What Happens When You Taunt 4Chan: Story of Lacey Vicich
betabeat.com
betabeat.com
Not defending 4Chan here but, wow, this is "walking alone in the bad part of town at midnight" type of stupid.
Its walking alone in the bad part of town at midnight having a student skirt with a sign that is saying rape me" type of stupid.
What can go wrong?? huh...
(Skip the family guy bit, and be aware that there's NSFW language.)
If I go for a walk in a minefield, it sucks that my leg got blown off...but I could have perhaps exercised better judgment regarding the location of my evening constitutional. That doesn't make it OK to deploy land mines, that just makes me an idiot for walking into the minefield.
Someone doesn't have to say "I blame the victim" to blame the victim. Usually what they say is something along the lines of "I'm not blaming her, but..."
I understand and agree with your logic (at least so far as "judging people for their participation in unavoidable situations is wrong" summarizes it), but I don't think it applies here.
She wasn't randomly targeted just for going about her business; she was targeted because she repeatedly posted calling /b/ "fags," "jits," "[/b] ain't shit," etc.
Suggesting that she doesn't have any responsibility for what happened doesn't make any more sense to me than condoning how /b/ responded.
Lord knows it ain't easy being a slutty amputee.
If I were a woman who had lost a limb in combat and had had a higher than average number of boyfriends, I think I would probably feel quite insulted that people were assuming I was unable to reason logically about the OP's premise.
I'll say this: anyone who goes around using sexual assault victims and landmine amputees for their analogies is just asking for it.
Classic ad hominem.
People don't actually get maimed because they stupidly walked into a minefield.
The operative term here is 'hypothetical analogy'. By insisting on the accuracy of the morbidity statistics of real-world minefields you're intentionally confusing the point and trying to derail the discussion.
"4chan /b/ is immature, toxic, stupid, and destructive"
In other news, water is really quite wet. Seriously, what else can be said about this that is not just repeating some variation of the above?
Imagine a woman (or a man) who is sexually assaulted after deliberately entering a prison reserved for violent sex offenders and intentionally provoking the inmates. The offenders have committed a reprehensible crime. Still, the victim is responsible for taking on an obvious risk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Man
I have sympathy for the Grizzly Man but more for the average bear attack victim.
If we don't expect people to exercise "common sense" in trying to avoid becoming the victims of circumstance, then why do we install locks on cars and homes? Missing locks on a house doesn't make it acceptable to steal things from inside of it, yet we don't in general rely on that social and legal rule alone.
Lacey doesn't deserve the treatment she's been getting but it's entirely appropriate to point out that the response could have been foreseen by anyone with experience with 4chan's /b/ (which includes Lacey, if she's to be believed). Any other argument is of the same intellectual logic as trying to prevent teen pregnancy by not teaching teens about sex (which is even worse as a method than abstinence education!)
This should be a "teachable moment" for other teenage or young entrepreneurs trying to drum up public interest in their enterprise by poking 4chan. It certainly shouldn't be hidden from public view just to make it look like it was a completely random attack on /b/'s part. People need to be educated about what can happen.
I don't think that the basic facts of what she did to "provoke this" are in dispute, at least if we take the article's account at face value. What I'm saying is that it's stupid that we don't talk about the nature of the harassment. That's what's really hidden from the discussion.
The peanut-gallery reaction to things like this ALWAYS centers on what the victim did, and there's an extra edge to it when the victim is a woman. (see the later "clarification" by the original commenter in this thread -- why use that language instead of "she definitely deserved it"?) And when somebody points out that we're blaming the victim, everyone's ready to jump in and make sure it's clear that that's appropriate this time. Well, there's almost always someone arguing that it's appropriate "this time."
I'd like this to be a teachable moment about how we excuse and perpetuate this behavior by focusing solely on what the victim could have done differently. That starts with somebody saying "hey, you're blaming the victim" and it'd be nice to get to "why focusing on the victim is a distraction from the actual problem" and then "how and why is this kind of thing happening and what do we do about it?" but we don't get to go there in this forum. It's trivialized to the point where even suggesting that it could be an alternative course of discussion is snarked at (see other responses). Yes, I'd argue that talking about the intersection of anonymity and technology that enables and encourages wanton and massively effective harassment campaigns is what I'd like to see from a hacker news discussion. (I'll put my thoughts on that in another comment, if anyone's still paying attention a day later.)
I got dinged for talking about the real nature of how a woman's sexuality is used both as a weapon of harassment and an excuse for that harassment, and for pointing out that hypothetical landmine analogies have no bearing on reality. Well, that seems a lot more relevant to me than trying to construct a thought experiment proving that the victim of this harassment had agency in order to defend a useless thats-what-happens comment. And while comparing it to how we lock up and take precautions in general is entirely reasonable in isolation, the comments here aren't isolated and they mostly add up to "she provoked it, end of discussion." The pattern of people responding that way reinforces the culture that accepts this as normal. I'm not ignorant of the argument that risks can't be entirely mitigated, or that anonymous groups also do good things. But the perpetrators of this harassment are liability-distributed and unaccountable in ways that individuals and even organized groups aren't. That's interesting, and scary, and we're not talking about it.
You're absolutely right that the anonymous and distributed nature of 4chan means that the "/b/" entity can react to perceived slights (trolling, mockery) in a radically disproportionate way.
If the individual provoker annoys /b/ with "strength" 1, and (e.g.) 10 000 /b/ denizens are each sufficiently annoyed to push back at the provoker with equal "strength" 1, that means that the reaction to the individual is profoundly out of proportion to the original attack. By a factor of thousands.
It's like burning someone's house down with their family inside because they dented your bumper without leaving a note. But as you point out, few individuals were all that nasty - the culpability is distributed across a large, anonymous mob, with a few critical nodes, such as those persons who leaked the individual's contact information, or made prank phone calls to her work place.
The crowd / mob dynamics gives massive strength to the anonymous group that is absolutely unmatched by the individual. Mob dynamics in physical space are understood well enough, and police have had various means of dealing with large groups of disorganized people in town squares and so forth. This is not the case for internet-distributed mobs, which are still relatively new.
The process is like leaderless, decentralized, crowdsourcing of cruelty (cf. "Anonymous: because none of us is as cruel as all of us"). And of course, the greater the crowd, the greater the possibility of someone recognizing the individual victim - which is exactly what happened in this case. Once this happens, with a name and identifying characteristics, the positive feedback loop and mob excitement can escalate and boil over.
You may already have seen this video about a thought experiment about the potential power of distributed, internet-powered mobs and the way things could go wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyMdOT8YJgY
On the subject of policing strategies, my feeling is that the relative newness of internet-distributed mobs (and less mobbish but still easily-formed groups) could be a significant factor in the rise in warrantless wiretapping that we're seeing in the U.S. The police recognize that this is a new problem, but they don't have precise strategies to deal with it, so they're left with an imprecise one, which is ubiquitous surveillance. If it's very hard to target individual contributors, you want to cast as wide a net as possible and then sort them out later. My hope would be that strategies for dealing with this will be refined with time and we'll be able to reign in the surveillance too, which has already done a lot of damage.
That's just a hypothesis and it might be refuted by actual cases where members of anonymous groups have been arrested. But the most recent overreaching in U.S. government surveillance does seem to roughly correlate with the increased ease of anonymous group formation.
Well, that or fear of terrorism. It strikes me that destructive 4chan campaigns are an inversion of "terrorism" as it's usually defined. With a terrorist cell you have a small group of people trying to intimidate a much larger group through extreme but limited acts. In an internet campaign like this one, you have a large group of people trying to intimidate one person through a collection of acts which might be fairly innocuous if it were only a single person doing one of them once. The large power imbalance is still there, but turned on its head.
In any case, better strategies to catch up with technology aren't going to solve the basic moral problem, which is how to assign appropriate culpability to individuals who each barely participate in a leaderless action that is massively destructive in aggregate.
- you have people who feel invincible because they are part of a crowd, so they strike out harder than they might if they were personally 100% accountable for what they did
- you have positive feedback loops where the crowd builds its momentum up in a way that would not happen with a small group
A similar trend is definitely taking place in file sharing. Mob action gives people permission (or at least a feeling of power), surveillance is deemed necessary by the aggrieved parties (and their government allies), and then eventually there's a "shock and awe" action to make an example of a big target, such as the takedown of Megaupload. (The distinction here is that unauthorized copying of movies or music is arguably less destructive than 4chan's focused viciousness.)
Back to the point at hand, once again we have a division of culpability, but a little more deliberate in the case of modern filesharing services like megaupload. The systems are legally and technically engineered so that the responsibility for "unauthorized" actions rests as much as possible with the distributed mass of uploaders and downloaders, per the provisions of the DMCA (in jurisdictions where it applies). And within that mob the accountability for the sum total of infringement is spread thin. It's an unpalatable choice for the enforcers, I think, with the current tools available to them. Or maybe not, and they just go where the money is.
I'm one of those who thinks a good portion of the spectrum of copyright infringement is overblown and outdated. I'm much more concerned about the feedback loop of bad behavior on /b/. But I wouldn't at all want to see Christopher Poole pursued like Kim Dotcom, either.
That's the conundrum for me. I'd rather come up with ways to combat the feedback loop during destructive mob events. I think the level of feedback is a function of both moral-alignment and attention-alignment in the mob. I put forward another wordy hypothesis about it elsewhere in the comments here. Attention alignment is somewhat novel because in a physical mob people can't jump out of the situation as easily switching to a different browser tab.
I'm sure there are more dimensions to it, but these two seem like possible attack vectors if you want to dissolve an angry distributed mob. But you have to do it in an appropriate and ethical way. The shock-and-awe of the megaupload case is, I think, clearly based on fear, but also an attack against the moral cohesion of the file-sharing mob. They're sort of pushing the guy into the role of criminal, extremist, profiteer.. any of which might resonate with any of us and knock people out of moral alignment with each other. If you make enough peers associate file-sharing with criminality or profiteering, you can shrink the mob.
"the stupid bitch deserved it"
I don't think she deserves any of this, just observing that it's a predictable outcome and she was stupid not to foresee.
Note that blame is not a zero-sum game. Blaming the victim does not diminish the blame assigned to the attackers, nor does it in any way justify what they do.
It's interesting how quick people jump on shaming the victim blamers when it's a women being harassed but nobody is there to reassure me it is not my fault when I stick my hand in boiling water.
You people seem to not be able to make the distinction between deserving something unpleasant and getting what's coming to them. She absolutely didn't deserve what happened to her but she did provoke it.
We can even condemn behavior without justifying or excusing extra-judicial violence. We just have to do it not in the context of discussing the violence they later suffered. We can discuss the injustice of an invasion, but the funeral of a fallen soldier isn't the place for it.
Also, no one is really blaming, I'm actually just curious. Anyone who knows /b/, knows what they're capable of, especially if you give them your name and what you look like. In 99% of the cases, it just fizzles out, but was she really betting on not being the 1%?
But what are we supposed to do when the victim bears some responsibility (obviously not all) for the process of their victimization?
Most people have some concept of a moral ladder ranging from "totally innocent bystander" to "criminal who deserved what they got". For example: a person who dies while standing on a NYC sidewalk and gets hit by a falling air conditioner is essentially blameless; a person who dies by being shot by a police officer while robbing a store at gunpoint earned their just reward.
Most situations, including this one, are less clear cut. She's not 0% responsible. She's not 100% responsible. But the correct number is somewhere in between. 5%? 10%? 20%? I don't know, and since I'm not presiding over a courtroom where she's suing 4chan, it's not my business to decide either.
In any case, to suggest that a person who freely chooses to venture into one of the seediest holes on the Internet, and then actively taunts and trolls the inhabitants (who are known to be vengeful, technically capable, and gifted with a lot of free time and tenacity) is absolutely and completely free from responsibility? ... Well, I'm not sure how to answer that.
Did /b/ overreact like a bunch of immature, possibly criminal, jerks? Of course they did. They played their part perfectly, living up to their terrible reputation. And if any of them have broken the law, then it's right that law enforcement get involved and the responsible parties be punished.
Does this young woman deserve this? Of course not.
But to ask the question, "what the hell was she thinking?", and to judge her partly responsible for the situation, is perfectly legitimate. She didn't deserve what happened, but she's not completely from responsibility for the outcome either.
Bears don't have a responsibility towards us: they're bears, they don't realize it's wrong to eat hikers. And accordingly, we don't have a responsibility towards bears: If there's a bear that's eating hikers, we don't try to have a conversation with it, we shoot it and move on.
That's nonsense. A baby doesn't know right from wrong, but parents are obliged to care for it. Just because a bear doesn't have responsibility doesn't mean we can shoot it wily-nily, there has to be some justification such as in the example you mention. And commutativity is a property of operations, you probably meant that moral responsibility is a symmetric relation.
And metaphor need not hew closely to semantics, but having is, linguistically, a ditransitive operation-- technically stative, but the difference isn't important here. I may have responsibility, and I may have responsibility toward you. Responsibility may commutatively have me toward you, if that made sense, or you might commutatively have responsibility toward me, which is the more sensical. In any event, the metaphor is clear.
have is actually a transitive word, not ditransitive. An example of the latter is give: A gives B to C. I disagree that there's metaphor here, commutativity is a very technical term and it relates to operations such as addition. So in fact I do think it's relevant that have is stative, because this implies it's not an operation. When speaking of ethical matters it is simply more common to use words like symmetry and reciprocity.
The point about whether it goes both ways is a matter of opinion I think. I feel that humans have an obligation to treat animals well, not necessarily because of how they would feel or their obligations to us, but because it makes humans look bad not to. Kind of like how a gentleman is supposed to be polite regardless of the situation.
Notice that we only shoot bears that are actually eating hikers, even though no bear actually have moral responsibility toward us; that's because we as a society do feel moral responsibility towards bears (and animals in general), and therefore avoid shooting them except when required.
We certainly don't feel anywhere near the same moral responsibility towards animals as we do towards people, but we feel some. And as society becomes less religious, that'll tend to increase.
Not true. Bears are a popular animal to hunt in every state in the US that has them.
That said, there are various animals which we do not hunt; bears were just the given example.
[1]http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,1607,7-153-10363_10856_57530_5...
Instead, I would argue that this is a function of urbanization and removal of a connection between humans and animals. Animals, which provide meat, eggs, and milk are removed as the providers as such and instead these things come from the grocery store. Because of this disconnect, animals undergo a process of anthropomorphism, which can clearly be seen in the form of lolcatz.
And you point out as evidence of the disconnect between the urban people and farm animals, by giving the example of the anthropomorphism of cats, which happen to be one of the few animals that actually live with people in urban environments? I can't even comprehend such logic.
[1]: http://www.animalsandsociety.org/assets/library/745_s3.pdf
As a member of a rural community your very livelihood is dependent on the relationship of people with animals. The doctor, the car dealer, etc all are connected to this. Doesn't it make more sense that this would have a bigger impact on how you view animal rights than what religion you are? It just so happens that rural people are overwhelmingly more religious, all I'm saying is they failed to account for a very important variable.
Rural people tend to view all animals as a resource, this includes cats as they are a very effective "mouser" or animal that kills mice. The same with dogs, as protectors of self and property. I'm willing to bet that Lolcats are overwhelmingly produced by urban folk, because they have lost this relationship with animals. My anecdotal evidence is that rural folks, and men in particular, don't find anything about lolcats funny at all. This is explained by their connection to cats as tools for removing rodents, not their religious views.
oh dear. this is scary
Needless to say, it was rather quite horrible and I really did feel for the girl. At the same time, I was utterly confused as to why on earth she tried to poke a hornets nest...
It's a shame that people are still trying to ruin her life more. It's almost like some people think if something is done over a computer, it's not "real".
Just as I give both Timothy (who had spent 13 summer living among bears) and this girl (who as the article says was an old time /b/ user) the benefit of the doubt, that they rationally knew the extreme dangers that existed.
There's already enough tragedy that happens in this world - due to pure circumstance and things out of our control.
I only have a limited amount of energy and time on this planet. My empathy is better spent on the latter individuals than on those who knowingly put themselves in direct danger of being harmed.
"Empathy is the capacity to recognize feelings that are being experienced by another sentient [...] being." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy
But I will say, the initial emotional response (for ex. feeling sad someone was harmed) is largely out of our control. But spending time feeling bad after the fact is a controllable state, and is the basis of a large amount of psychological and behavioral therapy.
Surely, given the subject, it is extremely relevant.
It can be influenced by conscious thought and logic, sure, but as it is primarily experiential in nature, I usually have an experience that I then rationalise about, rather than rationalising what my experience will be beforehand.
In the documentary, I watched footage of him sitting 5ft from grizzly bears by himself for 15-20 minutes before they discuss his death.
In this article it explains how the girl teased 4chan repeatedly for 3-4 paragraphs before they described the attacks against her.
My emotional/empathetic response after hearing what happened to both of them was heavily influenced by rational thought beforehand.
My assumption is that it is just like "real life" where something might be big drama in the family for a week or two. After that, only one or two people will still talk about it, but they will continue to talk about it years later.
I would love to see some actual data on this.
And as you point out, there's also a moment where the event becomes calcified, earning an entry into some wiki that records the biggest campaigns against individuals. This also seems to have the effect of permanently branding the individual so that if they do anything else perceived as a violation by a member of the group, a significant chunk of the network can reactivate quickly for a second round.
There's also a thin line between observation and participation. Someone might be passively aware of what's going on from reading 4chan or seeing it here, and they might comment, and the comment (maybe a suggestion) could galvanize the network to act in some way (call her employer). Each individual who does this may feel moral responsibility only for a trivial fraction of the damage. "All I did was make one phone call. I'm not responsible for what other people do."
Add that to a good technological mechanism for acting anonymously, and we get what we're seeing: a huge campaign of harassment unencumbered by moral and social concerns. Somewhat different from a family drama but not totally so. I'm sure there are sociological studies on how "shunning" works, but if you could get a hook into the numbers here, maybe there's a pattern that has general properties that subsume cases where people are more accountable and less anonymous.
The other question that interests me is whether there's a point in the "ramping up" side of the distribution where an active intervention of some kind can mute it.
The only criteria for participation in Anonymous, for example, is a commitment to the "lulz" at hand. If you're not in the current campaign, you're not provably in Anonymous. For example, just after the name began to be appropriated by people at the edges who were mostly interested in targeting scientology, and described in the news as a good campaign against a cult, we saw an attack on an epileptic support forum. This had the effect of purging people who claimed to be Anonymous but morally disavowed it. That's synonymous (hmm) with splintering the group, but the criterion of doing it solely for laughs was retained by one group and lost by the other. It'd be reasonable to call the former the "core." So there IS a form of accountability in Anonymous, and it operates strictly in the moral dimension of the action.
That would imply that both the ramping up and ramping down of a campaign is exactly the same as the size of the group (as defined by devotion to "lulz") at any given moment. Perhaps tautological, but different from a family. Apply this generally to all anonymous distributed groups. It also implies that an action that subverts the moral identity of the group can subvert a campaign. If you do something so reprehensible that a large contingent of the individuals in the campaign are compelled to disavow it, then you could effectively kill the distributed campaign. Is that a net win? Probably only if you convince enough people that you did it without actually doing it. Another possibility is to engineer a compelling distraction that draws in members of the campaign. But it seems to me that with enough knowledge, an individual or a smaller group can actively and deliberately affect the tapering off, either through manipulation of attention span or manipulation of moral alignment.
The fact is, sometimes hornets' nests need poking, not because of the hornets that will fly out and sting you, but so an exterminator will notice the nest and remove it shortly.
While I question her motives (linking to a porn site of herself didn't exactly help) this really shows the dark side of the internet yet again.
am I missing a detail here or is she getting exactly what she wants
I don't know if the publicity will be worth it if they're desecrating graves now.
What concerns me a little more than how the poorly developed people on /b seem to be deciding that targeting people just by association is acceptable for retaliation, is whats going to happen when they annoy someone that's living in a less digital world.. Ergo, someone that actually isn't afraid of using the virtual ante and responding physically
She's not coming out of this with a net gain.
Yes, /b/ seems to be the only reason people hear or know about 4chan. But /b/ has done this sort of stuff in the past for massive 'lulz', and they have also stopped stuff like animal cruelty, or even that one kid who decided to post a pic of his feet in people's salad (which got him fired).
Good times here, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tom-green-raids
There's another 50 boards on 4chan ranging from animals to papercraft. Explore.
4chan as a whole may have redeeming value (I'm not involved, so I can't say), but to the rest of the world, 4chan == /b.
She was trying to shill her porn site and knowingly poked a hornets nest
Bit of a difference
Thanks for your great advice, but I think I'll just stay as far away from that place as possible. I'm sure I'll be able to read about it somewhere else, the next time these mindless children decide to go too far.
It appears I cannot view the video from Canada-land. arbitrary region restrictions cough
"Anonymous is a hornet's nest, and Barr said, 'I'm gonna put my penis in that thing.'"
I hope that the 'wild internet' reintroduces society to the fact that people have a tendency to lash out and hurt others, and that reintroduction serves to help us put value back on thoughtful and caring behavior.
(Go watch Dogville for an exploration of that idea.)
I think it's a bit naive to suggest that if people lived in smaller communities, nothing nasty would happen to anyone.
4chan has different boards which pertain to different subject matter. For example, /mu/ for music, /sp/ for sports and /v/ for video games. /b/ is the "random" board where essentially anything goes. It is also the most popular board on the 4chan. /b/ is sometimes referred to as "the asshole of the internet" proceed there at your own risk.
Shame they took it so far with her though
I'd love to read this, but there does not appear to be a way to read the full article on an iPad.