its inherently evil and rots the brain) or www2 evangelism on the other (it’s a force for open content and better democracy).
Agree with Erik above that variations are likely – some youngsters likely to be more vulnerable than others. I had an odd experience a few years ago, where I became aware that in my daughter’s class, (last year of primary school) a bunch of lads held another kid (a bit of an outsider) down and hurt him until he cried, refusing to let him go while one of the boys proceeded to film it on his mobile – this was during a chaotic but ‘supervised’ class party as a farewell for the substitute teacher (who according to my daughter had been actually nodding off in the class on some other days so maybe not really watching closely?). Someone sent the youtube link to my daughter who, sitting at our computer reacted with disgust and told me some of the story. She had known about the incident but not that it would be put on the net (the teacher had apparently dealt with it on the day but clearly didn’t know about the filming). I felt I had to tell the school as this kid’s humilation video was still being bandied around. result was: All the parents were horrified but some didn’t believe their kids had been involved. The principal didn’t really handle the incident that well, suspending only the one with the phone and not the ones holding the kid down, and also spilling that I had phoned so my daughter then had to defend herself against the ‘dobber’ accusations (she hadn’t known I would ring and I had asked for discretion from the school). I knew some of the parents as educated, intelligent people, but it was all so ugly I think they just didn’t want to believe it. I reckon it is pretty powerful technology to give to 12 year old boys who are totally into trying to impress the other guys or win favour. I’m not sure the incident would have been revealed if I hadn’t rung and I would never have known about it if my daughter hadn’t told me. I am not sure that we really know yet how much impact this stuff is having on kids and what they consider to be normal behaviour. I personally think some kind of moderated space for kids is not a bad idea.
Shingle: an interesting experience and account of the sort of thing that is becoming commonplace. And where did they get the idea to film and broadcast this poor kid’s humiliation? It is a doubling of bullying trauma to do that.
@15 – anthony, that may well be so, but I wasn’t talking about pr0n in the post, but rather about (for instance) the largely textual signification of racist speech on social networking sites.
Sorry if you feel that I’ve taken it off thread. You are quite specific about the social networking sites which I tend not to use or differentiate from the social use of the tubes as a whole. Y-T is somehwere in the middle I guess as it invites you to ‘broadcast yourself’.