Comment by lifeisstillgood
3 years ago
So I am asking because my views are only challenged inside my own head, hence the need for external thoughts.
But firstly the "governments will come and do bad things" argument - yes this is clearly and obviously a major problem - but not one solvable by technology in anyway. Fixing violent dictatorships is a IRL problem - one that requires enormous effort and sacrifices (see Ukraine for obvious example). We cannot pretend that a browser extension or a ground up rewrite of Twitter will defeat Putin or would have stopped Hitler.
As for "free" countries (something like 120+ have open free elections), we still have online abuse for voicing opinions that some people don't like (anything from pro/anti Trump to LGBT and bitcoin etc). Those are real consequences but rarely government inspired and honestly I suspect we need better support for police in prosecuting such things - I mean a death threat is a death threat.
In general my view seems to be we should have the same protections online as we do offline - and if those protections are "in theory only" that requires us to use our voting and other political power to chnage it - not to obfuscate IP addresses or so on.
The upside of tech is so great it is worth spending IRL to defend agains the downsides
I am of the generation and mindset that online abuse is not real. Straight up. Log out, turn off the screen and watch Netflix, take a walk and calm down, block the offending user. It's not real.
>I suspect we need better support for police in prosecuting such things
We do see that! But mostly people on Facebook. Here we have had judgements of people who posted threats on Facebook because it is tied to your real name.
And yes, abuse is part of the "fun". Under your system, my 10 years old Leauge and CoD chats would have me locked up.
>I mean a death threat is a death threat.
Is it? I would find it more concerning if someone on the street tells me he is going to kill me than a kid on xbox live.
NOW there is a difference in systematic stalking and harassment online if I would get bombarded with DMs and messages to kys. I don't know how to solve. But a one-off comment is NOT equivalent. Then it feels like I'm just old? At 31? Is it really so serious?
This is almost certainly going to be decided by the "reasonable person" test - and if you were on the jury it's going to have to be a higher bar than I, but I suspect there will be some offences we will both agree on.
My main point is not that we need to lock up everyone who makes a threat, but that we as a society will have to adjust our standards to the new normal.
Once upon a time every conversation was fleeting, every discussion in a pub or bar was ephemeral. Even Einstein and Dirac would walk home chatting without fear of being overhead. Then someone imagined it would be wonderful for the whole word to hear the erudite wisdom of those two geniuses of our age - and Facebook and Twitter and social media made it possible for every conversation in every bar to be captured and recorded and published - and we found out that Dirac and Einstein were just sledging each other and most other conversations globally were worse.
The new normal is that, like speeding, most evenings, conversations in most bars actually broke quite a lot of laws, from hate speech to sexual threats and basic politeness. And now the police can hear them as can everyone else - and discretion does not work on this scale - we either enforce the laws or change them.
That's a conversation for each judiciary- and likely to be either a balkanisation of the social media world, or a race to the top (we can all have twitter as long as we all behave to the standards of the highest / politest society. I am not sure where I stand on that.
Is it serious - hell yes. We are looking at a global technology with global benefits for all humankind - and if we want to communicate globally we need to agree what the standards for behaviour are on this virtual stage - from contract law to human rights and freedom of speech. We are inevitably going to build closer contacts - Brexit is a salutary lesson - and how we deal with freedom of speech online is just part of the jigsaw - but a telling part.
> I am of the generation and mindset that online abuse is not real. Straight up. Log out, turn off the screen and watch Netflix, take a walk and calm down, block the offending user. It's not real.
Until people can pierce the veil of your pseudonymity (which isn't all that hard depending on the platform and the person) and it isn't just online abuse and harassment anymore. "Tied to your real name" includes "tied to enough information about you that someone with plenty of free time can sift through various databases and piece it together" and most people have absolutely no idea how many such databases there are, and how much piecing someone can do.
I'll say something tangential: Even if we both agree that one-off assholes are largely inconsequential, and I think we do, such assholery has a broken window effect on a platform, where people see all the assholes running free and decide that it's either a place for them to be assholes or a place they should stay away from to avoid assholes.