“Don’t read the comments.”
“Don’t feed the trolls.”
Folk wisdom suggests how people avoid and mitigate online harassment. To varying degrees, we’ve all received or at least seen examples of these abuses. But in thinking of harassment as an individual problem, targeted and precise, we miss understanding the broader patterns of abuse. In Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy, Sarah Sobieraj describes these patterns across her interviews with women who’ve been targeted with dehumanizing, violent, venomous harassment and illustrates the broader threat to our public forum and democratic discourse.
This week, Credible Threat was the featured selection for CITAP’s first-ever book club. (We really know how to have fun). Highlights from our conversation included the risk factors Dr. Sobieraj identified for receiving particularly severe attacks—being a person with more than one marginalized identity, identifying as a feminist or promoting messages seen as gender noncompliant, and working or speaking in male-dominated spaces each raise the likelihood of being targeted for harassment.
Dr. Sobieraj also underscores how poorly existing legal and technical infrastructure currently address the problem of harassment when platforms’ written policies already prohibit these kinds of abuses and, to quote, “it’s not illegal to be an asshole.”
Finally, for all that these attacks feel deeply personal to the people receiving them, harassment is anything but, with an online “random rape threat generator” illustrating the bland interchangeability and repetition of even the most horrifying threats.
If your holiday break could use a soupçon of hate with a side of concern for the future of public discourse, put Credible Threat on your wishlist! (More seriously, it’s an excellent book even if it won’t make you fun at parties, whenever parties return).
Platforms, speech policies, and democratic outcomes
This week, Daniel Kreiss and Bridget Barrett presented at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center’s conference on technology, social media, and the 2020 election.
They discussed the role of large tech platforms in supporting democratic society, proposing that platforms are indirectly responsible for the erosion of tolerance, growing polarization, and decreasing public faith in institutions.
Watch their presentation:
(Bonus content: the incomparable Tiana Epps-Johnson talked about local election officials and the role of the Center for Technology and Civic Life. You can catch her remarks at 1:08:20 in this same video.)
Recent publications and appearances
“The great irony is that by attempting to stay apolitical, YouTube consistently makes the political choice not to care about or protect vulnerable communities.” Graduate research affiliate Becca Lewis published an op-ed in The Guardian discussing what YouTube can be doing to curb the growth of far-right extremism.
"In a polity committed to pluralism, hate speech cannot conceivably contribute in any legitimate way to democracy and, in fact,repudiates the right to equality.” The Supreme Court of India cited Alice Marwick’s work in an opinion on hate speech.
“We’ve had this shift, where you shift to thinking of students as a consumer, and also as kind of a mark. Because it’s about getting their cash, collecting their loan money. It’s not about what happens to them afterward.” A Defector interview with Louise Seamster on student debt featured a discussion of Tressie McMillan Cottom’s work on the “negative social insurance” of for-profit higher education.
“It’s possible that a single dose—one that can cover twice the number of people—would provide a significant benefit to the recipients, though we would be unsure about whether the immunity protections last as strongly three months later.” In Insight, Zeynep Tufekci discusses the unknowns and trade-offs ahead in vaccination.