How the Internet’s Virtues Fuel Its Vices
by Danielle Keats Citron
Most Internet users are familiar with trolling — aggressive, foul-mouthed posts designed to elicit angry responses in a site’s comments. Less familiar but far more serious is the way some use networked technologies to target real people, subjecting them, by name and address, to vicious, often terrifying, online abuse. In an in-depth investigation of a problem that is too often trivialized by lawmakers and the media, Danielle Keats Citron exposes the startling extent of personal cyber-attacks and proposes practical, lawful ways to prevent and punish online harassment. A refutation of those who claim that these attacks are legal, or at least impossible to stop, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace reveals the serious emotional, professional, and financial harms incurred by victims. Hate Crimes in Cyberspace rejects the view of the Internet as an anarchic Wild West, where those who venture online must be thick-skinned enough to endure all manner of verbal assault in the name of free speech protection, no matter how distasteful or abusive. Cyber-harassment is a matter of civil rights law, Citron contends, and legal precedents as well as social norms of decency and civility must be leveraged to stop it. Here is a brief excerpt.
When Jeff Pearlman, a writer for Sports Illustrated, began his career in journalism in the 1990s, readers rarely attacked writers’ intelligence or character. Though readers often disagreed with him, they did so in civil terms. Things have radically changed since then. His readers regularly take a nasty tone when commenting on his work online.
Perplexed by the shift, Pearlman reached out to his commenters to figure out what was happening. After some sleuthing, he discovered the telephone number of Andy, who, in a tweet, had called him “a fucking retard.” When they talked, Andy was clearly embarrassed. He told Pearlman, “You know what’s funny. I enjoy your writing. But I disagreed with you and I got caught up in the moment. When you read something you think is bullshit, you’re going to respond passionately. Was I appropriate? No. Am I proud? Not even a little. It’s embarrassing: the internet got the best of me.” Pearlman tracked down Matt, a college student, who, via Twitter, sent him snarky comments and a link to a “nasty” pornographic site that would make “even the most hardened person vomit.” On the phone, Matt was meek and apologetic: “I never meant for it to reach this point.”
The Internet’s social environment had a lot to do with Matt’s and Andy’s behavior. Some of the Internet’s key features — anonymity, mobilization of groups, and group polarization — make it more likely that people will act destructively. Other features, such as information cascades and Google bombs, enhance the destruction’s accessibility, making it more likely to inflict harm. Yet these same features can bring out the best in us. The Internet’s anonymity allows people to express themselves more honestly; networked tools enable us to spread knowledge far and wide. These capabilities are the reason why billions of people flock to the web and other networked communications. The Internet fuels our vices and our virtues.
Anonymity: If You Would Not Say It in Person, Why Say It Online?
The message board posters who attacked the law student and her colleague wrote under pseudonyms. “Paulie Walnuts,” “Unicimus,” “Whamo,” “:D,” “neoprag,” “Yale 2009,” “STANFORDtroll,” “Hitler-HitlerHitler,” and “AK47” said disgusting, frightening things that they surely would never have said to the law student’s face. A poster whose real identity was uncovered admitted as much to the journalist David Margolick: “I didn’t mean to say anything bad What I said about her was absolutely terrible, and I deserve to have my life ruined. I said something really stupid on the fucking internet, I typed for literally, like, 12 seconds, and it devastated my life.”
Anonymity can bring out our worst behavior, just as this poster admitted. It can nudge us to do terrible things. Not surprisingly, most cyber harassment is accomplished under the cloak of anonymity. Why do people behave differently when they feel anonymous? Or, as an anti–cyber bullying advertisement asked, “You wouldn’t say it in person. Why say it online?”
Uninhibited
Anonymity frees people to defy social norms. When individuals believe, rightly or wrongly, that their acts won’t be attributed to them personally, they become less concerned about social conventions. Research has shown that people tend to ignore social norms when they are hidden in a group or behind a mask. Social psychologists call this condition deindividuation. People are more likely to act destructively if they do not perceive the threat of external sanction. Anonymity is often associated with violence, vandalism, and stealing. This is true of adults and children. People are more inclined to act on prejudices when they think they cannot be identified.
A classic study conducted by the social psychologist Phillip Zimbardo involved female college students who believed they were delivering a series of painful electric shocks to two women. Half of the students wore hoods and oversized lab coats, their names replaced by numbers; the other half received nametags that made it easy to identify them. The study found that the anonymous students delivered twice as much electric shock to subjects as the non-anonymous students. The anonymous students increased the shock time over the course of the trials and held down their fingers even longer when the subjects twisted and moaned before them. That the students ignored the pain of those affected by their actions showed the dramatic change in their mentality and empathy when they were anonymous.
Is anonymity’s influence muted in online interactions where people’s identities are known? When individuals join social networks, create video blogs, or send e-mails, they often reveal their names, pictures, and affiliations. But despite the ability to be identified, people often perceive that what they say or do online won’t stick to them. This certainly seems counterintuitive. Computer-mediated interaction, however, occurs in a state of perceived anonymity. Because people typically cannot see those with whom they are interacting, they experience their activities as though others do not know who they are. They are less self-aware because they think their actions are being submerged in the hundreds of other actions taking place online.This feeling of anonymity influences how people act online.
Out of Sight, out of Mindfulness
Users’ physical separation exacerbates the tendency to act on destructive impulses. People are quicker to resort to invective when there are no social cues, such as facial expressions, to remind them to keep their behavior in check. As Jezebel ’s Anna North explains, she has been called evil, ugly, and sexless online, but she doesn’t experience that kind of abuse offline. In her view, people recognize others’ humanity when interacting face-to-face but forget when they are separated or, alternatively, hide their rage until consequence-free opportunities arise for them to express it.
We lash out more when the negative consequences of our actions seem remote. The operator of online forums that published nude pictures of young girls and women without their consent explained that his pseudonymous character was merely “playing a game.” Electronic Freedom Foundation vice chair John Perry Barlow aptly remarked, “Cyberspace has the potential to make people feel like information artifacts. If you cut data, it doesn’t bleed. So you’re at liberty to do anything you want to people who are not people but merely images.” Telephone interactions also exhibit these tendencies. Call centers are an important case in point. The sociologist Winifred Poster has shown that Indian workers experience an enormous amount of racial abuse by U.S. customers.
A 2003 study explored the connection between anonymity and hate. It focused on a newspaper’s online forum designated for readers to share their views after a group of African American, Hispanic, and Caucasian youths murdered a local resident. The newspaper neither moderated the forum nor required posters to register with the site. During a three-day period, hundreds of posters weighed in on the incident. Of the 279 online comments examined, nearly 80 percent were “vitriolic, argumentative, and racist denunciations of the youths, their families, and various socio-political institutions.” Forty percent attacked the youths and their families, often with calls for violent retribution. The study attributed the violent expression of racism to users’ anonymity, at least in part, because of the posters who expressed prejudice, only 25 percent revealed their e-mail addresses, while 53 percent of all other posters included their contact information.
We can better appreciate anonymity’s influence by thinking about what happens when it is lost. When people are reminded of their potential traceability, they tend to retreat from destructive behavior. Holly Bee, a former moderator of a technology news and chat forum called The Register, explained that when online comments got “very ugly,” she would try to calm things down by e-mailing posters who provided their e-mail addresses during registration. She would tell them, “Even though you are not writing under your real name, people can hear you.” Posters wrote back immediately and were contrite, almost as if they had forgotten who they were. Bee explained, “They would send messages back saying, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ not even using the excuse of having a bad day or anything like that.”
Anonymity’s Virtues
Anonymity is not all bad. Quite the opposite: anonymity can be essential for some people to speak the truth about themselves and the world as they see it. There is substantial evidence that people express their views more freely online than offline because they believe they cannot be identified. Freed from concerns about reprisal, people tend to speak more honestly.
Examples abound of the importance of anonymity for commentary on politics, culture, and social matters. Political dissenters document governmental abuse on micro-blogging sites because they can disguise their real names. Teenagers share their concerns about coming out to family and friends on LGBT sites because they are not worried about being identified. Under the cloak of anonymity, new parents are more willing to be honest about the difficulties of raising children without worrying about being labeled a bad parent.
Anonymity’s substantial costs must be understood in light of its great benefits.
