I might get downvoted to hell for saying this, but women have to learn to be comfortable with some degree of harassment if the only alternative is to convert the internet into some limited speech zone.
I'm a bit reluctant to generalize like this... I think it's mainly a (relatively) small group of people (women and men) that are pushing this agenda to suit their other interests, using "women" simply as an excuse that people can easily emotionally identify with. None of the women I know are bothered by this kind of "violence".
- Calling out harassment / reporting it
- A better education regarding stuff like that (yes, this is an offline-first problem, only amplified trough anonymity)
If government gets involved then its likely going to be all or nothing.
I think that'd actually be interesting in the way that Hitchens allowed himself to be waterboarded to see if it was really all that bad. Y'know? Put up or shut up.
But not the scaredy cat way that Hitchens did it with a safeword and all. You'd have to commit to it.
The other alternative is that famous people are being harassed. In which case... well... that happens to famous people in real life too. It doesn't matter if you are online, once you have fame, your life is going to be harassment anywhere. You just need to make a sudonym personal account and not present yourself publicly on forums like facebook or twitter, and only share your new handles with people you trust.
Celebrities deal with this sort of thing by hiring bodyguards and other personal security teams. An average person cannot have that kind of protection.
As the Pew link posted earlier pointed out, men get harassed more than women on the internet. So, looks like the answer is yes.
But the dismissive attitude of some of the absolute vile garbage that is online is annoying. It isn't "some degree of harassment" it is god awful. Easy to be dismissive when you are not subject of something. Women by far are the target. A tad more empathy instead of dismissing something with the attitude their complaints are some needlessly whining
That is actually not true, see for example:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/01/the-darkest-...
By perpetuating this false stereotype, you're doing more harm to gender equality than harassment does. Online harassment can be bad - I've suffered it myself - but at least it's fairly equal in harming everyone.
The stereotype that men are harassers and women are victims arises because there are a few famous women that have been harassed very publicly. Why have there been more famous cases of women than men, when surveys do not find a large gender difference in actual harassment? I suspect it's that very stereotype of women as victims. It's an easy narrative to fall into, as you are doing right here.
Doesn't measure the intensity nor does it go in to general atmosphere of hate. Having post after post about "fat chicks" that is not specifically aimed at you can still be incredible painful.
Anecdotes like "posts about fat chicks" are not convincing. There are plenty of anecdotes going both ways.
If it's the latter I agree. A bunch of people working in open source receive death threats and considerable levels of harassment. That kind of stuff needs to stop, no matter who it's aimed at.
All I am saying is that gendering this issue, when the data shows it is actually something not limited or even focused on one gender, is incorrect, unhelpful, and sexist.
You think "of course", I think "of course", but there are people in this thread saying it's not a problem.
And, conversely, the Internet is not all rosy. The fact of the matter is we've opened up a real Pandora's box. This is the first time in human history we've enabled people to really be bombarded by public opinion in instant, rapid numbers at every moment they express a viewpoint. It's the first time the marketplace of ideas is out there in its true colors. Humans simply aren't used to this. It's perfectly normal that a lot will break down at the immense cognitive overload.
However, one thing annoys me. The idea that this is purely a women's issue, and how it's presented as a culture war over gender and feminism. In fact, this is a very recent development, and it seems to me that the zeitgeist on the subject changes cyclically. It used to be trolling, and it was acknowledged it happened to everyone. Don't feed the trolls, don't share public info on the Internet. But then, as social media totally subverted that, it became "cyberbullying". And though it was still acknowledged it occurred to all, it became a matter of imminent policy decision. Now, it has gone further off the edge. It's no longer trolling or cyberbullying, it's harassment and it has suddenly been morphed into an identity politics issue. What tripe.
I expect that soon this will change, of course. Some other neologism or term with a corresponding narrative will usurp the current gender feminist understanding. That's how it appears to work, observing prior historical precedent.
The way I see it, there's two real options: a) Humans must adapt to this new circumstance and learn to be more resilient in the face of a new reality, one where they are under constant global supervision for their words, or b) We must lower our dependence on the Internet and have decent analog/low-tech fallbacks to how our societal institutions operate instead of marching in full digital for everything. The latter, quite clearly will not happen. This leaves us with a).
Regulatory decisions will not work. The regulatory bodies do not understand the problem. I don't think any of us do. We have to learn to deal with the revolution we have started, as there's no reversing it.
Why don't they just turn off the computer?
Can you elaborate on this a bit? For instance, what about Kim Davis? Or extending Kim Davis' claims only a very little, those Mennonites and Quakers who pay only 48% of their Federal Income Tax because their religion makes them very uncomforable with the 52% of federal spending that goes to Department of Defense. And yes, I may have the exact percentage wrong, don't pick nits.
Do you really believe that? Think about where that goes.
I am, no doubt about it. My agenda is freedom of speech and dealing with real-world, not virtual, problems.
That doesn't mean I think websites need to become an arm of the state, it means I think the state needs to get a whole lot more tech savvy and figure out how to find and prosecute these idiots.
I don't think that threatens freedom of speech.
So if someone is insulting you in public, you call the police? Or simply walk away?
Sure, there's a line, and some behavior that people complain about as harassment doesn't cross that line, but some behavior is way out of order and should be stopped, with the force of law. Drawing those lines, between what is acceptable and what is not, is the job of laws. That isn't the top of a slippery slope, it's not the thin end of a wedge that leads to censorship, it's the way society functions.
- in the vast, vast majority of cases, it's not as bad as they (you, feminists, the UN, the "victims") claim it is
- the solutions they suggest are difficult to implement - for example, you would need to eradicate online anonymity - whereas my solution is very simple - use personal blocking software or, better yet, just ignore the trolls
- both of the points above lead me to conclude that their goals are insincere - that they're using "harassment" just as an excuse to legalize and implement more censorship and restrictions that will be used for nefarious political causes, the same as happened before with e.g. the "threats" of piracy and pedophilia
Edit: another reason is that I don't really recall many laws that made the internet better (DMCA, EU cookie laws, the "right to forget", Australia's blacklist), so it's seems unlikely that this time they will do it right
Newsflash: the internet is part of the real world, and always has been. Those people on the other side of the screen? They're real people.
You're doing it again, and it is growing tiresome. We aren't talking about 'insults', we're talking about sustained campaigns of intimidation using specific, personal threats.
As an exercise, please, today, go out to a public space, pick someone at random, and follow them around for a half hour or so, hurling abusive, threatening language at them. Draw pictures of them being subjected to violent abuse and hand them to passers by. Follow them to their home, ring the doorbell, and when they answer tell them that they and their family aren't safe.
I think you'll discover that your freedom of speech gets curtailed pretty quickly.
Then explain why doing the same while following someone from Twitter, across internet message boards, and then calling their cellphone, is qualitatively different.
It's equally tiresome for me when you call them threats. A real threat is e.g. "Give me your money, otherwise I'll shoot you.". I'm calling them insults because I'm not taking these "threats" seriously. I believe that in the very vast majority of cases, these threats are meant only to have an emotional impact (just like insults), not to express actual intention to commit a crime (warning your target would be stupid). However, if you disagree, you can always inform the police, there are no new laws required. IIRC, some anti-GamerGate activists did that, and the police dropped their investigation, not considering the threats serious, just like me (and so far, they've never been wrong).
> I think you'll discover that your freedom of speech gets curtailed pretty quickly.
I think either one of two things will happen: either (1) someone will attack me, which is a crime, or (2) someone will accuse me of being politically incorrect and will try to publicly shame me in hopes of getting fired.
Internet removes option (1), which I think is good, while option (2) is equally abusive as the one you're against.
https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Document...
The judge said it was "hard to imagine more extreme threats".
> In summary these tweets said: “Fuck off and die...you should have jumped in front of horses, go die; I will find you and you don’t want to know what I will do when I do... kill yourself before I do; rape is the last of your worries; I’ve just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried; seriously go kill yourself! I will get less time for that; rape?! I’d do a lot worse things than rape you.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-trolls-is...
> He said that, despite the defendants' claims, the harm threatened against Criado-Perez "must have been intended to be very high".
> The judge said the effect of the abuse on Criado-Perez had been "life-changing".
Your continued denial of the harassment that women face, in every thread, is really fucking weird.
Edit: I'm not really hiding anything, so you don't actually need my consent to start harassing (or "play-harassing" me). But if you seek my consent, I only give it for troll harassment (i.e. emotional abuse), not SJW/thought police harassment (perverting people's words to get them fired from their jobs, like Tim Hunt or Justine Sacco).
Sorry, I have nothing else to say, except: damn, you look so cool.
Similarly, I claim that in a free and open society, with lively and vibrant debate constantly transpiring in the metaphorical agora, it is your job to _not be offended_ by things that other people say, not their job _to avoid offending you_.
Neither the original article nor any other comment in this thread talks about people being "offended". The UN report itself only mentions "offensive behaviour" or similar a few times: a small number of times in quoting other people's opinions or existing policies, once in regards to "sending offensive emails from victim's email account" (that is, it is not the "offensive" content per se that is a problem, but the impersonation), and once favorably quoting Facebook's policy: "We prohibit content deemed to be directly harmful, but allow content that is offensive or controversial. We define harmful content as anything organising real world violence, theft, or property destruction, or that directly inflicts emotional distress on a specific private individual (e.g., bullying)."
The threat to "lively and vibrant debate" here is entirely invented, and it is disingenuous for you to pretend that this discussion is about being "offended" by things that people say. The discussion here is about threats and harassment, which have no part in encouraging lively and vibrant debate, not about potentially "offensive" ideas.
> Democracy means that people get to live in the society they want to live in.
is not true. It means they have a say, but we don't always get what we want. We might all not want to die of old age, for example. We might also all want to live in a society free of crime, but that will never happen either.
There's a lot individual communities can do to recognize and mitigate the problem, even on Hacker News. Not starting off the discussion with "women have to learn to be comfortable with some degree of harassment" would have been a great start.
If you think that it's important to preserve the internet as a free speech zone for those who are already freely speaking, and not for those who aren't, that's certainly a position you can take. But please say it in those terms.