Something that makes me sad these days is that I’ve lost…well, to be trite, I’ve lost some of my faith in humanity. I used to feel a certainty that people mostly act kindly and decently, at least one-on-one, and that people are, by and large, vaguely “good.” It’s the internet that that has perpetuated this crisis of faith in me, and I don’t like it.
For one thing, submitting to a view of humanity in which people are routinely hostile and aggressive seems to demean those things I value in my own life. It’s as if the internal voices that tell me that my own thoughts are insincere and worthless have expanded to form a world-view, and I don’t like giving those voices any more power than they already have.
Moreover, it’s simply hard to believe it’s true. In my everyday life, people are rarely overtly unkind, and I have frequently had experiences wherein a stranger has gone out of his or her way to help or compliment me.
Of course, that’s not universally true – I’ve been shouted at and harassed on the street; I’ve been the victim of rude driving; people I actually knew have been unkind, bullying, or rude to me and to those around me. But those experiences are, in the totality of my experience, rare. Most interactions I have with other human beings range from neutral to pleasant. (I have no doubt, by the way, that I would experience more unpleasant interactions were I not a middle-class white woman, but I still think that overall the number of people who interacted with me in a neutral or pleasant way would overwhelm the number of those who were hostile.)
Except on the internet. The frequency, the range, and the depth of the vitriol a heavy internet user encounters is, as a number of people have noted, extremely dispiriting.
This article by Christine Jackman contains many good examples of the kind of thing that regularly drives me to despair. It’s a good compendium of the kind of vicious, violent, personal, and gendered attacks that even the least “controversial” women on the internet regularly suffer, including some really harrowing comments directed at the survivor of a violent rape. The article’s takeaway is that internet harassment is a real problem and that people who shrug it off are denying its disturbing depths. In terms of solutions, the writer offers increased comment moderation, which is certainly part of the answer. I also like suggestions I’ve seen for requiring people to comment under Facebook accounts. Although I rarely comment on things I read and would do so even more rarely if those comments were attached to my real name, I’m confident that I’d be a happier – and better informed – internet user without the kind of anonymity that allows internet harassment to flourish.
But while reducing anonymity is certainly part of the solution to internet hostility, it doesn’t get at the problem that disturbs me the most – why? Why on earth would so many people be motivated to be so ugly by the internet? This post by Marc Abrahams about a linguistic study on trolling takes a fairly calm view of trolls – the researcher, Claire Hardaker, concludes that they engage provocatively, albeit superficially, with the subject at hand in order to “cause disruption and/or to trigger or exacerbate conflict for the purposes of their own amusement.” The study, Abrahams tells us, goes on to suggest that the most effective way to eliminate troll behaviour is to refuse to engage with it on its own terms. The “amusement” the troll thought he would provoke by hostile comments has failed to materialize, and he goes elsewhere.
But what about when provoking comments shade into outright harassment and abuse? The Australian article cites an academic at Queensland University, Dr Stephen Harrington, who suggests that
A few months ago, when there was a rash of stories about toddlers being served alcohol in restaurants by mistake, I found myself reading the comments on this article on CNN regarding one of those cases. I was absolutely staggered by the number of completely transparent racist comments the article had attracted within hours of its posting.
The comment section seems to be a little cleaner now (I hope that other readers did what I did and clicked the “report” button on them), but when I first looked at the article, at least two out of every five comments were outright racist. There were comments using exaggerated minstrel-show type dialect; comments alleging in the most hateful terms that the parents of the toddler (who are identified in the article as unmarried) were “welfare frauds”; comments using racist language to criticize the parents for their ages, their assumed unmarried status (though whether they are married is not mentioned) and their taste in restaurants; and comment after comment like this one from someone identifying himself as St3jr: “Black (michigan) family + opportunity to sue = $$$$$ I lived in Michigan for 2 years between Saginaw and Flint. I've seen it happen sooo many times.”
That one is quite mild compared to the comments I first saw on the article. I have no doubt that many of these commenters were attracted by the fact that the child pictured in the article has dark skin – that fact, for them, justified turning this story from one about a dangerous mistake that could have seriously harmed or killed a baby into a jumping-off point for racist rhetoric.
Just for comparison, I took a look at the comments on one of the front page CNN articles for today – titled “Report: Newark airport screeners targeted Mexicans and Dominicans” and sure enough over half of the first eight comments are what I would classify as racist. A sampling: from chinaguy
skytag’s comment is borderline – perhaps more intolerant than racist – “I'd be okay with profiling if it made sense, like extra scrutiny for Arabs, but Mexicans?” but Shawnj44’s reply definitely takes it over the edge: “Drug mules.” (The next comment praises Shawnj.)
And then there’s IslamSucks69, who has a swastika in his logo, and who says “Yeah, so what? Many of these same people smuggle in contraband. Great job to the screeners at Newark--keep it up!” I would say it’s the rare comment that manages to be racist and intolerant towards Hispanics, Muslims, and Jews, but unfortunately it isn’t that rare.
Yes, many of these people are “obvious trolls” – they want to provoke a response – but that neither explains nor excuses the blatant racism of their comments. What makes someone want to viciously berate a rape victim or hurl racial abuse at the parents of a sick toddler? “They’re anonymous” or “They’re fourteen-year-old boys” doesn’t cut it as an explanation. I don’t expect most of the strangers I pass on the street to give me a gratuitous shove; nor is it normal for a fourteen-year-old to be vicious, abusive, and cruel – most of them, in my experience, are perfectly normal, if perhaps slightly sullen, people.
I find it horrifically disturbing that so many people approach what they see on the internet with rage and hate. In my less depressed moments I hope that they only experience these feelings in relation to the things they read, detached, on the web, but I know that’s unlikely to be true. Someone who is violent and hateful in internet comments contains, somewhere in his person, that violence and hatred towards those he meets in real life. Seeing the terrible vitriol with which fat women are treated on the internet – far beyond even the worst harassment I have experienced in real life – makes me realize that there are thousands of people out there who feel that dreadful hatred towards me, a stranger, simply because of my size, even if they don’t say it to my face. The internet has taught me that there are people – many people – who honestly hate me, even though – because – they don’t know me at all.
It really bothers me to know that – to know that all these people have within them the capacity for this generalized, abject hatred, and that given some very simple conditions they will express it. It makes me feel as if we are walking through a sea of hatred all the time, as if there are waves of hatred floating, unseen, through the ether. And I know – I know! – that there are people who experience this much, much worse than I do.
It’s very troubling. I managed to get through most of my life believing that there are relatively few actually cruel and hateful people out there. Sure, I’d met some of them, but the mercy seemed to be that they were a distinct minority. Most people, even if they disagreed, even if they seemed to be very different, would behave with either decency or indifference towards each other. But the internet has made me reconsider that belief. Is it possible that, instead, many more people are driven by a desire to hate and to abuse than I would have thought? Is it possible that, given the slightest chance, many, many people feel savage joy and excitement from abusing others?
Or has the internet made us more hateful? Does its depersonalization – the way you can know a person without ever seeing her face-to-face – trigger some elemental fear that manifests as hatred? That’s not impossible. I found Tom Vanderbilt’s discussion in Traffic of the way drivers lose the sense of fellow drivers as humans fascinating. The act of driving, itself, identifies you with a self-contained car and takes away the humanity of other people in their own cars. The same thing may be happening with the internet.
But it still disturbs me. I don’t want to think that a huge number of people I pass on a daily basis are capable of such a switch. It makes me sad. And once that particular genie has left its bottle, I don’t really think I can put it back in. For all the wonderful things about the internet, I hate that it has done that to me.
For one thing, submitting to a view of humanity in which people are routinely hostile and aggressive seems to demean those things I value in my own life. It’s as if the internal voices that tell me that my own thoughts are insincere and worthless have expanded to form a world-view, and I don’t like giving those voices any more power than they already have.
Moreover, it’s simply hard to believe it’s true. In my everyday life, people are rarely overtly unkind, and I have frequently had experiences wherein a stranger has gone out of his or her way to help or compliment me.
Of course, that’s not universally true – I’ve been shouted at and harassed on the street; I’ve been the victim of rude driving; people I actually knew have been unkind, bullying, or rude to me and to those around me. But those experiences are, in the totality of my experience, rare. Most interactions I have with other human beings range from neutral to pleasant. (I have no doubt, by the way, that I would experience more unpleasant interactions were I not a middle-class white woman, but I still think that overall the number of people who interacted with me in a neutral or pleasant way would overwhelm the number of those who were hostile.)
Except on the internet. The frequency, the range, and the depth of the vitriol a heavy internet user encounters is, as a number of people have noted, extremely dispiriting.
This article by Christine Jackman contains many good examples of the kind of thing that regularly drives me to despair. It’s a good compendium of the kind of vicious, violent, personal, and gendered attacks that even the least “controversial” women on the internet regularly suffer, including some really harrowing comments directed at the survivor of a violent rape. The article’s takeaway is that internet harassment is a real problem and that people who shrug it off are denying its disturbing depths. In terms of solutions, the writer offers increased comment moderation, which is certainly part of the answer. I also like suggestions I’ve seen for requiring people to comment under Facebook accounts. Although I rarely comment on things I read and would do so even more rarely if those comments were attached to my real name, I’m confident that I’d be a happier – and better informed – internet user without the kind of anonymity that allows internet harassment to flourish.
But while reducing anonymity is certainly part of the solution to internet hostility, it doesn’t get at the problem that disturbs me the most – why? Why on earth would so many people be motivated to be so ugly by the internet? This post by Marc Abrahams about a linguistic study on trolling takes a fairly calm view of trolls – the researcher, Claire Hardaker, concludes that they engage provocatively, albeit superficially, with the subject at hand in order to “cause disruption and/or to trigger or exacerbate conflict for the purposes of their own amusement.” The study, Abrahams tells us, goes on to suggest that the most effective way to eliminate troll behaviour is to refuse to engage with it on its own terms. The “amusement” the troll thought he would provoke by hostile comments has failed to materialize, and he goes elsewhere.
But what about when provoking comments shade into outright harassment and abuse? The Australian article cites an academic at Queensland University, Dr Stephen Harrington, who suggests that
“much of the aggression comes from people’s disappointment that the online world still appears to favour professionals and experts, rather than levelling the playing field of public opinion as anticipated . . . . [T]hey have been told that their opinion is equally valid to everyone else’s, and they feel they have the right to say whatever they want to, no matter how tangential it is to the actual item under discussion.”That’s an interesting point, and one I hadn’t seen made before, but it leaves troubling questions unresolved. Okay, grant that some of this hostility may stem from a feeling that the wrong people are speaking (and in the case of the gendered vitriol directed at women writers, I think there can be little doubt that many of these people believe that the subjects of their wrath should have no voice in a public forum), how and why does it explode in the way it does on a daily basis on the internet? I’m also not sure I buy that online harassers are thinking back to a vision of a utopian internet, wherein everyone listens when you have the speaking stone. The incoherent violence and rage of their language seems to point to something deeper and less civilized than that.
A few months ago, when there was a rash of stories about toddlers being served alcohol in restaurants by mistake, I found myself reading the comments on this article on CNN regarding one of those cases. I was absolutely staggered by the number of completely transparent racist comments the article had attracted within hours of its posting.
The comment section seems to be a little cleaner now (I hope that other readers did what I did and clicked the “report” button on them), but when I first looked at the article, at least two out of every five comments were outright racist. There were comments using exaggerated minstrel-show type dialect; comments alleging in the most hateful terms that the parents of the toddler (who are identified in the article as unmarried) were “welfare frauds”; comments using racist language to criticize the parents for their ages, their assumed unmarried status (though whether they are married is not mentioned) and their taste in restaurants; and comment after comment like this one from someone identifying himself as St3jr: “Black (michigan) family + opportunity to sue = $$$$$ I lived in Michigan for 2 years between Saginaw and Flint. I've seen it happen sooo many times.”
That one is quite mild compared to the comments I first saw on the article. I have no doubt that many of these commenters were attracted by the fact that the child pictured in the article has dark skin – that fact, for them, justified turning this story from one about a dangerous mistake that could have seriously harmed or killed a baby into a jumping-off point for racist rhetoric.
Just for comparison, I took a look at the comments on one of the front page CNN articles for today – titled “Report: Newark airport screeners targeted Mexicans and Dominicans” and sure enough over half of the first eight comments are what I would classify as racist. A sampling: from chinaguy
Ummm, I'm pretty sure TSA and ICE (USBP) are part of the same Department - seems they should compliment one another. Isn't that what we complain about so much - bloated government where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Moreover, if the majority of illegals and terrorists are ducks and dogs it seems prudent to be a bit more cautious when a "guest" is quacking or barking. Anything else is just PC bull%$#*.Loaded comparisons to animals aside, the assumption that Hispanic people are automatically subject to inspection – and that “illegal” immigrants are as bad as terrorists – is extremely troubling.
skytag’s comment is borderline – perhaps more intolerant than racist – “I'd be okay with profiling if it made sense, like extra scrutiny for Arabs, but Mexicans?” but Shawnj44’s reply definitely takes it over the edge: “Drug mules.” (The next comment praises Shawnj.)
And then there’s IslamSucks69, who has a swastika in his logo, and who says “Yeah, so what? Many of these same people smuggle in contraband. Great job to the screeners at Newark--keep it up!” I would say it’s the rare comment that manages to be racist and intolerant towards Hispanics, Muslims, and Jews, but unfortunately it isn’t that rare.
Yes, many of these people are “obvious trolls” – they want to provoke a response – but that neither explains nor excuses the blatant racism of their comments. What makes someone want to viciously berate a rape victim or hurl racial abuse at the parents of a sick toddler? “They’re anonymous” or “They’re fourteen-year-old boys” doesn’t cut it as an explanation. I don’t expect most of the strangers I pass on the street to give me a gratuitous shove; nor is it normal for a fourteen-year-old to be vicious, abusive, and cruel – most of them, in my experience, are perfectly normal, if perhaps slightly sullen, people.
I find it horrifically disturbing that so many people approach what they see on the internet with rage and hate. In my less depressed moments I hope that they only experience these feelings in relation to the things they read, detached, on the web, but I know that’s unlikely to be true. Someone who is violent and hateful in internet comments contains, somewhere in his person, that violence and hatred towards those he meets in real life. Seeing the terrible vitriol with which fat women are treated on the internet – far beyond even the worst harassment I have experienced in real life – makes me realize that there are thousands of people out there who feel that dreadful hatred towards me, a stranger, simply because of my size, even if they don’t say it to my face. The internet has taught me that there are people – many people – who honestly hate me, even though – because – they don’t know me at all.
It really bothers me to know that – to know that all these people have within them the capacity for this generalized, abject hatred, and that given some very simple conditions they will express it. It makes me feel as if we are walking through a sea of hatred all the time, as if there are waves of hatred floating, unseen, through the ether. And I know – I know! – that there are people who experience this much, much worse than I do.
It’s very troubling. I managed to get through most of my life believing that there are relatively few actually cruel and hateful people out there. Sure, I’d met some of them, but the mercy seemed to be that they were a distinct minority. Most people, even if they disagreed, even if they seemed to be very different, would behave with either decency or indifference towards each other. But the internet has made me reconsider that belief. Is it possible that, instead, many more people are driven by a desire to hate and to abuse than I would have thought? Is it possible that, given the slightest chance, many, many people feel savage joy and excitement from abusing others?
Or has the internet made us more hateful? Does its depersonalization – the way you can know a person without ever seeing her face-to-face – trigger some elemental fear that manifests as hatred? That’s not impossible. I found Tom Vanderbilt’s discussion in Traffic of the way drivers lose the sense of fellow drivers as humans fascinating. The act of driving, itself, identifies you with a self-contained car and takes away the humanity of other people in their own cars. The same thing may be happening with the internet.
But it still disturbs me. I don’t want to think that a huge number of people I pass on a daily basis are capable of such a switch. It makes me sad. And once that particular genie has left its bottle, I don’t really think I can put it back in. For all the wonderful things about the internet, I hate that it has done that to me.
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