Public shaming becomes a disturbing trend on the web

I’m sure everyone is aware of the very public fall from grace of Brian Williams, the news anchor on NBC. By now his story has followed an all too familiar pattern: a past transgression, a public apology, the hue and cry on the internet, the attempts to hold on, abandonment by colleagues, dismissal by an employer who finds further support untenable, ignominious disgrace. We’ve seen it all before.

The integrity of people in the public eye, and the trust they deserve, is something that could be debated, but that is not the subject of this post. I am more concerned with the way in which the collective voices of the web seem poised and ready to tear down anyone wounded by indiscretion or past mistake.

I recently read an article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine that told a story that is even more harrowing than Mr. Williams’. It’s the story of Justine Sacco, whose single offensive tweet – it was racial in nature, and an attempt to be funny about something that wasn’t funny – led to consequences that I believe are far out of proportion to the stupid mistake that began it all. I will not recap the story here – and I urge you strongly to read the Times article now and then come back here to continue – but it is one of many cases in recent years in which the collective internet hive mind (to use Jaron Lanier’s phrase) exhibits a ganging up, bullying behavior on a massive scale. It’s Lord of the Flies magnified worldwide.

The Times calls this pattern an ‘online shaming’ and most disturbing to me is the gleeful nature with which the crowd piles on and brings down an individual. In my opinion, anyone who delights in inflicting this kind of suffering, no matter how much of it may be warranted, is at best a bully and at worst a sadist. Justine deserved to be reprimanded for her insensitive tweet, but she did not deserve to have her life ruined. I do not exaggerate. The chain of events included public humiliation, abandonment by friends, a massive amount of venomous public criticism by thousands of people who didn’t know her, dismissal from her job, loss of her career, and numerous death threats. There is such a thing as the punishment fitting the crime, and the punishment that she (and many others in similar cases) experienced, is far beyond what was warranted by the cause. Who deserves death threats because of a tweet?

A few years back I wrote a piece about a controversy surrounding Cooks Source magazine, and the editor there who was so ignorant of copyright law that she thought all material on the internet was automatically in the public domain and free for the taking. Her error should have earned her reprimand, criticism and perhaps a civil penalty – but not the horrific response by self-appointed, mostly anonymous web vigilantes who hounded her, her publication and its advertisers, in a campaign to put Cooks Source out of business, which they did. The very obvious visceral pleasure the mob took in this bullying was disturbing and repulsive, as I wrote then, and again I am not exaggerating. Since that time, however, as the Times piece this week shows, this behavior has only become more common. Today, an insensitive post, tweet or email, done in a thoughtless moment – admit it, we all do this – can bring massive consequences, which the originator becomes unable to control or counteract. Lives and careers can be ruined by a careless thought; I think this is out of all proportion of what is right or fair.

If you think that the lesson of all these stories is to be careful what you say on line, I’d probably understand. But I’d also tell you you are completely wrong. The lesson is to guard against the digital lynch mob, and to resist the urge to join in when all around you are kicking someone who’s down. You weren’t a bully in school, were you? So why be one on line. We all like to be with the majority, but on the web the crowd isn’t always right, or nice, or respectable. Sometimes it’s repulsive.

Public shaming – think of putting transgressors in the stocks in the town square – is a punishment fit for a different century and we should not bring it into this one with web tools and online anonymity that make it even more vicious, damaging and long-lasting than it ever was then.

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If you haven't read the Times article about Justine Sacco, read it now.

Anonymous: online freedom fighters, or the gang that couldn’t hack straight?

The FBI and affiliated law enforcement agencies are now rolling up the Anonymous and LulzSec hacker networks. Over a dozen arrests have been made so far, and countless numbers of computers and peripherals have been seized. Prosecutions will undoubtedly follow.

It doesn’t look like the Feds had to break a sweat to get these guys. Many of the hackers had not done even a fair job of covering their tracks online and a few did not even seem to try (or know how). Some, astonishingly (or perhaps incredulously), claim they did not think what they were doing was criminal. The DDOS attack against PayPal last December, prompted by PayPal’s refusal to accept contributions for WikiLeaks, has emerged as the test case for the arrests. The Anonymous mob used a program with the typically juvenile name Low Orbit Ion Cannon to flood PayPal’s servers with packets.


You can take off the masks now, boys.


As many of these NOT-Anonymous perps now make their defenses, the choices range from (1) I was just fooling around, (2) what Low Orbit Ion Cannon, officer? (3) I didn’t know it was illegal and (4) what I did was a form of political protest that has an honored history, like the civil rights movement.

I’ll brush aside defenses like one and two. We should talk about three and four, the ignorance defense and the political protest defense.

Ignorance of the law is never acceptable in court, and whether it will hold up in the court of public opinion is, I think, very doubtful. The actions of Anonymous, in their on-line taunts and tweets, clearly had the edge of lawlessness to them. To claim the hacking skills they touted, yet to remain ignorant of the rules of the road of the web (not to mention the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986) is facetious at best and laughable at worst. I think we can dismiss this one.

The attacks against government and other establishment sites, most in support of a POV tied to causes like WikiLeaks and Immigration Law, clearly showed a political agenda that Anonymous placed front and center. Can their actions be justified by the claim that they were fighting for a cause? Hacktivism, or White Hat Hacking, does indeed have a history of its own and we would be wrong to dismiss this without a hearing.

However I think it’s very wrong to put malicious, online vandalism on a plane with a civil rights sit-in (a claim specifically made by Keith Downey, one of the men arrested). Two key distinctions have to be made: one, civil rights protestors did not act anonymously. They took a courageous stand in full view and in full risk of the consequences. And two, the civil rights activists were ready to accept arrest and punishment as part of the protest; they did not seek to escape or hide behind subterfuge. Rather, they exposed injustice by submitting to it. No one in the Anonymous gang can claim this kind of courage or self-sacrifice.

I think both of these distinctions refute the excuses made by white hat hackers over the years. I applaud those who have resisted injustice by following the examples of Gandhi and King, and I refuse to taint their legacy by equating them with internet vandals who hide their identities and seek to evade the consequences of their actions.

(Downey's comparison to the civil rights movement was reported in the NY Times.)

On the internet, no one knows you’re not a Gay Girl in Damascus

You may have heard about or read the very popular blog “Gay Girl in Damascus” which is hosted here on Blogger. Written by Amina, a Syrian-American gay woman now living in Damascus, the blog has for the last four months chronicled the life and thoughts of a woman facing the challenges of being gay in a Muslim world, and also being caught up in the Arab protest movement there. The blog has over 2000 followers, and NPR, the Guardian and other legit news sources have all covered her story. The Guardian’s coverage on May 6 began with the headline “A Gay Girl in Damascus becomes a heroine of the Syrian Revolt”. Recently her many readers were dismayed to learn (in a post by her cousin) that Amina had been arrested by the Syrian authorities, her whereabouts and safety unknown. The blogosphere lit up with concerned followers searching for news, and launching a “Free Amina” online protest movement.

But hold on. Last weekend an apology was posted on the blog that revealed that the blog was all an elaborate deception and that Amina was in fact the pseudonym of a man named Tom MacMaster. Decidedly not a gay girl in Damascus, MacMaster is a 40-year old male American grad student from Georgia. He’s straight, married and now resides in Scotland.

More than a few (me included) were immediately reminded of the classic New Yorker cartoon of a dog in front of a PC, saying “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

MacMaster may not have started out with the intention of creating so large and elaborate a hoax. He created his on-line identity, he says, as a way of being able to write anonymously about the Middle Eastern protest movement and Palestinian issues, which he says he cares deeply about. Part of his apologia this week (he’s now been interviewed multiple times) is that the character was fictional but the issues he wrote about were not.

I think his readers will have a lot to say about that. The shock and anger has been considerable, and MacMaster says he is surprised by some of the venom now coming his way. Apparently his online identity was more than just a political front too, since he also carried on electronic and Facebook relationships in the guise of Amina, including what seems to be a romantic relationship with a lesbian woman in Canada. Not surprisingly, she and others who ‘knew’ him online have not had much to say that was nice about MacMaster. Many are commenting on the destruction of trust and the betrayal of what they thought was real but now find to be fake.

I think fiction is one thing, as long as you know it’s fiction. When you don’t know, then it’s nothing but falsehood and deception. Creating an elaborate on-line identity – complete with phony photos said to have been taken recently in Syria, but now revealed to have been taken on a trip there years before – is quite another thing. I have written before in this blog about how anonymity is harming honest dialog online, and how the need for a verifiable identity standard has never been greater.

“Trust but verify,” Ronald Reagan said. It’s a lesson we seem doomed to learn over and over. And by the way, one of the online sources that was quickest to criticize MacMaster’s hoax was the web site Lez Get Real, blasting him for making a mockery of lesbian politics. On Monday, the editor of the site, the deaf lesbian woman named Paula Brooks, was revealed to be a man named Bill Graber, a straight guy living in Ohio. No, I am not making this up!

(The Gay Girl blog is here, complete with the older posts and this week’s apology from MacMaster. The hoax was reported in the Washington Post, the New York Times and many other sources.)

RIP: Anonymous Trash Talk

Recent articles in the press (for example the NY Times and CNN) have pointed to a trend in big news media web sites pulling the plug on anonymous postings. They point to on-line comments that devolve into flame wars, bigoted rants and generally trashy behavior, toward the (named) writer of the article and towards other posters. The current wisdom is that the veil of anonymity encourages the worst on-line behavior. Forcing posters to register, and therefore identify themselves (at least to the site administrators), will douse the flames.

First let me say that I couldn’t agree more with this reasoning and I applaud and support this trend.

What’s at stake here are two public goods that both have merit: first, the encouragement of free speech without the fear of recrimination (the right to be anonymous). Second, the encouragement of free speech without the fear of intimidation (the right to engage in civil discourse and not be shouted down by a tirade of profanity and hate-speech). I believe that the latter must be protected, even at the expense of the former.

I recently read the book You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier. I recommend this book very highly, by the way. He makes an overwhelming case against anonymous web-speech, citing the almost inevitable descent into trash talk and worse. I agree with Lanier that this is nothing short of cyber-bullying (at best) and, on some occasions, criminal verbal assault. Suicides have resulted by those subjected to web mob behavior, as well as many traumas and psychological damage as a result of attacks from the hive mind.

I’m not overstating the issue here. Flaming on news sites and cyber-bullying on social networks has a true chilling effect, making the civil among us think twice before posting, thus leaving the field to the flamers. I know that more than once I myself have bailed out of a discussion thread as soon as things started to turn ugly, as they almost always do.

I think methods to link real identities to their posts, like that being instituted at the Huffington Post, will crowd out the trolls and cyber bullies, and make everyone accountable for their words. The freedom of speech of the vast majority depends on enforcing the rule of civility on everyone.