EFF Takes On Online Harassment 189
Gamoid writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has identified online harassment as a major challenge facing free speech on the Internet, and lays out its plan to fix it. They say, "Online harassment is a digital rights issue. At its worst, it causes real and lasting harms to its targets, a fact that must be central to any discussion of harassment. Unfortunately, it's not easy to craft laws or policies that will address those harms without inviting government or corporate censorship and invasions of privacy—including the privacy and free speech of targets of harassment. ... Just because the law sometimes allows a person to be a jerk (or worse) doesn’t mean that others in the community are required to be silent or to just stand by and let people be harassed. We can and should stand up against harassment. Doing so is not censorship—it’s being part of the fight for an inclusive and speech-supporting Internet."
There's a bigger challenge... (Score:1)
>> identified online harassment as a major challenge facing free speech
There's a bigger challenge in France right now: http://www.bbc.com/news/live/w... [bbc.com]
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Are we to assume that because France is having trouble, the EFF should stop and we should just not bother?
"Oh, they're dealing with something terrible, I suppose I should just be quiet and accept the abuse I suffer because, hey, at least I'm not being murdered!"
Re:There's a bigger challenge... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are we to assume that because France is having trouble, the EFF should stop and we should just not bother?
Of course not. But the EFF is treading on dangerous ground. Up to now they have mainly defended individuals against government attempts to censor or stifle speech. Now they are talking about going after individuals, for what some consider to be speaking freely. Many people that have supported the EFF in the past, may not be so supportive of this mission creep. Some of the harassment has been egregious, but that doesn't mean the EFF is the appropriate organization to "fix" the problem, or to even say what the "fix" should be.
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Bullshit. Freedom of speech is not freedom to be an asshole to anyone at any time. Words can hurt people. You can drive someone to kill themselves with nothing but speech. Happens all the time. Like it or not there are reasonable limits to your freedom when it affects others. The EFF is asking the tough questions here about where that limit should sit. This is not mission creep, protecting electronic rights should ABSOLUTELY include the right to not be systematically harassed, intimidated and threaten
Re:There's a bigger challenge... (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone can say they feel threatened or harassed by anything. It's the same reason why the FCC never defined what obscene content would be, it's not possible.
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Freedom of speech is not freedom to be an asshole to anyone at any time.
Yes it is. You do not have the right to physically harm, or threaten, someone. But you certainly have the right to offend them.
Words can hurt people.
Sure they can, but there is no constitutional right to not be offended.
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Indeed, you have the right to stalk them from website to website and deliver a constant stream of abuse. They take offense? Oh, that's their problem. So long as you don't physically harm someone, you're OK! Emotionally harming and constantly harassing someone until they break is a-ok though!
At least, if I understand ShangahiBill and the above post by fyngrz.
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How about you retaliate or report the problems ti the site owners getting them a ban. Or perhaps you could draw a cartoon with them holding hands with the prophit mohomed while a jew sodomizes a pig and Jesus marries them?
Or better yet, just do something else for a while? Its not like using different accounts or email addresses or visiting people face to face instead of online, going to the park or something is going to kill you/them/anyone. Why do we need laws for something so easily dealt with knowing tho
Re:There's a bigger challenge... (Score:4, Informative)
Harassment is somewhere in between physical threats and being a general arsehole. It's a sustained campaign of asshattery towards an individual, with threats but not necessarily physical harm.
The law says you can't do it. Things like stalking are illegal, even if the purpertraitor doesn't lay a finger on the victim.
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Physical threats and suggestions of violence fall into the realm of stalking. Just because some of the harassment is taking place online as opposed to in front of a live audience doesn't actually matter.
We can most certainly be assholes. I can call you ten different names under the sun, but those are my opinions. You can call me all kinds of terrible things, but unless I let your none sense actually affect me, it won't matter.
Psychology and dealing with your own emotions should really be taught. Things like
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You do not have the right to physically harm, or threaten, someone. But you certainly have the right to offend them... there is no constitutional right to not be offended.
I went to a talk a few years ago by a brain scientist. His results were that the brain response to a physical injury is pretty much the same as the brain response to insults and swear words. Does the constitutional injunction refer to the suffering that's inflicted, i.e. a brain response? or does it refer solely to the physical injury even in cases or people where this doesn't cause any suffering?
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While insults and swear words may hurt - it is a self-inflicted injury. There was a time when me, and many of my mates underwent a transformation by being subjected to order of magnitude more insults and swear words - they stopped hurting, within a few weeks of "practice". So much so that some swear words took on the shape of terms of endearment - literally, if only informally.
While martial arts training can make many physical injuries also less painful - there are 2 significant differences. Training requir
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Freedom of speech is not freedom to be an asshole to anyone at any time.
Yes, it is, in fact, exactly that. Freedom of speech is utterly useless if it only applies to speech "everyone (or, more likely, "you and people who agree with you") approves of."
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Yes, it is, in fact, exactly that.
No it isnt. Making physical threats to someone is being an asshole and that is certainly not covered under freedom of speech.
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What about an individuals freedom to live their life free of harassment?
In the US there have been instances of people protesting at funerals. They turn up with banners like "murderer" or "god hates fags" and start screaming at the mourners. Sometimes bikers turn up to keep them back, so that the bereaved family can try to bury their loved one in peace.
In Europe that isn't tolerated. People have the freedom to have a private, peaceful funeral without harassment. Europeans consider themselves to have more fre
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> Bullshit. Freedom of speech is not freedom to be an asshole to anyone at any time.
Yes it is actually. You have just fallen off the slippery slope that a great deal of us are worried about. You have quite effectively identified the big problem with any attempts to "fight online harrasment".
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Now they are talking about going after individuals, for what some consider to be speaking freely.
Some people don't understand free speech, so what? It's like the free market. It doesn't exist without some care.
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Yes, actually. The events in France demonstrate, what happens, when somebody considers himself justified to do anything other than talk back in response to whatever speech he may find offensive.
I'd rather suffer being offended once in a while, than see the First Amendment get watered down the way the Second and the Fourth have already been...
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when somebody considers himself justified to do anything other than talk back in response to whatever speech he may find offensive.
I think people are willfully misconstruing the sort of thing the EFF is talking about. They certainly don't appear to be talking about things that are generally offensive, but specific, targeted harassment against individuals where they are hounded everywhere they go.
But since people are getting killed over comics, you shouldn't worry about the torrent of abuse directed towards
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It is a slippery slope regardless. And we know, where it leads — Illiberals have been advocating banning "hate speech" [amren.com] for years. Guess who will be deciding, which speech is hateful? Ministry of Truth can't be far behind...
Right.
Strawman.
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The EFF isn't exactly suited to deal with armed extremists.
Define "harassment" (Score:5, Insightful)
There are various hug boxes on the internet where even vigorous disagreement backed with reason is seen as harassment. A more appropriate question than "should harassment be stopped" is "Who should be permitted to define harassment for a community"?
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Here's a solution to harassment that doesn't involve censorship: write better tools to allow people to ignore communication from people they don't like. This requires better, persistent identities across multiple modes of communication. The obvious privacy concerns can be sidestepped by allowing free creation of pseudonyms: people concerned about harassment can simply choose to only receive communication from pseudonyms that already have a friend-of-a-friend relation to them.
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I took a course on computer privacy law a few years ago, and one of the big questions is "what is privacy"? After looking at all the various philosophical and legal definitions, I came away with this definition: privacy is autotomy -- the right to conduct your affairs without unreasonable and uninvited interference.
So I would define online harassment as deliberate and uninvited interference. Unpleasantness is simply one *means* by which the interference is accomplished, but it is not in and of itself harass
Privacy (Score:3)
Ouch. Please read this. [fyngyrz.com]
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OK, I read it, and I wasn't impressed.
The reason is that your definition is circular:
Privacy is defined by the set of social and legal boundaries dealing with access in any one society that we are expected not to cross, or outright forbidden to cross.
That's fine as an operational definition of what a society *treats* as privacy, but it does no good in telling us what those boundaries should be.
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You have failed to demonstrate circularity. If you can, by all means, do.
Er.... yes, that's what the article is primarily about. I gave you the pointer to the blogpost because as an operational definition, "privacy is autotomy -- the right to conduct your affairs without unreasonable and uninvited interference" doesn't describe the problem space. If you look up a woman's skirt with
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I'm afraid there is no set of logical rules you can apply, but the law is pretty clear and works well anyway. Harassment is a campaign of threats and abuse against someone. Not just a one-off comment that clearly isn't going to be followed though, but a sustained stream of abuse over a significant period of time.
There is also the separate issue of making credible threats, which is also illegal. Again it is easy to understand and has nothing to do with freedom of speech. If someone screams "I'm going to kill
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What you are talking about is threats, and again the test is simple. Is a reasonable person receiving such a threat likely to believe that the threat is to be carried out?
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Since last year we've seen the legitimate criticism from a customer revolt misrepresented (on an incredbile scale) as "harrassment."
And there was also harassment that was described as harassment. Gemergate was/is mess, with lots of problems from lots of directions. Simplistic posts like yours here that are just "my side" tribalism are part of the problem.
Coverage Took Neutral Stand on Harassment (Score:2)
And there was also harassment that was described as harassment.
And that would have been fair enough if they hadn't also
a) pretended the tiny minority (and third parties) carrying out harassment accounted for the entire movement, in a transparent attempt to distract from and cover-up for the corrupt journalists, and
b) completely ignored all the harassment coming from the anti-GG "direction."
Therefore the coverage was intentionally biased, and decidedly anti-Gamergate rather than anti-harassment.
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Read the fine article. Despite the misleading summary (oh, Slashdot, please never change. Especially not to Beta), the EFF is coming down on the side of free speech and against censorship, either by governments or by forum owners. When they say "We can and should stand up against harassment", they're referring to "counter-speech".
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Yeah, they also crow about Gamergate being dead, but despite all the funerals there's no body. Never mind what the anti-gamers say; they've been known to lie. EFF doesn't take sides on Gamergate, they only mention it as a "magnet for harassment", which I think is undeniable -- people on both sides have been doxxed, swatted, and mailed undesirable stuff.
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The first GG link is about Felicia Day, and is actually one of the Guardian's more balanced pieces (which ain't saying much), including as it does Sam Biddle's "Bring Back Bullying tweets". It doesn't even include the word "misogyny", which is probably a first for the Guardian.
The second (broken) GG link is to some of Bria
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Challenge accepted.
http://sjwar.blogspot.com/2014... [blogspot.com]
You said a single. There are many references to this case, and it's not the only case, but you can do your own homework.
Sure, Let's Investigate (Score:2, Insightful)
Pro-GG people have been doxxed:
http://imgur.com/BNlLKcn [imgur.com]
So was the creator of #notyourshield, and his workplace was harassed until he was fired:
https://twitter.com/Moldyba [twitter.com]
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Your links betray you. Calling them weak would be an understatement. Someone arguing that a name is not private information does not translate to call to dox all GG supporters, for example.
If you really want to complain about games journalism you should drop the GamerGate tag. It's toxic. Trolls from 8chan have ruined it. When people talk about GamerGate, they usually mean those guys.
At this point I think even if GG admitted it was wrong about Quinn and based the whole movement on misogynist lies, it couldn
Your rights and my feelings (Score:1)
Well, as long as it's not a case of "your rights end where my feelings begin" then there isn't really a problem. If things are legal, who cares? Beyond that, it's an enforcement issue. Individual sites already have their own policies, so if a user is not satisfied with the policies and enforcement of the site they are using, that is not a problem as the user can discontinue using the site.
This comment thread will be a sewer (Score:2)
Hundreds of posts of people talking past each other coming right up.
You fight words with words (Score:1)
Censorship is always, absolutely unacceptable. A person that raises his hand to censor another should have that hand cut right off!
You can't take away people's right to be assholes! (Score:1)
The main problem (Score:1)
People tend to see anyone disagreeing with them as "harassment".
Note how I will get down-modded "troll" for the following sentence: I think Xbox One is a better platform than Playstation 4.
Not edgy enough? How about this radical opinion: For all it's flaws, Windows 8's UI is many times more usable than whatever Ubuntu is trying to do.
Blood still not boiling? I don't think Jar Jar Binks was that bad of a character, considering that Star Wars is primarily a franchise designed to sell toys to children.
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I was with you till Jar Jar
I moderate a small local community forum (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is a real and serious problem.
There is one local character with a personality disorder who carefully hides online and constantly, for years, weekly attacks and smears taunts and insults local people just going about their online and offline business.
If it were fair and open criticism, so what.
If it were a national site, so what.
If they were attacking CEOs or politicians or bureaucrats... good!
But for local communities it's a real problem when people with serious asocial problems use all of their efforts, for YEARS, on a weekly basis, to simply do their best to degrade any and all online and even offline interaction and assassinate people's character out of simple avarice. They have a serious problem, and they make us part of it.
Such people always existed. There are people with profound social problems in this world who derive pleasure from hurting others in petty ways. But when you are talking about small communities, and easy carefully protected anonymity, and prolonged sustained effort fueled by a psychological disorder, you have a new phenomenon.
Not even just for the local community. It's not healthy psychologically and socially for the sick person to indulge their bad behavior rather than get help.
This article isn't my location, but here's a good write up from a few years back similar to what I and others in my small city have to deal with:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09... [nytimes.com]
Re:I moderate a small local community forum (Score:4, Interesting)
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well said
there's definitely an academic study in there somewhere
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But I have noticed the negative impact online chatter can have with my large family.
Have you ever talked to a large portion of your family in person at once? That's how I found out that my family and I didn't actually like one another
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This article isn't my location, but here's a good write up from a few years back similar to what I and others in my small city have to deal with:
You don't happen to have any non-paywalled links suitable for posting to slashdot, do you?
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1. click the link
2. put the url in quotes
3. google returns a search page with the link being the first result
4. click that, and get the page without invoking paywall
NYT allows following results from google without restriction
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that's not good enough
this one person has multiple sock puppet accounts. i know because i see them post the same thing within seconds of other posts and use the same verbal cadence, obsessive focus, same language, etc. their real identity is carefully hidden. but they'll make believe they are other people, real and imagined, frequently
they camp new discussion topics with their venom. span multiple sites. go out of their way to make fun of local bloggers... simply for blogging about what interests them
it tak
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if it's temporary no big deal (they come, they vent, they go away: they got over it)
if it's public real identity no big deal (the crank who shows up at city council meetings every week)
if it's constant and anonymous and harmless no big deal (they constantly vent about animal activity in their neighborhood, not people)
if it's on a national board where no one really knows anyone no big deal (4chan)
but if it's 1. constant, 2. anonymous, 3. hateful and interpersonal, and 4. local...
that has to be opposed and de
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By your tone you seem to be pushing for something more drastic, so I'm asking what that might be.
i'm speaking as a mod. so i meant: banhammer. that's the extent of my abilities
if you're asking for what i would LIKE to do, it would be to attach a real name to the behavior. real life consequences: this is your neighborhood troll, the person who has been hating, attacking, smearing, and mocking everyone for no good reason other than feeding their bizarre social disorder
they aren't dumb either. they're well spoken. and they are plugged into what happens in the small city. which makes it all the more worse,
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Yeah, I've done my own armchair psychological profiling.
Problem is they're smart enough to throw in red herrings. So I have details, but I just can't be sure.
They're witty, well spoken.
From the way they get information, I'd suspect someone connected to media, a reporter or editor. They always know topics, stories, details way ahead of almost everyone else. They are also regular, flinging their bile on a weekly basis for years. Like it was their job (or... an easy psychological subset of their job.)
They're f
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republican obstructionism is fucking stupid and shows they are devoid of any leadership or valid ideas
but... that's politics
we're talking about attacking local common folk, neighbors, no real power. anonymously. constantly. some serious social disorder
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good points, well said
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Symptom, not cause (Score:2)
Well, what if we made it so things were even more transparent, and we were able to bring pressure against the "doxer".
I had someone engage in character assassination against me based on a wilful misinterpretation of what I said. Rather than taking my post down, I left it for all to judge for themselves.
Apparently ordinary people who saw what this person did, under their real name, and started sending threats. Or so I overheard when i was recognized, prompting a conversation I could overhear.
More transpare
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Re: Symptom, not cause (Score:2)
Worked out in this case
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Re: Symptom, not cause (Score:2)
You're totally ignoring the fact that they already can. You don't need technology to stalk someone.
If someone wants to stalk me, all they need is a car. If I want to catch them, and be warned soon enough to stay safe, I need to be constantly vigilant.
Allowing technology to be vigilant for me makes me safer, even if it makes finding me easier.
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Your approach requires billions to willingly agree to put my head in the sand in order to work. This simply isn't going to happen.
My approach involves giving people greater intel systematically. This can happen, and if it does happen, it will make everyone stronger and able to make better informed decisions.
Yes, the inside of my head is a strange place. "Gifted", "Genius", "Freak", "Monster", "Idiot", take your pick, I've heard it all.
I'm being stalked right now, by people who don't like the shit I write
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Yeah, I'm not talking about you, stupid. You're just barely above notice.
I do have a life outside of Slashdot, dimbulb.
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This.
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We need to educate people not to use their real names or phone numbers.
Trolls and stalkers. (Score:2)
I think they should be clearly distinguished instead of throwing everyone on the same basket.
There are those people, like pretty much everyone on the internet that sometimes will get too bored, and will throw some hooks to cause some flame wars etc.. and well, this happens and sometimes its even fun, as it ends killing boredom.
But then there are the stalkers.
People that get fixated in making someone's life hell, someone that keeps "chasing the prey", that seeks every place the victim goes and slanders and d
Laugh (Score:1)
The likely outcome from this will be total loss of free speech rights, how else do you stop online harassment when literally anyone can say literally anything is harassment if they don't like it.
We need definitions for "speech" and "freedom" ... (Score:2)
A lot of people will be talking past each other on topics like this because we don't agree upon what is meant by freedom or by speech.
Sometimes the answers are easy. Many nations protect the people from the government with respect to the political freedom of speech. That's great, but harassment is rarely political and is usually an act of individuals or (non-governmental) groups. Yet expanding the definition of freedom of speech presents problems. Harassment is not about imposing upon people speaking lo
Laugh again (Score:1)
We can and should stand up against harassment. Doing so is not censorship—it’s being part of the fight for an inclusive and speech-supporting Internet."
Bull shit, because who gets to define harassment? It's the beginning of the end of freespeech.
inclusive and speech-supporting Internet
?huh? Is that Newspeak?
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Bull shit, because who gets to define harassment? It's the beginning of the end of freespeech.
Same as the people who decide what constitutes solicitation of murder?
Nonetheless if half of the population is suppressed from speaking not by the government but because of harassment, you still don't have free speech.
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Bull shit, because who gets to define harassment? It's the beginning of the end of freespeech.
Harassment is not the use of a specific word, although that can be hate. Harassment is a behavior, not a word or a phrase or a sentence or a paragraph. If you don't know what it is by now, you probably never will. Sorry about your lack of social development. Guess you found the right place to display it.
way I see it... (Score:1)
the ones who seem to get the most harassment are the ones who have a habit of bringing it on themselves, see this post for proof
course I dont go running off and whine about it, but that's cause im not a special unique snowflake who needs to be protected when I act like an ass
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Ah yes, blaming the victim.
EFF meeting 101 (Score:2)
We can and should stand up against harassment.
EFF meeting:
Lets make a search engine?
- Google done that
Lets make the world more connected?
- Facebook/Twitter did that
Fuck it, lets enforce our own laws on the world and get donations to do it.
- Roger that. Lets create an issue that doesnt really need to exist and make people fall for it. Lets ignore the things that really matter like world hunger, corrupt governments and corporations. But hey, at least EFF will get popular sifting shit down peoples throats that DOESNT REALLY MATTER.
Maybe someday I can post on The Atlantic again! (Score:2)
You want to get rid of online harassment? (Score:2)
Get rid of anonymity. If users can hide behind a veil of online anonymity, if they can always be relatively assured that no one is going to trace down that AssH/\t350 is really Wendel Jeppers of 113 Terrace Dr., Apt. C, Meat Hollow, KY, and that there is almost no chance that one can deliver a summons to him, you will not get rid of harassment. Couple that with the fact that there is no authority which can get rid of a troll once and for all, that they can sign up with a new anonymous account, and it's easy
Bar for harassment has been lowered ... (Score:2)
Doing so is not censorship—it’s being part of the fight for an inclusive and speech-supporting Internet.
The way to fight online harassment... (Score:2)
...is the same way we fight spam - filter it.
Seriously, just have a plugin in your browser that censors the words you don't want to see, and *BAM*, we're done. No need to control the troll, just don't look at them.
Offense or defense? (Score:5, Insightful)
Say, for whatever reason, valid or not, you perceive me as annoying and contrary and generally pin-headed, and you undertake to call me truly despicable names in the most contemptuous and filthy manner imaginable. Every day. Until you expire. Are you harassing me? No. You aren't. It wouldn't even rise to the standard of mild annoyance. Why? Because I am immune to such rhetoric under all but the most trying circumstances, and even were you somehow to reach such a malodorous level of offense, you're still 100% within the bounds of acceptable speech in my book; I just have to cope with it (which would require just about zero effort, I assure you.)
But the next person in line? They might break down into tears, wander off into the nearest bathtub, and slit their wrists if you simply called them a douchebag or implied they had too many pimples.
Whose fault is this? What is our responsibility in the matter of such weak, unprepared, or broken personalities? Should we pad the very walls and take out all the tubs and razors and knives and muzzle each and every one of us to prevent poor Cluetard McDimwit from wrist slitting lest something rises to the level of offense in the dim, dysfunctional reaches of what passes for his mind?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
Prepare your kids, and yourself, for exposure to the opinions of others, and gird yourself appropriately lest there is (gasp) an encounter with differing opinion, surprising and/or not-to-your-taste behavior, or OMFG, someone intentionally being nasty, crude or stupid. Or all or the foregoing. It is not anyone else's job to do this for you or your children; and it is not anyone else's responsibility if your failure to do so causes unrest, or worse, in minds you failed to prepare. Including yours.
In order to have freedoms, we must be educated well enough, and prepared well enough, to deal with them. If the fact that some cannot deal with them is sufficient to the cause to limit those freedoms, then eventually, they will erode away to nothing. Likely there will always be some personality on the borderline of collapsing at some provocation, imaginary or otherwise. Should we really attempt to tune our whole society to the lowest possible standard of discourse as a result?
Think very carefully before you endorse force of any kind as a remedy for "offense." To borrow somewhat from Jefferson, if it does not pick my pocket, break my leg, or falsely portray my reputation in some measure likely to cause material or financial consequence... then no remedy is called for; no coercion of law appropriate; and no sympathy required.
Having said that, the owner of any private venue has every right to set arbitrary limits on speech and behavior within the venue. You don't like it, leave. End of story. Such r
Offense VS attack (Score:1)
Nobody has the right not to be offended, but people do have the right not to be stalked or harassed.
That means I'm free to state my opinion. What I'm not allowed to do is follow you around, waiting for you around every corner, repeating whatever vile thing I want.
Saying somebody is an idiot on Facebook is one thing. Spreading rumors is another. Stalking is another. Again, I don't know why we need special cyber-laws, because many of these things are ALREADY illegal without specific cyber-laws being needed.
*
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Whose fault is this? What is our responsibility in the matter of such weak, unprepared, or broken personalities?
Your responsibility is to have positive intent. If you can't manage that, why should anyone give one shit about you? In that case, you're simply part of the problem, and no better.
Think very carefully before you endorse force of any kind as a remedy for "offense."
Harassment is not about offense. It's about behavior.
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Say your brother was a soldier who was killed in the line of duty. At the funeral some people turn up to scream abuse at you and call him a murderer. Or how about if he was gay and they stated chanting "faggot" over the words if the priest. Would you be okay with that?
Is there really no limit to what someone can say to you, in any possible context, that doesn't bother you?
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Here in the US, soldiers fight to defend the constitution -- they swear an oath [army.mil] to do so -- and the constitution in turn forbids the federal and state governments from restricting speech:
I take that to mean that a f
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This illustrates the key difference between freedom in the US and in the EU. In the EU we have more positive freedom, that is things like the right to have a private life which would also entitle us to a peaceful funeral at a public cemetery. People are free to protest and say what they like, just not to do it in a way that infringes the basic rights of others.
The US has extreme negative freedom, that is freedom to do what you like without interference. The problem is that without some positive freedom peop
Talking about freedom (Score:2)
I find your characterization to be inaccurate. Freedom means the ability to do something, as opposed to the ability to not do something. Every time people are restricted from some action, their freedom diminishes, which would be going in a negative direction.
I would not argue with the contention that in many ways, freedom in the US is diminishing; but I would insist that this is not a condition that is justified by our consti
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Positive and negative freedom has a quite specific meaning. Negative freedoms are freedom from restrictions on your behaviour, e.g. free speech which gives you the freedom to say what you like. They are characterised as "negative" because they are freedom from things that limit your behaviour.
Positive freedom is the freedom to achieve your goals and enjoy your life. The US really doesn't have much in the way of positive freedom - the constitution is about negative freedoms and limits on government interfere
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I went a-googling and found the source; some work by Isaiah Berlin [wikipedia.org]. I can't say I'm impressed with his choice of terminology, but I get it now. Positive liberty is supposed to be understood as self-mastery, particularly in choosing who runs one's society, and is degraded when elites force behaviors upon the citizenry (which would include all of the examples I gave above, btw.) Berlin's own explanations of what positive liberty is: He says "when positive liberty is misconstrued
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They do not "protect the majority." From a practical viewpoint, Nazi memorabilia are perfectly legal in the US, this has been uniformly the case for the last 75 years, and the majority has suffered not one whit from this.
Germany is not the US. The situation is different.
does nothing to stop people from thinking about Nazi concepts free of their history
It's not designed to.
You make a huge leap here. If banning the possession of certain objects has an overall negative effect regardless of the nature of the object, as you seem to claim, then surely you must advocate anyone being able to possess things like nuclear weapons. It doesn't follow that because things like anthrax are restricted that there is a chilling effect on debate about anthrax, or that the negative impression it gives of anthrax is not balanc
Memoribila (Score:2)
If possession of anything to do with the events was prohibited, yes, in fact it would provide a chilling effect.
But if you were to buy the lab coat, or a box of unused envelopes that said "from the desk of..." of some idiot who mixed up some anthrax and put such a thing on display with a plaque explaining what it was, that would be both interesting and provocative of conversation where r
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Because I am immune to such rhetoric under all but the most trying circumstances
I think you're arrogant and deluded. I base this on a talk I went to a few years ago where the speaker explained that the brain activity caused by offensive swear-words is pretty much the same as the brain activity caused by physical pain -- and went on to say that this brain response was apparently pretty much unavoidable. So when you claim to be immune, I assume (because "science") that the low level of your brain isn't actually immune, but you find yourself able to consciously suppress it and delude your
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You have failed to understand that no matter what your intent is when you make a remark to another person, it is up to them to evaluate the level of offense actually delivered by the remark.
You have also failed to take into account proportionality. Lightly scratching one's skin on rough tree bark causes pain. A gunshot to the knee causes pain. The former can be trivially ignored and dismissed without consequence or any particular reaction despite the fact that it was, technically speaking, "painful." The la
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The way I see it, an unqualified threat is a promise of action.
If the action promised is violence, and the threat is credible, then the recipient of the threat has been adequately notified that conflict is actually under way.
As the recipient has been assured that violence is immanent in some measure, preempting the other party's violence is reasonable, sensible and should be socially acceptable on every level.
Qualified threats are something else entirely, the question of coercion arises as does the authorit
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Disparity in anonymity is a major factor (Score:4, Interesting)