> If we start jailing people for the psychological harm they cause, we would jail a lot of people (including most of the politicians).
Perhaps we should, then.
Perhaps we should, then.
This is beginning to happen - harassment laws are a thing, and so are anti-bullying laws (the line between the two is different depending on jurisdiction I believe).
The question I have is around how far we can go with these laws before we start to impinge on valid civil rights concerns. As your sibling comment explains, it's pretty difficult to establish where the line is - too far and you start to impinge on legitimate comment.
Personally, I tend towards the free-speech angle, but it depends on context. For example, I feel that there's a difference between bullying IRL and on the internet, and between Twitter and Email.
Perhaps the difference is in the directness of the conversation and the avoidability. For example, workplace bullying laws (and policies) are necessary because the conversation is quite personal and there's great difficulty to avoiding it. Twitter is not necessarily personal, and avoiding those you don't like is pretty simple.
But what if your work is on Twitter? What if most of your personal life is there? It's obviously not reasonable to ask someone to abandon either of those things. Do you prosecute the ringleader? What if the first result for your name is a derogatory page on Encyclopaedia Dramatica?
It occurs to me that the answer might be found by a creative interpretation of defamation/libel laws.
I'm far from an expert in law and/or it's interpretation. But I think that it's not too hard to see where the line is.
A single comment, or even a string of comments on a specific page does not constitute a "criminal" case of online harassment. Nor does a heated discussion in private over email or IM. However a continuous assault on your presence online, emails or comments on things you say or ED pages about you, do. That's just my opinion on these matters so if anyone disagrees maybe there is a case to be made for vague lines. However I think that in essence this is where everyone would draw the line.
More about human behavior in general, not specifically coupled to this thread/article. It's more like my personal philosophy of what human behavior should be like, as opposed to how it is:
It seems to me that it's in no way acceptable to voice your opinion in such a way that it is harmful to others, as there is simply no _real_ reason for it. I wonder sometimes why there's so much strife in all the circles of human society. If you really think about it, isn't it strange that we're only able to extend _real_ love to a very small circle of people around us (think family and friends)?.
I find it very difficult to articulate exactly how I think about human interactions with each other. In a very high-vantage overview I could try to summarize it like this, slowly building towards my idea beginning with how my brain seems to work:
The first idea is made up of two other ideas that I have: The 'human mind model' and 'compartmentalization'
First the mind model:
I've said this before on HM: The way my brain seems to work (and by extrapolation, maybe yours too) is that you have internal representations of the external world inside your head. When you see a plant, you don't see the _plant_, you could even say that you're not even _seeing_ anything. The photons that hit the receptors in your eyes somehow invoke the image of a plant inside your 'mind'. The things around you, the world that seems so coherent, is really only coherent inside your head. What you see, know, feel about a 'thing' is not what that thing really _is_. It's just the details and patterns your brain can parse and understand. I think there's information and knowledge about things that can't be expressed inside our brains. There's probably more information inside a spec of dust than can be encoded inside the brains of all the people on this earth.
Then compartmentalization:
To me it seems that the human mind deals with this problem by compartmentalizing everything you think about. If you're a mechanic you don't understand how an engine works. You have a very vague idea about the physics of combustion, and from there the idea of the combustion chamber in the cylinder 'emerges'. From your vague understanding of the interaction between a cylinder and an axle 'emerges' the idea of the engine. But this is not _the_ _engine_, just your idea of what an engine is. When you think of an engine you're not simultaneously thinking about combustion. Combustion is encapsulated in the idea of the cylinder. Just like the vague ideas and knowledge about 'interaction' are encapsulated in the total idea of an something that is solid and the principle of locality, which in turn are 'understood' by understanding space and time.
My takeaway from these two ideas is that there seems to be no end in what we could theoretically know and investigate. There's always something more and something deeper just like Douglas Hofstadter shows in the chapter of "Two-part Invention" in his book GEB.
My idea about human interaction follows from these two ideas. Like everything else, you don't interact with another human being. Instead you interact with the (flawed) _representation_ of that person in your head. And during the course of your life you build a 'generic template' of what a 'human' is. This is the representation you first begin interacting with when you meet a new person.
Unsurprisingly some people have a very bad 'default human' representation inside their mind-world, but really the fact alone that we need approach people through these mash-up jobs of a template seems bad enough. We all know how bad it is to be interacted with based on something that might not be true (super generic statement, meant to capture things like: judged because race, gender, etc, discrimination). But I can't seem to lose the idea that this is basically how we work, and that unless you put some real effort into it, you're predetermined to treat the most people you meet with a very unfitting generic template of 'humanness'. Because really getting to know a person the way our minds work takes time, and we simply don't seem to have that time to get to know everyone we meet.
I wonder if perhaps in the future we can change our brains to be more pleasant to each other by default, or more understanding.
On the original point, I kind of agree with you, but there are two edge cases that immediately come to mind. The first is where we see an individual (heated) comment thread where someone takes deep offense and/or fears for their life. There's probably a point in that situation that should constitute actual illegal harassment. The second is kind of the reverse, where we see someone 'follow' someone else around, but not deliberately. They may have continued arguments/disagreements over the same topic across the internet by virtue of the fact that they are both heavily invested in that topic. So yeah, vague lines somewhat moderated by intent and how vitriolic the discussions are.
Second, your "human mind model"/"internal representations" idea is well studied. I don't know how much you know about this, but generally this is grouped under the idea of "Mental Models", and the idea has been around for decades. I've studied them in the context of how students learn to code. They're crucial in programming because we have to form a whole lot of correct mental representations of an inherently abstract concept (in which, yes, we compartmentalise). It's an incredibly interesting area of work.
In terms of how they form the basis of human interaction, that's a little more complex (and well outside my 'expertise', if you can call it that), but intuitively I doubt you're far off.
"I'd do a lot worse than rape you. I've just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried [sic]. #10feetunder."
Caroline Criado Perez was not complaining about one or two people sending a few dozens of messages that were a bit mean. She was inundated with thousands of messages, from many people, threatening sexual violence and death. One man was sending 50 messages per hour, over about 12 hours. Another woman sent hundreds of messages. Perez's "crime"? She campaigned to have a woman on British banknotes after the Bank of England phased out Elizabeth Fry on the £5 - leaving no women on the banknotes.
> Twitter is not necessarily personal, and avoiding those you don't like is pretty simple.
No it isn't! That shows complete ignorance forthe scale of the problem. Women are not complainign about one or teo trolls sending one or two unpleasant messages. They are complaining about floods of credible death threats - the threat-maker knows where you live and work and what car you drive.
The problem with that is that it's a very slippery slope. Everything you do, someone will complain, and be hurt. You're pro choice? You hurt Christians. You're pro life? You hurt women. You're pro immigration? You hurt domestic workers. You're against immigration? You're hurting foreigners living in oppressive countries. Most any binary choice will have some people pro and others against, and unfortunately everybody can pretend they're emotionally hurt, which effectively means you'll be jailing people whose opponents are the loudest.
If we were just talking about mere offense and hurt feelings (which are still serious), I wouldn't be talking about jail time.
And what you'd actually do in that situation, now what you'd think you'd do.
In theory, I could also have you arrested because your sleeve accidentally brushed mine in a crowded elevator. "Assault!", I cry, while I flop to the ground like a soccer player. But that's not a big problem because it turns out that legislators and prosecutors and judges and juries are not total idiots. The flopping thing has been attempted, seen as a problem, and generally dealt with.
It's also not even a slope. Blasphemy has been a crime in plenty of places, but we're moving away from that. Ditto crimes like insulting the king or harming the state. We move away from it because we get better at discerning actual harm from societally valuable dissenting speech.
Harassment is real. This isn't about hurt feelings. This is about concerted attempts to ruin ppl's lives. Kathy Sierra's case for example included lies being spread about how she was an actual prostitute (not as an insult).
Should trolls be allowed to spread lies about other people?
Sure, Sierra legally probably was entitled to sue these trolls, but now it's on Kathy to expend her time, effort & resources trying to identify the trolls to sue them. Even if it's legal, harassment can also be used as a DoS against the victim, which is frankly, still bullshit.
2) As Cory Doctorow put it "Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time rich and cash poor." demanding payment of legal fees from someone who has no money doesn't get you very far.
3) The question is whether there is a societal problem here that we should care about at the level of governance. I'd argue yes, but what the remedy should be is way more complicated a topic, and something that i think is probably only worth discussing in good faith. So if you don't think this is a problem, that should be addressed first.