You are conflating two independent ideas: was it wise to behave as she did, and was 4chan's response OK. The answer to both is "no". It was unwise for her to do what she did, but that does not justify the response. Don't accuse people of blaming the victim for pointing out her unwise behavior.
If I go for a walk in a minefield, it sucks that my leg got blown off...but I could have perhaps exercised better judgment regarding the location of my evening constitutional. That doesn't make it OK to deploy land mines, that just makes me an idiot for walking into the minefield.
Spoken like someone who has never been slut-shamed. Or had his/her leg blown off by a landmine. People don't actually get maimed because they stupidly walked into a minefield. They get maimed because someone put a minefield where they live and grew up, and they can't live life at all without being in constant danger. Women don't get slut-shamed because they did something to deserve it, they get slut-shamed because they live in a culture where our first reaction to anything having to do with women and harassment is to look for a reason why she had it coming.
Someone doesn't have to say "I blame the victim" to blame the victim. Usually what they say is something along the lines of "I'm not blaming her, but..."
Spoken like someone who has never been slut-shamed.
Classic ad hominem.
People don't actually get maimed because they stupidly walked into a minefield.
The operative term here is 'hypothetical analogy'. By insisting on the accuracy of the morbidity statistics of real-world minefields you're intentionally confusing the point and trying to derail the discussion.
I don't know. The only rail I see in this discussion is "wow, she should have known better." Nothing about how pathological the response was, nothing about the culture that encourages that community to retaliate with such vengeance and mirth. All of that is in the story, and in the background, but we're not talking about that... we're talking about whether or not she should have known better. That's the rail.
Discussing the response is useless, because there's nothing much to discuss, we'd just be agreeing with each other and patting ourselves on the back.
I know that some communities enjoys such circlejerks, but I expect HN to be above that.
In this case, I think it's kind of a stretch to suggest the victim doesn't hold some level of culpability.
She wasn't randomly targeted just for going about her business; she was targeted because she repeatedly posted calling /b/ "fags," "jits," "[/b] ain't shit," etc.
Suggesting that she doesn't have any responsibility for what happened doesn't make any more sense to me than condoning how /b/ responded.
I don't buy the landmine analogy because she didn't "walk into" this situation by happenstance.
Imagine a woman (or a man) who is sexually assaulted after deliberately entering a prison reserved for violent sex offenders and intentionally provoking the inmates. The offenders have committed a reprehensible crime. Still, the victim is responsible for taking on an obvious risk.
But wouldn't it be awesome if one showed up and made an insightful contribution to the conversation?
If I were a woman who had lost a limb in combat and had had a higher than average number of boyfriends, I think I would probably feel quite insulted that people were assuming I was unable to reason logically about the OP's premise.
In this case, wasn't the poster assuming that you (the slut-shamed landmine victim) were unable to avoid reasoning correctly? Without taking sides here, it seems as if the poster was saying "you're wrong about X, therefore you couldn't be part of group Y that would know about X".
Perhaps, but it seems to me that the "X" was a premise about how 4chan relates to people who taunt it openly. Then an analogy was made to sexual assault and landmine victims and then it was "you couldn't be part of group Y" that would have first-hand knowledge of sexual assault and landmine morbidity factors.
I'll say this: anyone who goes around using sexual assault victims and landmine amputees for their analogies is just asking for it.
> Spoken like someone who has never been slut-shamed. Or had his/her leg blown off by a landmine. People don't actually get maimed because they stupidly walked into a minefield. They get maimed because someone put a minefield where they live and grew up, and they can't live life at all without being in constant danger.
If we don't expect people to exercise "common sense" in trying to avoid becoming the victims of circumstance, then why do we install locks on cars and homes? Missing locks on a house doesn't make it acceptable to steal things from inside of it, yet we don't in general rely on that social and legal rule alone.
Lacey doesn't deserve the treatment she's been getting but it's entirely appropriate to point out that the response could have been foreseen by anyone with experience with 4chan's /b/ (which includes Lacey, if she's to be believed). Any other argument is of the same intellectual logic as trying to prevent teen pregnancy by not teaching teens about sex (which is even worse as a method than abstinence education!)
This should be a "teachable moment" for other teenage or young entrepreneurs trying to drum up public interest in their enterprise by poking 4chan. It certainly shouldn't be hidden from public view just to make it look like it was a completely random attack on /b/'s part. People need to be educated about what can happen.
I don't think this accurately characterizes the article and the discussion. Saying that this is a "teachable moment" is sugar-coating the character of the responses here. I'm not arguing that the agency of the harassment victim, and what should be "common sense" precautions, can't be discussed at all. But it's a distraction and a cop-out, and it fits a destructive pattern. When our first response, collectively, is to dismiss the person whose life is still being actively dismantled with "well that's what happens," then all we're doing is blaming the victim. We talk about what the victim of this harassment campaign should have done differently, but not about what the perpetrators should have done differently. "Common sense" should dictate that you don't try to get someone fired and harass them relentlessly in this way because they took a jab at you on the internet.
I don't think that the basic facts of what she did to "provoke this" are in dispute, at least if we take the article's account at face value. What I'm saying is that it's stupid that we don't talk about the nature of the harassment. That's what's really hidden from the discussion.
The peanut-gallery reaction to things like this ALWAYS centers on what the victim did, and there's an extra edge to it when the victim is a woman. (see the later "clarification" by the original commenter in this thread -- why use that language instead of "she definitely deserved it"?) And when somebody points out that we're blaming the victim, everyone's ready to jump in and make sure it's clear that that's appropriate this time. Well, there's almost always someone arguing that it's appropriate "this time."
I'd like this to be a teachable moment about how we excuse and perpetuate this behavior by focusing solely on what the victim could have done differently. That starts with somebody saying "hey, you're blaming the victim" and it'd be nice to get to "why focusing on the victim is a distraction from the actual problem" and then "how and why is this kind of thing happening and what do we do about it?" but we don't get to go there in this forum. It's trivialized to the point where even suggesting that it could be an alternative course of discussion is snarked at (see other responses). Yes, I'd argue that talking about the intersection of anonymity and technology that enables and encourages wanton and massively effective harassment campaigns is what I'd like to see from a hacker news discussion. (I'll put my thoughts on that in another comment, if anyone's still paying attention a day later.)
I got dinged for talking about the real nature of how a woman's sexuality is used both as a weapon of harassment and an excuse for that harassment, and for pointing out that hypothetical landmine analogies have no bearing on reality. Well, that seems a lot more relevant to me than trying to construct a thought experiment proving that the victim of this harassment had agency in order to defend a useless thats-what-happens comment. And while comparing it to how we lock up and take precautions in general is entirely reasonable in isolation, the comments here aren't isolated and they mostly add up to "she provoked it, end of discussion." The pattern of people responding that way reinforces the culture that accepts this as normal. I'm not ignorant of the argument that risks can't be entirely mitigated, or that anonymous groups also do good things. But the perpetrators of this harassment are liability-distributed and unaccountable in ways that individuals and even organized groups aren't. That's interesting, and scary, and we're not talking about it.
You're absolutely right that the anonymous and distributed nature of 4chan means that the "/b/" entity can react to perceived slights (trolling, mockery) in a radically disproportionate way.
If the individual provoker annoys /b/ with "strength" 1, and (e.g.) 10 000 /b/ denizens are each sufficiently annoyed to push back at the provoker with equal "strength" 1, that means that the reaction to the individual is profoundly out of proportion to the original attack. By a factor of thousands.
It's like burning someone's house down with their family inside because they dented your bumper without leaving a note. But as you point out, few individuals were all that nasty - the culpability is distributed across a large, anonymous mob, with a few critical nodes, such as those persons who leaked the individual's contact information, or made prank phone calls to her work place.
The crowd / mob dynamics gives massive strength to the anonymous group that is absolutely unmatched by the individual. Mob dynamics in physical space are understood well enough, and police have had various means of dealing with large groups of disorganized people in town squares and so forth. This is not the case for internet-distributed mobs, which are still relatively new.
The process is like leaderless, decentralized, crowdsourcing of cruelty (cf. "Anonymous: because none of us is as cruel as all of us"). And of course, the greater the crowd, the greater the possibility of someone recognizing the individual victim - which is exactly what happened in this case. Once this happens, with a name and identifying characteristics, the positive feedback loop and mob excitement can escalate and boil over.
You may already have seen this video about a thought experiment about the potential power of distributed, internet-powered mobs and the way things could go wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyMdOT8YJgY
I hadn't seen that video, thank you! That's an excellent analysis.
On the subject of policing strategies, my feeling is that the relative newness of internet-distributed mobs (and less mobbish but still easily-formed groups) could be a significant factor in the rise in warrantless wiretapping that we're seeing in the U.S. The police recognize that this is a new problem, but they don't have precise strategies to deal with it, so they're left with an imprecise one, which is ubiquitous surveillance. If it's very hard to target individual contributors, you want to cast as wide a net as possible and then sort them out later. My hope would be that strategies for dealing with this will be refined with time and we'll be able to reign in the surveillance too, which has already done a lot of damage.
That's just a hypothesis and it might be refuted by actual cases where members of anonymous groups have been arrested. But the most recent overreaching in U.S. government surveillance does seem to roughly correlate with the increased ease of anonymous group formation.
Well, that or fear of terrorism. It strikes me that destructive 4chan campaigns are an inversion of "terrorism" as it's usually defined. With a terrorist cell you have a small group of people trying to intimidate a much larger group through extreme but limited acts. In an internet campaign like this one, you have a large group of people trying to intimidate one person through a collection of acts which might be fairly innocuous if it were only a single person doing one of them once. The large power imbalance is still there, but turned on its head.
In any case, better strategies to catch up with technology aren't going to solve the basic moral problem, which is how to assign appropriate culpability to individuals who each barely participate in a leaderless action that is massively destructive in aggregate.
The angry mob analogy seems most appropriate to me:
- you have people who feel invincible because they are part of a crowd, so they strike out harder than they might if they were personally 100% accountable for what they did
- you have positive feedback loops where the crowd builds its momentum up in a way that would not happen with a small group
A similar trend is definitely taking place in file sharing. Mob action gives people permission (or at least a feeling of power), surveillance is deemed necessary by the aggrieved parties (and their government allies), and then eventually there's a "shock and awe" action to make an example of a big target, such as the takedown of Megaupload. (The distinction here is that unauthorized copying of movies or music is arguably less destructive than 4chan's focused viciousness.)
Hadn't thought about the similarity to file sharing, but it makes sense. Sort of a chaotic neutral in contrast to mass retaliations. Early on with file sharing, I thought that a system might arise where people would voluntarily pay into legal defense or settlement funds for the people randomly targeted by enforcement agencies. A kind of insurance system against the possibility that you might be next. It didn't turn out that way, and in retrospect I think it would mostly have encouraged the RIAA etc to keep pursuing random sharers instead of trying to go after the center of bigger hubs such as megaupload.
Back to the point at hand, once again we have a division of culpability, but a little more deliberate in the case of modern filesharing services like megaupload. The systems are legally and technically engineered so that the responsibility for "unauthorized" actions rests as much as possible with the distributed mass of uploaders and downloaders, per the provisions of the DMCA (in jurisdictions where it applies). And within that mob the accountability for the sum total of infringement is spread thin. It's an unpalatable choice for the enforcers, I think, with the current tools available to them. Or maybe not, and they just go where the money is.
I'm one of those who thinks a good portion of the spectrum of copyright infringement is overblown and outdated. I'm much more concerned about the feedback loop of bad behavior on /b/. But I wouldn't at all want to see Christopher Poole pursued like Kim Dotcom, either.
That's the conundrum for me. I'd rather come up with ways to combat the feedback loop during destructive mob events. I think the level of feedback is a function of both moral-alignment and attention-alignment in the mob. I put forward another wordy hypothesis about it elsewhere in the comments here. Attention alignment is somewhat novel because in a physical mob people can't jump out of the situation as easily switching to a different browser tab.
I'm sure there are more dimensions to it, but these two seem like possible attack vectors if you want to dissolve an angry distributed mob. But you have to do it in an appropriate and ethical way. The shock-and-awe of the megaupload case is, I think, clearly based on fear, but also an attack against the moral cohesion of the file-sharing mob. They're sort of pushing the guy into the role of criminal, extremist, profiteer.. any of which might resonate with any of us and knock people out of moral alignment with each other. If you make enough peers associate file-sharing with criminality or profiteering, you can shrink the mob.
...how again is someone who (according to the article) has been part of 4chan for some time fundamentally incapable of poking that particular bear?
I understand and agree with your logic (at least so far as "judging people for their participation in unavoidable situations is wrong" summarizes it), but I don't think it applies here.
If I go for a walk in a minefield, it sucks that my leg got blown off...but I could have perhaps exercised better judgment regarding the location of my evening constitutional. That doesn't make it OK to deploy land mines, that just makes me an idiot for walking into the minefield.