Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to downplay the significance of this writing - thank you for calling it out!

I do want to gently call into question the danger of the attack surfaces that you have (I think accurately) spelled out:

1) "Doxxing with calls to action (that — and trust me on this — people DO act on)."

For the most part, high-profile "targets" from the troll's perspective are already known to the public anyway.

Those that aren't, and who want to stay anonymous, have a big job doing so - not just from trolls, but from the NSA and corporate advertising culture.

2) "Swatting (look it up). That nobody has yet been killed in one of these “pranks” is surprising. It’s just a matter of time."

This is purely a political problem. Clearly there's a flaw in the system when police can enter a home by the say-so of someone they haven't verified to be in that home. A sensible solution here is to work to abolish (or nearly abolish) so-called "SWAT" teams. For those that remain, obviously their standard of probable cause needs to change so that the scope no longer includes phenomena that are so easy to defraud.

3) Physical Assualt

In a general sense, this is already illegal under law that is widely supported. It's worth adding sexual assault as well.

The example that you give, which is disgusting of course, seems solvable by some kind of client-side solution that prevents machines from activating photosensitive epilepsy.

At the end of the day, there's not that much that somebody can do from a world away. To the extent that there is, I assert that the solutions are largely political, social, and cultural.

Ugh. At the very least, this kind of victim blaming attitude and lack of empathy is presumably exactly the setup for people jumping on the harassment bandwagon without thinking things through.

1. You're pretty much advocating mob rule. Also, are you seriously comparing the threat that internet hate-mongers vs. the NSA poses to the average Joe or Jane with an internet persona? I dislike corporate and government spying as much as the next person, but what immediate threat does the NSA pose to Kathy?

2. It's not hard to dream up a scenario (any immediate severe danger to one or more members of the public?) which, once the police starts believing the "witnesses", would make it irresponsible for them not to act on it. You just need enough "witnesses". From what I gather, the attitudes of some police forces, particularly in the US, could certainly do with adjusting, but that's an entirely separate problem.

3. Yes, as I'm sure you'll remember from the OP, once someone gets beaten up or worse, the authorities will take an interest. Not before that. You can't run around in real life constantly threatening people with violence, what makes it OK to do so via electronic media?

I didn't see any victim-blaming in that post - the victim is obviously due our full sympathy in each and every case. The question is what to do about it. The OP suggests that we might be able to form better communities, suggesting that the existence of communities in which this kind of thing does not happen proves that it must be possible. The GP appears to disagree, believing that we need technical and legal solutions to the problem instead. That's something about which reasonable people can disagree.

Victim blaming/"they deserve it":

"For the most part, high-profile "targets" from the troll's perspective are already known to the public anyway."

I read that differently from you.

I think the author was simply pointing out that well-known people are well known, so their privacy is, almost by definition, limited anyway.

This handily ignores that doxxing is not some virtuous research and release of pure facts in the public interest. Its purpose is to turn lies about the victim into the publicly perceived truth (defamation) by mixing them with the weight of real facts.

That people who have some level of public exposure (as you and I do, posting on a public forum) will have some personal information out in the open is obvious. The thread-starter appears to be playing down the damage that doxxing can do "I do want to gently call into question the danger of the attack surfaces". To me, their admittedly unspoken, conclusion from point 1 is therefore "they had it coming".

I agree with that and I'm not sure what that jMyles' point was there, but I still don't think he/she was victim blaming, but rather making some sort of observation about the nature of privacy and popularity.

That's a cruel outlook and not at all what I meant. I think it's reasonable (and in fact an essential part of calling into question the norms of patriarchy) to point out that attack surfaces are real and they require scrutiny.

In this case, the one with which you seem to take issue OP's point #1, which I merely want to point out is a surface that is only available against people who haven't already dox'd themselves. And for those people - people who want to occupy a place on the anonymity spectrum that is far away from a "public figure," the threats to this attack surface are more damning than trolls - they include huge advertising corporations and the NSA.

I think they meant more that it was the trolls' targeting critera ("Has lots of Attention, and 'doesn't deserve it" implies someone you can google, or who has a relatively large following), NOT that it was any implication that the target deserves such abuse.

I read it as "If you don't want to be harassed, you shouldn't have a public presence."

FWIW, immediately before that sentence, the thread-starter called into question the real danger of doxxing and calls to "action" based on the released information/misinformation.

> "If you don't want to be harassed, you shouldn't have a public presence."

I did not at all mean that. What I meant was that doxxing is a complex attack surface. If someone is already high-profile and public, they can't really be dox'd. If someone isn't, then staying anonymous is a more harder task than avoiding being dox'd. That's all I was saying.

If anything, I think that people who choose not to be anonymous need more social / political support, not less.

It's not victim blaming to say, "this attack surface is larger than that attack surface." Shame on you.

> For the most part, high-profile "targets" from the troll's perspective are already known to the public anyway.

According to Dunbar's number, the average human can maintain meaningful social relations with around 150 people. If you have more than 150 followers on Twitter, you therefore must have followers who are not known to you personally, viz. "the public". That makes most of us "known to the public" in some way.

Calls to action matter. History has plenty of examples of situations in which somebody manages to provoke a group of people into attacking some individual by selectively or misleadingly disclosing information about that person, even if that information is untrue or nonsensical. My favourite example is the case of a mob attacking the home of a British paediatrician after someone confused the word "paediatrician" with "paedophile"[1] (yes, this actually happened).

This could happen to anyone, and the information being released doesn't even need to be true. Are you sure you've never done anything publicly that couldn't be twisted against you by a sufficiently malevolent person? And if you haven't, what would stop them from just making something up?

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.so...

Furthermore mobs are much easier to rile up than to disperse. I'd suspect the problem is even worse online where the mob is distributed and whose only coordination is around mutually inciting each other.

Literary evidence from Shakespeare, when a mob wishes to avenge Caeser's death, from Julius Caeser, Act 3 Scene 3:

  Third Citizen
    Your name, sir, truly.
  CINNA THE POET
    Truly, my name is Cinna.
  First Citizen
    Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.
  CINNA THE POET
    I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.
  Fourth Citizen
    Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.

I don't know what the solution to the troll problem is, but I don't think anti-epilepsy filters are a part of it, any more than I think bulletproof vests are a solution to gun violence.

I don't know; I think anti-epilepsy filters can be a _part_ of the solution (at least for the epilepsy trolling sub-problem), among many other things.

Bulletproof vests aren't a solution to gun violence due to practical reasons (uncomfortable, expensive, only protect your torso, not your head etc.), most of which wouldn't necessarily apply to software.

Good points, but they don't help much if you're active victim of trolling. E.g. try to sleep at night if they doxxed your children :-(

Technology affects culture (and vice-a-versa). Trolling is/was rampant in blogosphere and Twitter, but I have impression that Facebook and Google+, who both enforce much hated real-names policies, have less of a trolling component.

I guess it's because Facebook and Google+ are built mostly around reinforcing meatspace relationships. It's harder to be an asshole if your family, friends and cow-orkers read your comments.

You'd be surprised how happily people will make abusive and hateful comments on sites with facebook comments.

The real-names policy is itself a vector of "trolling", especially transphobia and homophobia; when it was instituted on Facebook some people took it upon themselves to report drag queens and transpeople in very large numbers.

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