Wednesday Serious Thread: Anonymity and the Internet

Perhaps, if you prefer a soapbox platform. I'll stick to email and phone calls.

 

Consider this forum: people would share less if there wasn't the veil of anonymity, but how badly would we miss the part that wouldn't be shared? Would the board be a more enjoyable experience if we had less intimate sharing, but what was shared was more credible? Opinions will certainly differ.

I feel that, on balance, there is a net loss in being able to communicate opinions anonymously. My own preference would be to remove all anonymity in social media. People could continue to share whatever they wanted, as much as they wanted, but would be regulated by having to stand behind it.

 

Substitute "farts and sex life" for "poop" and that's me.

 

Is there something wrong with me that I never feel "offended?"

I love trolls, I think they are mostly hilarious. I love transgressive humor. I love dead baby jokes. I don't think that makes me a sociopath because I can mentally distinguish actual dead babies (tragic) from conceptual dead babies (comic). But apparently not everyone can do that. And because of this, the rest of us have to moderate our behavior.

I also love trolls because they keep the Internet honest. You want all this freedom, you want to operate outside what you consider oppressive laws, rules, and social convention, fine: you get trolls. It's easy to keep trolls out of your online community, you just need to become a fascist. But so many people want to have their cake and eat it too.

Some people will make impassioned pleas for civility..that for the good of the community or whatever trolls ought to curtail their activities. Fuck these people.

This poor slob loses his job and gets doxed for posting some shit on the Internet that was already posted on the Internet. As far as we can tell, he never knew, met, or interacted with any of his "victims" directly.

What also emerges for me is that there's no clear pattern in his 'targets' (I.e., the subreddits he ran) other than that various groups might find them offensive. If he were running all communities of vampire necrophiliacs you could read something into the guy's personality from that. But this set of stuff? Seems he got off on trolling for its own sake, which is a very small transgression indeed.

 

Victim blaming!!!

 

Wait, so now civility is a bad thing?

Fuck you, sir.

I'm not suggesting that it should be illegal to say basically whatever you want on the internet. I'm not even suggesting that a private community that extols free speech should have to censor the most noxious elements. But for you to shit on people you are simply asking nicely that some dude not be a lecherous pervert that exploits pictures of their dead children for internet points?

That's fucking absurd.

Characterizing VA as a "poor slob who committed a small transgression" is revisionist history. I'm sorry, if your primary hobby is so odious that your name merely getting out is enough for you to get fired, you're almost certainly an asshole of the highest order. He wasn't fearlessly muckraking the sausage factories. He was helping people jerk off to secret pictures of 12 year olds. If you think that's a relatively minor transgression when it comes to the internet, I'd hate to see your web felony list.

Can I take a stab?

Relatively privileged straight white male with Libertarian leanings whose never experienced much personal tragedy?

 

I think civility is great. If I really hated civility, I'd be, I dunno, ballsack.

You're absolutely right, I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that the way I did.

Asking nicely should be perfectly allowed. I don't think it'll do much good, but you can do it. I am not sure if anybody asked violentacrez to stop (though I can't imagine nobody did). But if they did, the answer was clearly "no" and so an impasse was reached quickly. And so, the question is, now what?

The thing I take issue with is people who demand a system (the Internet, society) with tremendous freedoms, but want people to voluntarily avoid taking maximum advantage of those freedoms. In any complex system, you're going to have exceptional elements who operate at the margins, and it's probably a good thing that they operate at the margins and don't dominate the system.

But to set the margins and then ask people to voluntarily stay away from them, so you can avoid the negative consequences of the margins you set? Futile at best, hypocritical at worst. I'm OK with honest authoritarians. Authoritarians in libertarian, progressivist clothing, though...ugh.

In this vein, I have an issue with people that say "well, I don't want what he did to be illegal, but I am OK with the fact that he had his identity revealed/lost his job/had his life ruined." Would these people be OK if the police had released his information, or if a judge had told his boss to fire him? "I'm for freedom and I'm anti-authoritarian...but yay for mob rule!" Ugh.

Apparently nobody at his work noticed he was an asshole of the highest order until his hobby was outed. Did his job performance suddenly turn to shit when he got outed? Or was the mob justice PR disaster his employer would have suffered if they kept him employed the real incentive?

Compartmentalization is an amazing thing. Was it a good idea to impeach Bill Clinton for philandering? Would it have been a good thing if they had succeeded? Was it fair to try? He, too, had a noxious hobby that caused direct harm to people around him.

What he was doing (the actus reus) was not something that made society better.

My comment, however, was about his mens rea. He facilitated so many different kinds of offensiveness - most people are focusing on this one because it is the most shocking and the most "offensive" to the most people. He reportedly ran or facilitated other subreddits including 'Hitler', 'Jewmerica', and 'Misogyny,' none of which I've ever visited. Which is more likely:

1. He is the walking definition of evil and hatred. He hates, and seeks to harm, children, women, Jews, African Americans, and more.
2. He really loves fucking with people and those are easy and obvious targets to accomplish that aim.

What's even more interesting is that it seems that this behavior was confined to the Internet. Nobody has reported that he runs around the real world trying to make people feel bad. Should our response be different if he's #1 than #2? In some sense, he's like the Joker, but confined to the Internet - a man that just wants to watch the (virtual) world burn. What should we do about a person like that?

That's a very interesting question. What should be a Web felony? How much should we, as a society, allow someone to type things at a keyboard that hurt the feelings of people he has never met before we say "enough" and throw that person in jail or curtail their freedom?

Sure. I was just born that way; I couldn't help it.

Had those for a short while, but quickly abandoned them as it was clear that they sounded great, but were fundamentally incompatible with how humans work and behave. I don't know what my leanings are now. Registered Republican, voting Democrat lately, authoritarian impulses dampened by uncertainty that the cure would be worse than the disease. Is "Realpolitik" a position? That's probably where I'm at now, especially with my growing awareness of my actual political and social power in a world of 7 billion people.

I dunno, how much personal tragedy would I have needed to experience before my opinion becomes valid? Compared to the average citizen of the world, no tragedy at all. Compared to the average American, it's hard for me to say.

One thing that I am constantly fighting is my brain's inclination toward a just-world hypothesis. I am acutely aware of how my own decisions and actions affect future outcomes for me (both positively and negatively), and how much "personal tragedy" I have avoided (or avoided compounding, or avoided inflicting) simply though what I consider to be good decision-making. Plus, I see lots of people around me making different kinds of decisions and ending up with (what I see as) predictably tragic outcomes. I know, intellectually, that a lot of people will end up with a lot of tragedy even if they make great decisions all the time. I also know, intellectually, that a lot of people make bad decisions precisely because of their circumstances, in a vicious cycle. Hell, I don't even really believe in free will, which is a real mindfuck. But it's hard to know these things emotionally when your own experience is so different.

 

It's hard for me to feel bad for a guy that went around being a shitheel on the internet and then had real world consequences in the real world. I think a lot of people are stuck on the thinking that your online persona and your real life persona are two different things. With the relative ease it takes to identify someone, it seems to me that acting like a human being instead of a sociopath, online or otherwise, seems to be the way to go. I imagine that in a hundred years, there won't be any separation between someone's screenname and real name.

I think this place is insular enough where I don't care if someone here were to find out who I am. Jesus, I even put my dating profile up here for you hyenas to laugh at. With my other screenname, Googling it would bring up my Facebook, Twitter, and that old profile, so I clearly don't give a shit. Then again, I'm not shitposting on reddit with it either.

 

I'm offended constantly, but I just let it slide as often as I can, because only people after attention make a fuss about how offended they are. Being offended is no great deal, and I'll put myself in the camp that doesn't believe anyone has the right not to be offended.

Many of these sub-reddits crossed lines a great deal of people have, beyond merely being offensive. Sure, you can say there was nothing illegal to his facilitation of hosting the images, but he was a key element (why else would he be awarded for his contribution?), and the images in question were sexually objectified photographs of children. And whatever the circumstances the photos were taken, however he and others found them, their usage in the subreddit would most certainly be non-consensual. And can you seriously tell me that the overwhelming purpose of hosting a thread like that was not for sexual gratification, really just to upset the sensitive constitutions of John and Jane Q Public? Obviously it would attract complaints, which would be hilarious, but I don't think that would have required the thousands of uploads.
Non-consensual sexually objectified photographs of children: I think that bears repeating. When you choose to be a part of the process of disseminating these photographs, I think you are being a part of something more sinister than telling a dead-baby joke. Speaking of which:

You say you can tell the difference between the always-a-laugh concept of dead babies, and the reality of dead babies, which is tragic; Did you notice the 'Dead Jailbait' thread? Real images of dead children? I'll grant you that in this instant, it was for the dark humour, but surely you can see how the anger it would have inspired wasn't just because some people can't take anything stronger than lolcats?

Now, is it fair that he lost his job because he was outed? I don't care. People have lost their jobs for less on the internet.

My own stance is still unaltered. I don't get trolling as something that has any higher purpose than annoyance. It's not that I never laughed at shock humour, but I tire of it quickly. Indeed, humour is based around the unexpected. If a joke is clever enough, but un-PC, I'm not worried, but if the whole crux of a joke is that it's offensive, the humour just gets repetive and the levity is drained.
I laughed the first time I heard the "What's the difference between a pizza and a Jew?" joke, but this wasn't because I bear some latent strain of anti-semitism, rather it was despite that. And it didn't also mean I was suddenly in the market for Jew jokes. Hence, I don't think of "Jewmercia," "Hitler" and the like subreddits as being offensive so much as stupid. Being free to say something tasteless, and yes, offensive, is perfectly fine in my book. Living in that zone constantly strikes me as less about being the first line of defending free speech, and just a sad, merit-less existence that attracts no sympathy, even if it is just an escape from a life devoid of meaning and your fat, diabeetus-ridden also-ran wife.
If some ballsack-alike coyly looks about the room to check for black people, then tells me a joke where the punchline is based around the use of the word "nigger," I'm probably not going to find it funny.

Well, we can all be glad for that.

 

Anonymity has positives and negatives, but fuck if it can't really bring out the shitty side of some people. About a year back a memorial page on Facebook for a friend of mine who passed away got trolled and filled with vitriol by someone (or several people, not entirely certain) using fake profiles. Myself along with quite a few other people were enraged and I should say rightfully so and the family of the deceased was devastated that someone would say the things that were posted. That shit just isn't right, and while know that while some people might find that kind of thing funny, I don't.

I'll admit even recently I've see shit on the internet and have been slight irked about it and in the past have even gone so far as to respond in some manner, but as time has gone on that urge to respond has gone away. I wouldn't say I'm desensitized to everything or above feeling offended by something I see on the internet, but I realize it's just not worth being angry or offended over and definitely not worth responding to.

The internet isn't a place to be if your feelings get easily hurt, but I think it's important to realize that the internet isn't strictly separate from real life and events that occur on the net can and do have very real consequences outside of the internet. Trolling is generally harmless and can be funny and I'm of the opinion if you don't like something don't look at it, but fucking with people's lives through the internet is wrong even if it's brought about because of their own poor decisions like Amanda Todd.

 

Tor is best used by those who have an interest in anonymity. In the English-speaking world, where political thought or deviant* sexuality between two consenting adults is legal, there would logically be more use of the seedy stuff, as we're mostly a permissive society. In other countries, Tor can be a lifesaver.

IIRC, the Violentacrez bit included blackmail (which was complied with), then a public unmasking, yes? Ah, the highest standards of journalism. Sounds like a creepy human being, but I can't say I'm a fan of the media side of this either.

 

Am I the only one who thought of this when they heard "Violent Acres"?
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.violentacres.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.violentacres.com/</a>

Basically this. Anonymity on the Internet is vital. You want filtered "safe" speech, there's this little thing called The Rest of the World.



If you want to hold people accountable in your little corner of the Web, you have the tools to do that. But there absolutely should be a space, within the bounds of the law, for people to say what they want without their identity attached.

edit: this is a better video I think