Online abuse is, unfortunately, a common
problem. It seems that there are some people in this world who simply
get a lot of pleasure out of abusing others and the online world is a
fertile ground for finding vulnerable victims. By vulnerable I’m not
really referring to people who have any particular physical, emotional ,
or psychological vulnerabilities but rather the fact that we are all
vulnerable in the online world to having our personal and professional
reputations injured or destroyed. All knowledge and information about
us which is out there is available to be twisted, misrepresented,
distorted, exaggerated, lies invented based on it, and otherwise abused
to present us in a negative light, in public, amongst those who either
don’t know us or only know us casually.
We are also vulnerable to this abuse in
real life but it’s harder to do and requires more structure and
organization. It’s also harder to prove that it’s going on in real life.
In the online world where nothing ever really gets deleted (despite the
harassers attempts to remove the evidence) it can almost always be
located and therefore the allegations proven.
Someone, somewhere has almost always archived it for posterity.
So, while the lies never get erased, your
refutations to the lies also never get erased. If you’ve done your job
properly the truth can and will overwhelm the lie and the liars even if
they outnumber you.
However, going through that process is
time consuming and often quite painful because those who engage in
cyberharassment and stalking often have nothing else to do. They can
(and do) spend hours doing this because they are dysfunctional people
living dysfunctional lives whereas those of us being targeted with this
abuse are trying to lead active, normal lives and this nonsense takes us
away from that.
While these stalkers and harassers are
usually incredibly stupid people, they do excel at lying so you will be
dealing with their false allegations with the police, social media
sites, friends, family, etc. sometimes for years. In the case of
psychopaths, it’s pretty much guaranteed that they’ll be on your case
for years or until they get themselves incarcerated in prison or a psych
ward.
This is one reason why this type of
harassment can’t be ignored or swept under the carpet. The lies, if left
to fester can and do take on a life of their own and become ‘truth’ by
virtue of the fact that there is nothing out there refuting them.
When it comes to one’s personal and
professional reputation these lies can have a deep and often
immeasurable impact, especially vicious ones like the current ‘call
everyone you hate a pedo’ rage.
The more seriously mentally ill the cyberharasser/stalker is, the further they will go with their abuse and lies.
If you:
- Challenge their story by challenging the fact that they have no evidence? Voila, evidence gets fabricated in the form of fake photoshopped screenshots, fake pedo web sites set up under the targets personal name as the domain, quoting known liars or people who have an obvious bias, etc.
- Expose their lies and their cowardice? Voila numerous false allegations/complaints filed with police, social media sites you’re a member of, government agencies, employers (past and present), schools, social service agencies (if you receive assistance), etc.
- Confront their lies? Voila they recruit other stalkers to spew them for them so that they can claim ‘they aren’t the only ones that hate you’. Suddenly you’re surrounded by a goon squad wallowing in its own filth of lies, the intent being to overwhelm the truth with the lies.
So, what are the solutions?
What can we do to deal more effectively
with such lunacy online. Aside from having those who engage in this
abuse carted off to their local Psych Ward in strait jackets or to
prison. While that will certainly help resolve the problem, it isn’t the
easiest thing to do and in the mean time we all have to survive the
crazies.
While we can’t change the fact that there
are seriously disturbed people out there in the world, many of whom
have access to the Internet and are going to be problems… there are
often small things that can be done that end up having a big impact.
This recent article from Wired provided some interesting examples and insight into this issue:
According to the article, a simple
process like providing a specific and detailed explanation for why
someone was banned reduced the recidivism of the bad behavior
dramatically whereas not providing an explanation resulted in a
‘disturbingly high’ recidivism rate.
The team also found that it’s important to enforce the rules in ways that people understand. When Riot’s team started its research, it noticed that the recidivism rate was disturbingly high; in fact, based on number of reports per day, some banned players were actually getting worse after their bans than they were before. At the time, players were informed of their suspension via emails that didn’t explain why the punishment had been meted out. So Riot decided to try a new system that specifically cited the offense. This led to a very different result: Now when banned players returned to the game, their bad behavior dropped measurably. –Extract from Curbing Online Abuse Isn’t Impossible
A solution like this actually accomplishes three things which are excellent for the consumer of the service.
- The user has a clear understanding of what the behavior that was considered negative is, and knows that if they want to stay on the site they can’t engage in that specific behavior again. This creates a solid deterrent for that negative behavior.
- The support staff are required to properly examine the issue and provide a specific reason, presumably with the evidence that the person did indeed violate the rules. This has the benefit of ensuring that Support staff do their jobs properly and can actually justify the suspension (or lack of suspension based on a complaint). That is they can justify it based on actual written policy rather than just an arbitrary spur of the minute, get this off my desk fast, decision or I feel sorry for person A, I’m on their side and will help them even though the person isn’t doing what person A says they’re doing, etc.
- Most importantly, any sense of injustice or unfairness at the decisions is also removed because everything has been properly explained and justified. This, in and of itself, can lead to self-correcting behavior. Justice has been done.
Of course, the person might find the
standard itself objectionable which is a different issue but one that
should be addressed by any social media site which actually wants to be a
comfortable place for their users. They could have a special forum
where these types of discussions can occur directly with Support staff
or Development staff. Explanations will resolve 90% of the issues and
the other 10% probably need to be fixed. If they can’t be fixed, people
are kept informed and things are unlikely to get out of hand. Or, at
least less often, than they would without these measures in place.
The reality is that the current
recidivism rate for ‘bad’ behavior is disturbingly high on sites like
Twitter and Facebook, and the decisions to remove or leave items being
objected to are arbitrary, inconsistent, and frequently not based on the
written site rules/policy.
Frequently items which obviously violate the social media site’s policy are left while items which don’t are removed and the posters suspended, banned or otherwise punished despite the fact that they didn’t violate any policy or rule.
I’m currently in a battle with Twitter
and have been for a nearly a month to get my business Twitter account
unsuspended. Twitter refuses to interact with me to provide any
explanation, rationalization, or justification for their arbitrary (and
unjustified) actions.
I have provided a detailed refutation to
Twitter (in several emails now) including the tweets that I was tweeting
at the time my account was suspended based on a false complaint, and
screenshots of Twitters own interface showing that at least one
allegation is completely bogus and without any merit. This has, so far,
been completely ignored.
Not only is this frustrating to the user
who is the target of cyberbullying / harassment and being further
victimized by false accusations of allegedly doing what is actually
being done to them, but it enables and encourages the cyberbullies and
harassers to take things further and further. After all, their scam
worked.
And you can rest assured they will be
smugly gloating about the fact that it worked while coming up with ways
to escalate things even further. Of course, they’ll blame you for the
escalations. How dare you stand up to their abuse and do so publicly.
That’s cyberbullying them according to their sick and twisted thinking.
Lol.
The article proposes the following and I
agree because it’s focusing entirely on the behavior that’s exhibited
rather than the content of what is said. What is said only matters when
it leads to negative behaviors and on those grounds free speech has
always had some limitations.
You can’t shout ‘fire’ in a theatre because of the impact that will have on behavior.
CyberBullying and harassment are the
same. When you falsely call someone a Pedo or Pedo enabler and post it
all over the web in numerous blogs, web sites, torrents, pastes, on
DarkNet with personal information in Doxbin, etc. etc. there is an
impact not only to the person targeted but to others who might decide to
interact in negative ways with the target because of those false
allegations.
So, this isn’t about free speech. It’s about bullying and harassing behaviors.
Extracted from the article:
What would our social networks look like if their guidelines and enforcement reflected real-life community norms? If Riot’s experiments are any guide, it’s unlikely that most or even many users would deem a lot of the casual abuse, the kind that’s driving so many people out of online spaces, to be acceptable. Think about how social networks might improve if—as on the gaming sites and in real life—users had more power to reject abusive behavior. Of course, different online spaces will require different solutions, but the outlines are roughly the same:
• involve users in the moderation process,
• set defaults that create hurdles to abuse,
• give clearer feedback for people who misbehave,
• and—above all—create a norm in which harassment simply isn’t tolerated.
–Extract from Curbing Online Abuse Isn’t Impossible