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Internet Vigilantism, Justice, and The Impact on Society
Dread Pirate Arbuthnot
OMG WRIGGLYT O X O P L A S M O S I SRegistered User regular
OMG WRIGGLYT O X O P L A S M O S I SRegistered User regular
The Internet is great, and everyone loves it. However, it's a tool, and some people are using that tool for some unfortunate things. Sometimes this is furry pornography, but sometimes it's internet vigilantism. Vigilantism has always been a problem, but the Internet complicates things dramatically. Everyone has phones at the ready that can take pictures or record video. Cracked has an article about 8 cases of Internet vigilantism here (http://www.cracked.com/article_17170_8-awesome-cases-internet-vigilantism.html) and they all have a common theme – person refuses to play within the laws of society or just acts like a total dick, the Internet spreads this person's affront around, and everyone begins to shower them with e-mails and phone calls full of threats. This is pretty awesome, right? You'll hear stories of people being total douches, animal abusers, total monsters, or just getting away with being an immense dick... until the Internet gets a hold of the case, and then sweet justice is administered.
Is this something that we should be encouraging as a society? Or is it completely poison?
The Cracked article mentions a 16 year old girl, a 14 year old boy, and a couple of young women. It's also explained exactly how people get revenge:
“Forcand's life was picked apart. Transcripts and photos from his conversations were forwarded to his church and posted on his Christian blog along with his contact info."
“The result of Anonymous's detective work is that there appeared an entire website devoted to the teen, including his picture, links to the videos he made, the names of his parents, their addresses, phone number (as well as work addresses and numbers) and the website address of his father's business, which is now strangely absent from the Internet."
“The girl was eventually arrested and held in custody for three days after personal information was posted online (and in such detail that people even knew her blood type).”
“Next the page was linked on Digg, and Gizmodo, and from there to hundreds of other sites. Hundreds of thousands of people read the story, remembered the last time they fell victim to some asshat with sticky fingers, and started a massive virtual campaign of harassment against Gomez. People from all across the planet were sending e-mails, some of them likely with the most strongly worded LOLcats you can imagine.
Of course this wasn't nearly enough for the more industrious types who tracked Gomez down on MySpace and started to harass her and her friends. Then it was time for the real hardcore avatars of justice (or the insane) to bring it into the real world, actually finding her address in Queens and driving past her home shouting accusations and 4chan memes.”
It's becoming increasingly easy to find someone's information and spread it around. When Blizzard Entertainment decides that forum users would be forced to post under their real names to reduce trolling and flaming, there was a huge outcry. One user, Sikketh from Thunderlord, posted the following:
“I’m really not so sure about what’s so devastating about putting a name out. My real-life name is (removed). My cousins have problems finding me on facebook and social networks because when they try to search for me, there are hundreds of results. Your real-life name is very likely not going to be unique. I don’t see how knowing someone’s name can turn into knowing everything about them. I welcome anyone to come to me where I work, then, if you can figure it out by my name, and ask me about my WoW characters. Or call my cell phone, it will be on. Throwing myself out there.”
Within 20 minutes, Internet detectives called his home and work, providing his address, phone number, the colour of his bedroom, how many pets he had, his location on vacations, and his parents names. (More details here http://seewhatyoudidthere.com/2010/07/07/realid-changes-the-very-real-ease-of-stalking-in-the-internet-age/)
So we live in an age where someone can take some pictures of you being a dick on the subway or being a jerk, find everything they need to about you and your life, then distribute that information online.
Personally, I don't think bringing justice to some thieves and animal abusers is worth this. First of all, you end up with people who committed minor infractions getting a hugely disproportionate response. Feminist activists, for instance, have complained for years that being a visible blogger gets you death threats, rape threats, and even people showing up to your door. Secondly, it's incredibly easy to accidentally end up with the wrong guy. If you start a campaign against Jane Doe, you may end up with some wires crossed and find the address of Jane Doe 2, who is completely innocent. Finally, I don't believe this sort of behavior actually has a positive change on anyone's behavior.
What can people do to cut down on this behaviour? Is it even possible to cut down on witch hunts and bandwagoning? Who's responsibility is it to make those changes? Is there ever an instance where Internet vigilantism is actually the right thing to do?
Is this something that we should be encouraging as a society? Or is it completely poison?
The Cracked article mentions a 16 year old girl, a 14 year old boy, and a couple of young women. It's also explained exactly how people get revenge:
“Forcand's life was picked apart. Transcripts and photos from his conversations were forwarded to his church and posted on his Christian blog along with his contact info."
“The result of Anonymous's detective work is that there appeared an entire website devoted to the teen, including his picture, links to the videos he made, the names of his parents, their addresses, phone number (as well as work addresses and numbers) and the website address of his father's business, which is now strangely absent from the Internet."
“The girl was eventually arrested and held in custody for three days after personal information was posted online (and in such detail that people even knew her blood type).”
“Next the page was linked on Digg, and Gizmodo, and from there to hundreds of other sites. Hundreds of thousands of people read the story, remembered the last time they fell victim to some asshat with sticky fingers, and started a massive virtual campaign of harassment against Gomez. People from all across the planet were sending e-mails, some of them likely with the most strongly worded LOLcats you can imagine.
Of course this wasn't nearly enough for the more industrious types who tracked Gomez down on MySpace and started to harass her and her friends. Then it was time for the real hardcore avatars of justice (or the insane) to bring it into the real world, actually finding her address in Queens and driving past her home shouting accusations and 4chan memes.”
It's becoming increasingly easy to find someone's information and spread it around. When Blizzard Entertainment decides that forum users would be forced to post under their real names to reduce trolling and flaming, there was a huge outcry. One user, Sikketh from Thunderlord, posted the following:
“I’m really not so sure about what’s so devastating about putting a name out. My real-life name is (removed). My cousins have problems finding me on facebook and social networks because when they try to search for me, there are hundreds of results. Your real-life name is very likely not going to be unique. I don’t see how knowing someone’s name can turn into knowing everything about them. I welcome anyone to come to me where I work, then, if you can figure it out by my name, and ask me about my WoW characters. Or call my cell phone, it will be on. Throwing myself out there.”
Within 20 minutes, Internet detectives called his home and work, providing his address, phone number, the colour of his bedroom, how many pets he had, his location on vacations, and his parents names. (More details here http://seewhatyoudidthere.com/2010/07/07/realid-changes-the-very-real-ease-of-stalking-in-the-internet-age/)
So we live in an age where someone can take some pictures of you being a dick on the subway or being a jerk, find everything they need to about you and your life, then distribute that information online.
Personally, I don't think bringing justice to some thieves and animal abusers is worth this. First of all, you end up with people who committed minor infractions getting a hugely disproportionate response. Feminist activists, for instance, have complained for years that being a visible blogger gets you death threats, rape threats, and even people showing up to your door. Secondly, it's incredibly easy to accidentally end up with the wrong guy. If you start a campaign against Jane Doe, you may end up with some wires crossed and find the address of Jane Doe 2, who is completely innocent. Finally, I don't believe this sort of behavior actually has a positive change on anyone's behavior.
What can people do to cut down on this behaviour? Is it even possible to cut down on witch hunts and bandwagoning? Who's responsibility is it to make those changes? Is there ever an instance where Internet vigilantism is actually the right thing to do?
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I think the fundamental problem is that receiving thousands of threats for something trivial or merely annoying is obviously the wrong way to enforce politeness and anything that is serious and breaking the law or endangering others should be handed over to the police anyway.
Mass actions against institutions are a lot easier to support than mass actions against individuals, and that's before we even get to "how many times have geniuses on the Internet had the wrong person."
I don't care if the people they're going after are legitimate criminals, look at the mob justice that surrounded the Boston bombings, with people being falsly accused and conjecture being treated as fact. There is a reason we have due process. The mob cannot be trusted to be impartial.
He and his girlfriend adopted a rescue dog. Within a few days the dogstarted acting funny (I dont remember the details) so they took it to an animal hospital, shelled out a few grand, and the dog which had been really abused and fucked up in the past died.
So he went back to the animal shelter all "WHAT THE FUCK? Dont you, you know, give the animals you're "rescuing" medical attention?" They apologize, and give him another rescue dog.
He takes the dog home. The dog freaks out, starts barking and baring his teeth at his girlfriend. So they collectively decide "NOPE", take it back the next day, and demands his $500 (IIRC) donation back.
A few weeks later, they start getting death threats. Someone at the shelter sent out a mass DNA (Do not adopt) email calling them puppy killers.
You can't type his name into google without "puppy killer" auto populating.
Granted, this was these were their first dogs, and rescue animals are apparently not for scrubby casuals, but at the same fucking time, everyone says "Oh No! Don't get a dog from a puppy mill. People that get dogs like that are giving money to Canine Hitler! Get a rescue!!!"
In summary, internet animal people are the worst.
The mainstream media does this as well, of course (the NYP headlines after the same event).
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
The subreddit moderators found themselves becoming a part of the media story and being both cited and insulted by huge mainstream media sites before the manhunt through Boston started and everyone had moved on
and they were really angry about it! They believed, or at least claimed, they were just sorting and thinking about information and not endorsing any sort of justice at all
and yet I don't think the family of Sunil Tripathi would buy that all
So who was at fault there - the moderators for starting and running the community, the users who were contributing and posting to it, or the administrators who turned a blind eye to it all until they had to make a public apology?
I can't remember the name of the guy, but there was some lawyer (based in Florida I think) who was really pushing on intruding on people's anonymity and privacy. And he was a jerk about it. So in response this sort of thing happened; the internet found out everything about him and posted it publicly (it was even covered on The Daily Show). It was a very, "Here's what it is like" moment and I didn't have much sympathy for the guy. I'll admit, it was emotionally satisfying that someone into doing wrong to others got a taste of his own medicine. When the people running Oklahoma push to have those undergoing abortion procedures have their private information posted publicly, I want the people advocating that to have the same done to them, because fuck them, that's wrong and they need to learn somehow.
But then I look at all the shit that happens to feminists or WoW players or whoever else and realize it can never be a valid tactic. Vigilantism looks really cool when it's Batman doing it, but that's because Batman does it as right as it can be. The reality is that heavy-handed morality isn't that pure. Lines will be crossed.
I appreciate Twitter for that level of accountability, and that lack thereof is the basic problem with "vigilante" anything.
There was a highschooler earlier this year who got punished via the school over shit he was saying on his Twitter account. Nobody had to pry to figure him out - he had his name publicly displayed and was carrying the school's banner on the account. I never came to a conclusion about whether or not the school punishing him was right in the end. All it had me thinking was that if he didn't want to be so punished, he shouldn't have had the school's banner so associated with his account.
That said, the internet doesn't need to do this vigilante shit on him. He was out in the open and it was up to his community to respond.
Then you have incidents like the firefighter guy who was saying racist shit on his Twitter account and got fired from the job over it. That one I think went about the right way (but it wasn't internet vigilantism).
You know what? I kind of do, people are idiots when they're teenagers, they say stupid things because they're young, dumb and don't know any better. Fuck, if I had every terrible, assholish thing I said when I was 17 preserved for posterity on the internet forever being used to publicly shame and punish me, I doubt I would have had the opportunity to grow out of that phase and see the folly in it.
More likely I would have sought the company of people with equally terrible world views and doubled down on the crazy. You think the politicians of today have never said a bad word in their lives? Somehow I doubt that very much, they just had the luxury of growing up in an age when their every mistake growing up wasn't given digital immortality.
Well think about this a little more though - when you're a teenager just saying any dumb thing for whatever reason, how do you learn any better? Usually it takes your peers responding in some fashion right?
When you actively engage the internet, does that not also expand who your peers are? I lean toward yes.
There's a difference (a rather vast one in fact) between receiving a well-deserved slap on the wrist to show you the error of your ways and being on the receiving end of an internet hate campaign. One is a proportional response and is temporary; the other has lasting effects that ruin people’s lives (or in some cases drives them to take their own lives).
I do not support mob justice. Ever. It is 100% about people taking joy in acquiring a socially acceptable target to let out their ugly side on. It has nothing to do with justice or proportional punishment to the crime.
Instinctively, I agree, but what counts as "cover of anonymity"? That's not necessarily a thick, solid line when you might be able to undermine someone's anonymity with a simple google search.
But is that realistic? Maybe you simply want to know where their handle comes from, and you happen across a page where their real name appears, perhaps quite accidentally, alongside it. If I take any further action in making this person's words publicly associated with his or her name, am I in the wrong?
I guess the real question might be: on whom does the burden of privacy protection really fall? In this example, it's going to depend at least in part on the participation of a viewer in ensuring a person's privacy when the person his or herself has not done a very thorough job.
That idea creates a binary out of something that should be a spectrum. It made sense when information disseminated slowly; when photographs were not easily reproduced; when nobody gave a shit who you were outside of your county.
But we need a new standard, one that recognizes scope.
When you provide your personal information to somebody, you generally have an expectation (however vague) of how widely that personal information will be distributed. When I give my phone number to a friend, I don't mind if his spouse knows; I do mind if he gives it to a stranger. When I give my address to a corporation, I expect that address to be disseminated within that corporation, and perhaps shared as necessary with contractors and partners - say, for billing and collections. I don't expect them to sell it to a marketing agency.
Similarly, when I say something to, say, a volunteer at an animal shelter (borrowing Deebaser's example), I should expect that information to be logged in their CRM, discussed around the break room, possibly shared with spouses or family. I don't expect it to be publicly posted to the Internet.
The violation of "Internet vigilantism" (I dislike that phrase, BTW - it's not vigilantism in a meaningful sense) IMO isn't a traditional violation of privacy. I don't care when Alan Ralsky is publicly shamed - he agreed to an interview with the Detroit News and posted YouTube videos of himself talking about spamming. He voluntarily put himself in the public eye, and the public decided to fling shit at him (deservedly). However, Jessi Slaughter didn't - and, for that matter, neither did dog shit girl.
The easy counterargument to this is "if you're on a train, you should expect somebody to whip out a cell phone and take video of you." If this is the expectation we have to live under, then we're effectively a surveillance society under mob rule - two shitty tastes that taste even shittier together.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
These are all, generally, good things. Being able to look up details on almost any random thing inside of a few minutes is awesome. You want to know whatever happened to that one kid who played on that one show, or you need to find the capital of Mongolia, or you're curious about sub-Saharan tribal politics, and the internet is fucking brilliant. Yay, information! And there's nothing wrong with the idea that being an asshole should have social consequences.
If this guy I know is always a dick, I will stop being nice to him. Maybe I'll mention to a couple of my friends that he's an asshole. Maybe my friends stop being nice to him, too. Bam, his being an asshole results in him losing respect and favor among his peers. Nothing with that - it's how society works.
And there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting to help people and be a hero, to the extent they're not doing stupid things that jeopardize their own safety.
But you get all these things together, and you get a clusterfuck. Because it's also the case that people are terrible at fact-checking. They take things like chain-letters and the Drudge Report and Facebook posts as incontrovertible fact. And even if the facts are accurate, you can wind up with ridiculous overreaction. If you're an asshole to someone, it's reasonable that a few people around you snub you for a little while. It's not reasonable that a million people across the country send you emails to tell you what a dick you are forever and ever. And that doesn't even figure in the people who will take it to an especially creepy place, and start talking you, or sending death threats.
Some of this can be mitigated through existing harassment laws, likely. Most of it can't - sending someone a single email saying, "I don't like you" isn't harassment by any sane metric. The issue lies in getting a thousand of these emails from a thousand people. I think all that can really be done is to redirect the forces of social action and peer pressure. Change the culture so that internet vigilantism isn't this heroic thing you're doing to help out someone who was wronged, but rather a stupid, overreactive thing that only dumbasses do. Everyone hears stories of this one guy who was a dick and some other guy got back at him and ruined his life, and they cheer because the dick got his comeuppance. That right there is the problem. That's the social attitude we need to change.
Person A gets drunk at a party
Person B puts person A in his car and drives her home.
When Person A wakes up, she finds she's been sexually assaulted.
A youtube video goes viral showing B leaving with A.
Reddit decides B is guilty and starts a campaign to "get justice"
Dang, nobody caught on their cellphone when Person C sneaked into the room where A passed out. Whoops.
I just want to springboard off this that so many people get up in arms about living under government surveillance, but are happy as pigs in shit to do the same to other people around them.
There's also the angle that people are generally more 'unchained' when using the internet as a communication medium. I can speak from experience that a lot of the time, I'll speak harshly of someone when I'm at a distance - but the moment the person I'm speaking of is in some closer proximity in my life, I start to weigh my judgment and words more carefully. I don't doubt a lot of other people do the same, whether they know it or not.
Gabe described it in a podcast as it being harder to be a dick to someone in person.
The technical term is disintermediation. As someone becomes more abstract, our internal protections break down. It's why "othering" is at the heart of bigotry.
It takes even less than that:
Person A gets drunk at a party
When Person A wakes up, she finds she's been sexually assaulted.
A youtube video goes viral showing B at the same party as A.
Reddit decides B is guilty and starts a campaign to "get justice"
I say that 100% seriously. It doesn't matter whether they're doing a DoS attack on some corporation or harassing a dumb teenager.
Other Internet vigilantes aren't quite as bad, but they're fairly close.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this
I realize it's strong wording, so I understand some hesitation in your response.
But think of it this way, if Al Qaeda (or some other Islamic terrorist group) performed a DDoS attack on the FAA, the American people would scream for their heads. At a minimum, there would be drone strikes. How is Anonymous performing an attack on the US Copyright Office any different?
And the attacks on banks they announced for last month might as well be a Bond-villain plan! They even had sketchy anger at the government over actions in a war to "justify" their attacks. It's like they think they're Janus in Goldeneye!
Other Internet vigilantes are only really separated by scale. They're the KKK members throwing rocks at windows to Anonymous's burning down black churches.
What are anonymous's political goals?
how can it be
They commit illegal acts(or skirt the law) in order to enact social or political change. It's pretty much the definition of terrorism. Certainly some are "in it for the lulz" but I am not sure that makes it any better.
On one hand, 4chan. On the other hand, Fat, Ugly or Slutty. Does anyone care to argue that the latter site is not engaged in Internet vigilantism? Because i know that the latter site is pretty lionized around here & elsewhere (and arguably for good reason - there's only half-assed moderation at best in most online gaming services, so users have to basically fend for themselves).
I completely agree with this... but, I mean, how do you even start to address the issue? The technology is already in the public space, and it's actually expanding rather than shrinking. Even if we could magically update all of our current laws to mesh better with current technology (and we can't), enforcement over that space is basically impossible (in the current paradigm, anyway, where the end user is basically considered to be holding the bag at the end of the day). We'd have to start imposing restrictions / guidelines for technology manufacturers to follow - and if you did that, you're basically handing all of the chips over to people that know how to get around the restrictions.
Having visions of a place under constant surveillance where the mob rules via public shaming vs a place under constant surveillance where /B/ rules via public shaming, I'd have to say I'd vote for the first option.
Eh, a necessary criterion of terrorism should be the violence and/or destructiveness of the acts, not the illegality of the acts.
Otherwise, your definition of "terrorist" includes such villains as Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and Harriet Tubman.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That is not anyone's definition of terrorism except your own.
Ghandi committed illegal acts to enact political and social change.
Jesus.