The Myth Of The Anonymous Troll by Violet Hargrave
As no shortage of articles will tell you, social media sites in general
suffer from a very serious “trolling problem.”
There’s a fair bit of confusion on what exactly having a “trolling
problem” means, with some very sheltered people confused at why
victims can’t “ignore a few people shouting irate nonsense at them.”
There is not nearly enough discussion of just how the disgusting
comments highlighted in articles on this topic are accompanied
by police battering down doors after receiving calls about “executing hostages,”
death threats made to elderly grandparents, child protective services being called
to investigate abuse allegations of siblings/cousins/children, or the evergreen
favorite of employers being bombarded with calls and emails accusing victims of every
unsavory act under the sun until the victim is fired, if only to shut
them up.
While the more serious and life-endangering aspects of these harassment
campaigns are hard to find easy solutions for, running aground against
woefully out of date police departments, or the anonymity of disposable
prepaid phones and spoofed e-mail addresses, the one thing everyone seems
to agree on is that social media sites really need to institute policies
where everyone must register under their real name, because trying to hold anonymous
posters accountable is impossible.
Unfortunately, this seemingly common sense approach doesn’t
come close to addressing the real problems, as any victim of such an
attack can tell you, and as sociologists and abuse prevention experts
constantly explain in public talks.
First off, the “trolls” aren’t anonymous. There are a few moves in the
serial abuser’s playbook which involve registering a huge number
of dummy accounts and using them all to send similar messages,
to conduct DDoS attacks or harass employers with “widespread
e-mail campaigns,” but those are inherently disposable single-shot
accounts, never to be used again whether they’re banned from a
service or not, and don’t make up a significant percentage of any
dedicated harassment campaign’s activity. The persistent sources
of abuse- the organizers, the stalkers, the performative types who
compete with each other to see who can make the most outrageous
posts or provoke the strongest reactions, almost always do so under
their real names, or at least under professional names they can’t
simply step away from.
In many cases, the people who orchestrate these sorts of campaigns
earn a living off it. Crowdfunding sites like Patreon are rife with
“internet personalities” who produce rambling 4 hour youtube
videos consisting of nothing but a neonazi staring into a camera
and delivering rambling monologues about the imagined crimes
of arbitrarily chosen victims, or reposting videos from feminists
and other social activists, pausing after every sentence to make
a rambling ‘counterpoint.’ This is a hugely lucrative business for
some, bringing in thousands of dollars each month(45) between ads
and subscription based donations. This of course on top of the
financial backing millionaire neo-nazi Palmer Luckey(46).
Those who don’t have the savvy or the drive to monetize their
hatred need their names attached to satisfy their egos. Twitter in
particular is swarming with monstrous little scumbags who make
games out of harassment, keeping score by how many women
they’ve been blocked by, or how many tweets they got in before
a target stopped responding. Others, like ego driven misogynist
45
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/14/how-crowdfunding-helps-haters.html
46
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...re-secretly-funding-trump-s-meme-machine.html
Markus Persson(47), or genocide-minded bigots like Cathy Brennan(48\)
seem to take perverse joy in how many of their followers will
attack a target after nothing but a pointed finger and display of
disapproval.
Meanwhile, it’s the victims of these attacks who suffer the most
from efforts to “combat anonymity.” Facebook’s real name policy(49)
is routinely abused to shut down the profiles of people of color,
trans people, and those posting under pseudonyms, specifically
to avoid the sort of harassment the policy ostensibly exists to
prevent. Trans women under the age of forty are exceptionally
likely to spend years exploring their true gender via roleplaying
games before coming out to friends and family, particularly online
games like World of Warcraft. Online gaming communities are
also notorious for violent queerphobia and misogyny(50), so when
Blizzard Entertainment’s instituted a policy tying accounts to legal
names, staggering numbers of trans players were suddenly exposed,
and women both cis and trans, already facing abuse and harassment
in-game, suddenly had to contend with their names being readily
available, to search for social media accounts and home addresses.
This in turn ties back to the most dangerous aspects of “trolling
problems.” Even without the aid of real name policies, uncovering
the contact information of victims in order to further escalation
is a huge priority of harassment campaigns. Take the case of
Sarah Nyberg(51), an unassuming young woman pseudonymously
discussing the transphobic comments she received on twitter to
a modest audience. After over a year of traditional abuse, “trolls”
compromised the security of the server hosting an old user image
of hers, discovered her real name, then used Facebook searches
47
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2...raft-guy-mansplains-mansplaining-uses-c-word/
48
http://theterfs.com/tag/cathy-brennan/
49
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_controversy
50
https://genderterror.com/2014/04/03/gaming-culture-and-safe-spaces/
51
https://medium.com/@srhbutts/i-m-sarah-nyberg-and-i-was-a-teenage-edgelordb8a460b27e10
and ancestry websites to research her entire extended family, and
publicly accuse her of sexually abusing her youngest living relative.
Such efforts to strip victims of their anonymity (often referred to
as “doxxing”) are frequently coordinated by means of dedicated
stalking sites, like 8chan’s /baphomet/board52, or Kiwi Farms(53).
Social media sites routinely refuse to treat links to these sites as
harassment, claiming to only have jurisdiction over what they
personally host, but have similar excuses when people’s personal
information is directly exposed by way of their services.
Personally, I have been inundated for months with tweets from
users advertising their ties to Kiwi Farms, shouting names and
attaching photos of various people they believe me to secretly be.
When I report these, the response from Twitter is that they will
only remove the posts if I can provide them with photo IDs, proving
myself to actually be each of these random men. Random innocents
are being harassed now in an effort to attack me, and the only action
the platform is willing to take would be to confirm to my stalkers
that they finally guessed the right name if I provided verification.
How then, one might wonder, do these nefarious creeps avoid the
consequences of repeatedly, if not regularly, leading campaigns of
hatred and abuse against innocent people? Campaigns so severe as
to end careers, force people into hiding, and capture international
media attention? It isn’t that they’re anonymous. Perhaps their
rampages aren’t as high a priority as others? Not the case. Having
personally reviewed tens of thousands of cases of reported abuse,
first time and minor offenders are far more likely to see action taken
against them than high profile repeat offenders.
52
https://storify.com/a_man_in_black/baphomet
53
http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-biggest-community-ofstalkers.html
Perhaps then, there are mitigating circumstances? Exceptions for
people with a big claim to fame unrelated to their campaigns
of abuse? That would certainly explain why Persson gets a pass,
having sold the company behind Minecraft for an absurd sum
of money before retiring to his current lifestyle of bringing hell
down on women he gleefully refers to with the most unspeakable
obscenity in the country he currently calls home. It would also
cover the lack of consequences for Adam Baldwin, the C-list actor
who gave the most famous sustained campaign of abuse in history
its name by referring to what was then called “The Quinnspiracy”
with the hashtag #gamergate(54). Perhaps we forgive all the bizarre
abuse and photos of squirrels hanging upside down by their testicles
because we remember him as Jayne on Firefly?
If that were the case, it still wouldn’t let Brennan off the hook.
Her entire life revolves around the vindictive, life-endangering
persecution of trans women and has for years. And it most certainly
wouldn’t excuse the actual creator of Gamergate, Eron Gjoni, a
man whose entire claim to fame in life is recruiting an army of
honest to goodness neo-nazis to punish a woman he used to punch
in the face for dumping him, and continuing to direct their attacks
as they grew into a general purpose hate group responsible for
so much senseless abuse and ruination that the governments of
several countries have drafted new legislation in direct response.
One would reasonably assume that at the very least, he’d be
suspended from the social media sites specifically called out in
the restraining order issued against him. Yet there he is, under his
real name, running crowdfunded efforts to continue tormenting the
same victims.
Twitter considers stalking and abuse to be examples of “active
engagement” that drive ad revenue, and outright reward some of
54
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
the worst offenders with special treatment. While they eventually
made a big public display of suspending the primary account of
Milo Yiannopoulos, an offender so over the top, blatant, and clearly
dangerous as to essentially be a cartoon villain, this was done
purely as a symbolic gesture in the face of massive blowback against
twitter as a company for his campaign against actress Leslie Jones(55).
Prior to his banning, Yiannopoulos was the specific subject of many
meetings, discussing literally thousands of clear cut cases where
he exhibited behavior unacceptable by any standard. Willfully
endangering the lives of women he suspects are trans, attacking
their character with completely fabricated stories of drug abuse
and child endangerment, sharing sexually explicit photos of teens,
encouraging people to visit child porn sites, and once distributing
a photo of a victim’s dead sister with a nazi flag added to the
background.
The sad truth of the matter is that social media sites actively enjoy
hosting these sorts of serial harassment campaigns. Publicly of
course, they constantly issue statements to the contrary, affirming
their commitment to safety and decency, and announcing formal
partnerships with anti-abuse organizations to help clean house.
Given that, it would frankly be absurdly cynical to speculate that
they secretly love their hordes of trolls.
As it happens though, we don’t need to speculate. Confidentially
prevents me getting into the specifics, but the details of meetings
conducted within these “partnerships” reveal what sorts of high
profile abuse cases have been brought to their attention behind
closed doors, the pathetic excuses given not to act on them, and
the honest reasons that come through when those come out. Many
of the sordid details are also publicly available.
55
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...7/21/what-it-takesto-get-banned-from-twitter/
Reddit’s founders have admitted, in public discussions on their
internal operations, to introducing “gold” as a way to fan the flames
of abuse on the site while profiting off it, and chose to oust a
CEO(56) rather than shut down forums openly dedicated to white
supremacy, with outright unspeakable names(57).
Twitter considers these actions, and the torrents of crowd sourced
hate that follow vital to the site’s profitability, generating huge page
view spikes and accompanying ad exposures, going as far as to
promote Yiannopoulos’ “articles” as “top news stories” relating to
his targets.
Facebook is notorious for enabling bigotry and silencing activists(58\)
through its features, blaming it on flaws of the system, but actively
patrols for even the slightest sleights against dangerous bigots(59).
The problem has never been that anonymity allows abusive people
to avoid consequences. There simply aren’t consequences for abusive people.
56
https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_thank_you/
57
http://gawker.com/how-reddit-became-a-worse-black-hole-of-violent-racism-1690505395
58
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/12/facebook-blocks-shaun-kingblack-lives-matter
59
http://the-orbit.net/metaphoricalpenis/2016/04/27/cathy-brennan-fake-goth/
