Trolls, griefers, harassment and hate crime

A post inspired by personal experience, written in response to Naomi Dunford.

My name is Chelsea, and like most people I know, I use the Internet. As an Internet-person, I am more than familiar with the fact that while most people are various shades of decent, there exists a very vocal minority of people who exist as proof of Penny Arcade’s “Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory”, which states that the combination of anonymity and an audience will transform an otherwise normal person into a complete jerk.

In psychological terms, this is called deindividuation – and it is a phenomenon by no means exclusive to online environments. When your identity is concealed and you may act with relative impunity, adherence to social norms deteriorates.

I am of the opinion that anonymity is not the problem any more than the Internet itself is. While I blog and tweet under my own name here, I also believe that there are circumstances under which anonymity or pseudonymity are socially productive things, as they allow things to be said – things that should and need to be said – without fear of reprisal. Although they also permit the saying of some pretty nasty things, the root of the problem is, in my opinion, people.

We know them. We’ve crossed paths with them. Maybe we’ve even been them ourselves at some point along the line. Most often, they are garden-variety trolls and griefers. Sometimes they believe what they are saying, but it’s difficult to tell. What is easy to tell, however, is that they are not being nice.

Trolling can vary in tone from vicious to rather jocular, and at the end of the day it is all about getting a reaction out of the target. Take, for example, the recent case of Alyssa Bereznak, who engaged in a rather explosive bit of geek-baiting by writing mean things about a well-known gamer and expressing disdain for anyone who plays Magic: The Gathering. Trolls crave attention; thus the old Internet adage: don’t feed the trolls. If you ignore them, trolls will eventually give up and go away, like how our parents told us to deal with schoolyard bullies.

The problem with this advice is that both on the playground and online, not all bullies are simply trolling.

Though common discourse tends to conflate the two terms, griefers and trolls are different – mostly in their motives. In online games such as World of Warcraft, griefers are predatory players who will repeatedly harass weaker players for no apparent reason. More broadly, a griefer is someone who will try to upset you regardless of whether you show it or not. Your parents’ advice doesn’t work very well against a bully who insists on punching you in the face, because no matter how unfazed you try to appear, the bully still knows that being punched in the face hurts and will continue to do it, or maybe they will just punch you once and walk away, purely for giggles. (The online equivalent is someone who drops in, posts a hateful comment, and subsequently posts nary a peep.) Not caring about your response means that griefers have little motive to continue harassment beyond their own pleasure in the activity. Griefers are basically Internet sadists – and not the fun kind of sadist that cares about your feelings and enthusiastic consent and wants you to have a good time.

Generally speaking, if a troll or griefer is targeting you personally, they will focus on whatever is ostensibly different about you. Take, for example, persons of colour being told to “go back where they came from” or some such racist vitriol. In the absence of any identifying characteristics, if you are presumed male you will often be targeted on the basis of your sexual orientation, masculinity or sexual capacity, whereas if you are presumed female you will often be subjected to allegations of ugliness or promiscuity.

Everyone has different boundaries. Everyone has different ideas of what is and is not appropriate. And we all say nasty things on occasion; especially if we think someone is insulting something that means a lot to us, whether it is a video game or Jesus Christ or Justin Bieber or whatever.

But there is a line. There is a line beyond which we pass out of the realm of trolling and griefing and into the sordid territory of harassment and violence.

I don’t know what it is that makes people cross that into that dark arena of explicitly wishing, advocating, or threatening violence against a relative stranger, but I do believe that most people do not mean what they say, even if they think they do. Some people hold opinions or behave in ways contrary to the accepted norm because it makes them feel enlightened, persecuted, or courageous. Some people find it easier to blame others for their problems. Some people like the feeling of being part of an in-group and thus must hate members of the out-group.

We all know not to feed the trolls, but what happens if someone online threatens you with violence? (Trigger warning on that link, by the way. Things start getting disturbing around the 2:50 mark.)

Anyone who spends enough time reading will eventually run across online harassment, either personally or through a popular blogger or public figure. Death threats online are, sadly, not uncommon. In fact, the only time I have ever moderated comments on this blog was when a certain individual saw The Snarky Optimist as a suitable venue in which to issue violent threats towards me. As a reader of several feminist, masculist, and gender egalitarian blogs, I am more than familiar with the fact that ladypersons and gay men online don’t just deal with threats against their lives and their families – they also often endure threats of sexual violence.

So when I read this post on IttyBiz (via the Geek Feminism blog) in which Naomi Dunford discusses the recent spate of serious death threats she has received – for no discernible reason apart from being a successful female blogger and businessperson, although allegations of sexual indiscretion and tax evasion have been made – I am sad to say that my initial reaction was damn, not again. It happens all the time. Game developer Kathy Sierra’s well-known situation was not a unique case, nor was it the worst.

Rather than simply accept this as a sad fact of Internet life, I decided to heed Naomi’s call to talk about it. What people who harass others online want is for these individuals to shut up and go away – they want to feel that they have won. But I’m not writing this as an attempt to give the middle finger to potential harassers, a blog-delivered rah-rah for empowerment. What I want to do is to reaffirm that this kind of behaviour is not okay, it is not a joke, and most importantly it is not a private matter you need to deal with alone.

I believe that many people who issue threats have no intention of ever carrying them out. I think of some people who issue threats as the online version of Scarlet Kingsnakes. The Scarlet Kingsnake is a nonvenomous snake that bears a tri-colour pattern believed to mimic the highly venomous Coral Snake as a defense mechanism. Like some people online, these snakes have essentially evolved to protect themselves from aggression by appearing to be more dangerous than they are.

But you know what? Even if you don’t intend to carry out a threat, it’s still illegal. It’s still harassment, regardless of whether you’re just doing it because you enjoy the feeling of power or if you have a self-esteem problem or if people have been really cruel to you.

When you are on the receiving end of a death threat, there is little way to tell if the people involved are serious or not, which means you must take them seriously.

Even though most of these hate-spewing individuals do not themselves pose a danger to anything beyond your emotional and financial health, the fact remains that people who are more dangerous are listening to what they have to say, and interpreting their hate speech as sanction for violence.

“These people are escalating, and they’re looking for a success,” Naomi writes. “Hate bloggers claim innocence because they are acting within their First Amendment rights. But their mobs look up to them, and the mob mentality that they are stoking is escalating.”

This is why you shouldn’t make jokes about – for example – sexual violence: not only because it’s highly probable that someone who is listening may have survived a similar incident (and seriously, is a joke really worth reminding someone of one of the worst days of their life?), but also because it’s possible that someone who is listening has perpetrated or would consider perpetrating a similar incident (and you are unintentionally sending them the message that it’s okay). This is not blaming assaults on insensitive jokes about assaults, but it is saying that we can and should try to send clear messages to those around us that assaults will not be dismissed or ignored or taken lightly.

Because among the scores of people who will say that women should not hold positions of power, some of them happen to be like Jared Lee Loughner, who will decide to take action in support of their beliefs. He shot Congresswoman Giffords in the head and killed six people, including a nine-year-old-girl. Because among the scores of people who will advocate for the eradication of the Islamic faith, some of them happen to be like Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 85 young people in Norway and believed his actions were necessary.

Fred Clark has written about this issue in the context of the political rhetoric surrounding abortion:

“Paul Hill [the former minister who murdered an abortion
provider] argued that abortion was the moral equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust –
just like the National Right to Life Committee, the Southern Baptist Convention,
the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and dozens of other evangelical
groups said it was. If that's true, Hill said, then he wasn't
merely justified, but obligated to take up arms against
abortionists. If you're confronted with an evil equal in magnitude to that of
Adolf Hitler – as all these groups insisted was the case – then surely one is
obliged to do more than vote Republican every four years in the hopes of one day
appointing enough judges to change the law of the land.

Confronted with what all of these groups assured him was the Holocaust,
he decided to become Claus von Stauffenberg.

Yet when Hill repeated their own argument and their own rhetoric back
to them, these groups all recoiled. They all claimed to share Hill's premise,
but not to share his conclusion. That won't work. Hill's violent conclusion
arose logically from that shared premise. If he was a madman to be condemned –
as all those groups suddenly insisted he was – it was because of the madness of
that premise. So how was it possible they could repudiate him without also
repudiating that rhetoric that compelled him to act?”

The bottom line is that hatred – in all its forms – is deadly, and the cure for hatred is certainly not more of the same.

Naomi called for bloggers to speak out, and I decided that this was a call important enough to answer.

So here is what I have to say: this is a plea for empathy and forgiveness and restraint, in the hopes that reasonable human beings will make the effort to distinguish themselves from the real criminals and predators, and in hopes that if we commit ourselves to being more empathetic individuals, maybe we can save someone the heartache and pain that eventually rots them into monsters. But no one is perfect. We all mess up. So maybe, if we can forgive those who have hurt us terribly, we can save each other from contributing more hatred and scorn to the world and becoming some manner of monsters ourselves.

Update, full disclosure: I have no comment regarding the allegations (regarding sexual indiscretions or the nature of her business) posed by some against Ms. Dunford. She and I are not personally acquainted in any way. This is post is designed to say that harassment is not acceptable, and to that I hold. We should all strive to be better people. Additionally, while I do not intend to moderate comments on this post unless things get out of hand, I will delete anything that I deem to be threatening, derogatory, or offensive.

Helpful links:
· Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime
· Canadian Clearinghouse on Cyberstalking - resources
· The Office of the Privacy Commissioner blog
· Department of Justice Criminal Harassment handbook