For the sake of my own mental health and quest for personal happiness, I have been trying to lay off the "manosphere," but the other night found myself pulled back in. I'd seen a retweet on Chris Kluwe's feed from Randi Lee Harper, a coder and game enthusiast, who has been working on an app that will allow twitter users a means to block gamer-gators from accessing their feeds. I thought that was an interesting idea given that social media platforms like twitter are unable or unwilling to develop anti-harassment policies with any teeth.
I don't fully understand how Harper's program works, but it is based on an algorithm that identifies block-list candidates primarily by their link to the gamergate hashtag, and those they follow. Undoubtedly, some innocent parties have been swept up in this -- obviously, many who follow the misogynists are doing so in order to keep a wary eye on them -- but there is an appeal process, by which people can be (and in fact are being) removed from the "blacklist".
Harper's project isn't sitting at all well with the gamer-gators misogynists, most of whom appear to live online and who have grown accustomed to unfettered access to their "enemies" -- and they've reacted in predictable ways: by attempting to use the power of SEO to smear Harper's name on Google.
I watched, transfixed by the sheer horror of it, as Mike Cernovich threw up on his twitter feed shot after shot of Ms. Harper's old personal blog (in which she candidly discusses a bad breakup, among other painful experiences) along with a mugshot from a traffic violation ten years ago and other personal pictures. This was not the first time Ms. Harper's online reputation had been violated by disgruntled, anonymous trolls -- this seems to go with the territory of being a young woman in tech or journalism -- so Cernovich dug around in the libelous cesspool that is Encyclopedia Dramatica too, to throw up a post that is a bizarre mash of innuendo, frank speculation, fact, and outright fabrication.
My mouth literally agape, I watched this online attack unfold in real time. Of course, Cernovich deleted the most outrageous tweets immediately (and moved the attack to a post on one of his blogs). I'm sure the tweets have been screen capped and saved. Cernovich appears to fully expect, and even anticipate, being banned from twitter.
As enraging (and needless to say, immensely triggering) as it was to watch this online attack take place, Randi Harper's responses, curiously, made me feel stronger.
Back when I was the target of one little troll, I briefly consulted a local professor who is an expert on "cyberlaw". He did not encourage me to pursue a legal remedy (see this report). All he could do was to refer me to an organization for support of victims of revenge porn. That was of little direct relevance to my situation, of course, but it was then that I learned just how pervasive, profitable, and ruinous the "revenge porn" industry was.
Should "revenge porn" be criminalized? I certainly believe so, and in fact, several states are already working on laws to that effect. To what extent such new laws will compromise our much valued social tradition of "free speech" remains to be seen, but it seems to me that it is practically inevitable that we will move in the direction of criminalizing online conduct that is deliberately destructive.
We must find ways to balance the rights of people to exercise free speech with their rights not to be violated by those who abuse the anonymity and ubiquity of the internet to persecute others. First Amendment devotees wring their hands about the "chilling" effect the loss of anonymity would have on public discourse, but we also must acknowledge the "chilling" effect that fear of harassment currently has -- especially on women (well, anyone who isn't a white cis-gender male, really).
We cannot have bullies running the means of communication on which all of us have come to depend. And hoping that the internet will somehow regulate itself isn't really working out. We may romanticize the Wild West in movies and fiction, but the horror of being at the mercy of bandits in reality mostly led to unruly posses, lynchings, and a lot of innocent civilians bleeding out in the dusty streets of Laredo.
In the past several months, I'd been looking for a book that would help explain how the internet has become such a fertile playground for sociopaths, and why victims have such limited legal recourse.
I am currently reading Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, which is what compelled me to read up on programmer Kathy Sierra, one of the cases described in the book. And if you thought the wringer Anita Sarkeesian has been put through in the past year has been bad, Sierra's ordeal will take your breath away, in part because she faced it down all alone. Sierra was one of the first female high-tech bloggers to be targeted by hacker trolls and their followers ("Weev", her primary tormenter, is currently in prison for an unrelated conviction). She was sufficiently terrorized to withdraw from the public for several years, but now she's back -- and she's just published a rather raw but very compelling account of what happened to her "Why the Trolls Will Always Win."
Campaigns like the ones against Sarkeesian and Kathy Sierra are relentless and sustained attempts to quash women who have earned a modicum of success or celebrity.* They are motivated by envy, fear, malice, and mob hysteria. They have little to do with ideological conflict or girls' intolerance for hurt "feeeelings". They are designed solely to inflict emotional and financial distress on women who are perceived as a threat (to insecure masculine egos that is); indeed, they are launched in order to intimidate an entire gender by instilling
fear of real physical harm and the ruin of their professional and
personal lives.
Will online misogynists and bullies "break the internet" by forcing us to forgo the very real benefits of anonymity? I sincerely hope not, but we need to start exploring alternative ways to stem the tide of abuse.
Social media sites like twitter, facebook, and youtube are finally getting on board, developing codes of conduct and policies with teeth, and not a moment too soon: their bottom lines depend on it.
And it is amusing to note that nobody is faster to play the "victim" card than my own little troll, who was much incensed to discover, this week, that some malicious prankster had been impersonating him on twitter! He was even threatening to dox and sue participants in a subreddit who had dared to call him a fat, virginal neckbeard! (And also "dox" his family although he provides no evidence to substantiate that claim.)
Apparently, sadistic, amoral trolls have "feeeelings" too! (But then, in the words of film-maker Errol Morris, "What is life without irony?")
*Also check out Zoe Quinn's "Five Things I Learned..."
Randi Harper
