A Law Professor's Brilliant Solution to Curb Online Harassment: Strip Anonymity Privileges from Abusers

Online harrassment against women in the game industry reached a very terrifying peak yesterday, provoking a viral protest on Twitter, #StopGamerGate2014. But as great as that is, online abuse (especially against women) will likely continue at a feverish level until Twitter and other platforms which allow anonymous/pseudonymous identity have structural solutions to help address it.

Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, a new book from law professor Danielle Keats Citron, has a very clever proposal for doing just that: Make anonymity a privilege not a right. "Users who violate terms-of-service agreements could be required to authenticate their identities in order to continue their site privileges," she writes.

"[R]equiring users to own their own words, so to speak, has the effect of bringing online speech to a level playing field as offline speech," Professor Citron explains to me. "Offline, social norms develop as people react to speech and gauge people’s reactions. Workers are far less likely to sexually harass fellow employees because others will think badly of them and because it may in fact be cause for termination and liability for the employer." In online spaces which allow people to identify themselves by their real name or by an anonymous pseudonym -- such as Twitter -- that calculus changes:

"When only the victim is named and not the perpetrator in online spaces, others can hardly send the signal that their behavior is unacceptable and harmful. If anonymity is a privilege that can be lost, we could introduce the power of social norms back into the calculus. Perpetrators may decline to fantasize about how they would rape named individuals because they would not want to be seen as the kind of person who does that sort of thing. And bringing names into the calculus would help victims to bring legal action if the speech was proscribable like true threat. The approach is less drastic than removal, though removal should be considered for direct threats, for instance."

I ask Professor Citron if she thinks a policy like this implemented on Twitter and other social platforms would address the death and rape threats and other harassment associated with #GamerGate.

"For death threats," she says, "my inclination is to urge site operators to work with victims to ensure that posters can be traced (for law enforcement purposes). In those cases, that would be my recommendation of first order of business so that journalists like Amanda Hess can’t be told that there is no evidence to deal with graphic threats after she blocked and deleted them." (Read Hess' shocking Pacific Standard story about that.)

"Identifiability," Professor Citron goes on, "might provide a disincentive to threaten others with rape and other forms of violence. If posters know that they have to own threats of violence or lose their site privileges, they might think twice about doing it."

A solution like this, by the way, has already been implemented by Facebook around their user pages:

"Unlike individual [Facebook] users, those administering a page can remain anonymous/pseudonymous. Facebook has shifted its policy to say that if administrators of pages are reported as including hate speech, Facebook will let them continue but only if they appear under their real names. My suggestion is just that—a suggestion—for sites to address their desired community norms. In my book, I urge site operators interested in fostering civility and protecting against online abuse to be as transparent about their policies as possible. That includes defining what they mean by terms like harassment (repeated online expression targeted at particular individual usually involving defamation, threats, and privacy invasions) or hate speech (general demeaning statements about groups), making clear their decisions about ToS violations, providing users with examples of speech violating ToS and CG, and giving users a chance to appeal. Some of this may not be feasible or too expensive to scale. My book offers an array of advice in this respect."

Scalability does seem to be the biggest challenge here. If you need one administrator reviewing abuse reports sent from within a block one million users, and Twitter has over 100 million regular users, and Facebook over 1 billion... well, do the math. Then again, this may be the cost we need to bear to create a civil Internet everyone can use -- on social media, and frankly, for online worlds and any other platform that allows anonymity.

Hat tip: Adrian Chen.

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Comments

[Cube Republic]

If you agree with any of the points or not, this is just evil. Anita should be allowed to voice her opinions in a free country without threats of violence. What's more it spoils any debate or discourse.

[Ezra]

The problem hasn't been what kind of action to take against abusers, it's been identifying them in a timely manner so that something can be done.

A company like Twitter devoting the time and manpower to figuring out who gets to be anonymous or not sounds way more taxing and less effective than simply banning people who break the law and their TOS.

[ReBeccaOrg]

"Real names" are a fraught issue and I'm really not keen on asking online services to get them wrong YET AGAIN. (Nor do I entirely buy the idea that even if you could force real names that it would improve things: cf. Facebook, G+ up till a few months ago.)

But let's imagine that part is ok. To do this you have to use some sort of proxy identifier to stop the user from just making new accounts. Typically that'd be an IP address. As imperfect as that is, it's enough of a speed bump to stop most users.

But if you're willing to impose per-IP penalties, why not just allow your end users to block everyone who's shared an IP with an account? That'd let your users continue to decide who they want to listen to, while making it much harder to sock-puppet, especially with tools like the block-bot*.

* Personally, I'd like to see services add subscribable block lists as a core feature.

[Leo]

Those Gamergate people are not responsible for this event and would love to see the perp behind bars as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq798B0z5qc

[Sjöfn Stoneshield]

Unfortunately, anonymity on the Internet are guaranteed not only in the Swedish Constitution, but also in the EU Constitution

[Pussycat Catnap]

@Leo: Gamergate is just a smokescreen:

http://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-and-its-gamerga-1646145844

"Co-opting the language and posture of grievance is how members of a privileged class express their belief that the way they live shouldn't have to change, that their opponents are hypocrites and perhaps even the real oppressors. This is how you get St. Louisans sincerely explaining that Ferguson protestors are the real racists, and how you end up with an organized group of precisely the same video game enthusiasts to whom an entire industry is catering honestly believing that they're an oppressed minority."

"The idea is that we're all so equal now that true intolerance begins with even noting that anyone is different from the norm, said norm of course being a young, straight, middle-class white guy. To get to this mindset requires a certain willful blindness to privilege and the ways it has embedded itself in the very structures of American life, which is how you wind up with people saying things like, "For some reason, some black people kind of hold onto the 'back in the day,' the slave thing, or they feel they're not being treated right." Cluelessness about institutional inequality isn't a crime, but it's a major contributing factor to the grand nerd myth of the internet as a perfect meritocracy in which everyone is equal and the worst crime is special pleading."

"By those lights, a woman using her sexuality—her difference from the presumed default state of humanity—to gain an advantage, well, shit, that's violating rule No. 1. That people badly want this to have happened even though it didn't is crucial to understanding why Gamergate resonates the way it does—it seems to offer evidence not only that the social-justice warriors are hypocrites and frauds, but that the true defenders of equality turn out to be, well, young, middle-class white guys, and their allies."

And this from the comments there:

"this is probably the most vitriolic case of unexamined privilege we've seen in a long while"

[zz bottom]

Quoting:
Unfortunately, anonymity on the Internet are guaranteed not only in the Swedish Constitution, but also in the EU Constitution
Unquote:
Unfortunatly???

[zz bottom]

The right to our privacy is a right i will fight over any other, be on internet or real world, to say that it is unfortunate that constitutions protect those rights is like asking us to wear id marks on our bodies to be better identified, the last time i heard about this was on WWII death camps!

[Adeon Writer]

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20100707

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Private forum operators have a pretty much absolute right to set and enforce their own policies. Personally, I don't favor "outing" anybody unless they've been convicted (not just accused) of a crime in a court of law. But I'll take it over a system where there's no anonymity at all, for either victimizers or victims.

I do think most forums and games are not adequately moderated, and they'll likely stay that way until operators start facing criminal and civil liability for crimes, defamation and other activities that occur in part due to a lack of enforcement.

[FredTheGamer]

Well, the example with Sweden is interesting as it shows how something with good intentions can get ugly really fast.

In Swedens case political views and comments posted attached to articles alternative to mainstream media newssites, however leftwing activists decided to exploit a weakness in the USA based provider of the comments function and managed to map comments to real identities.

Those identities were than passed on to one of the bigger mainstream media newspapers who actually went home to those ordinary people with video camera and knocked on their door asking them about the comments that they made, they had said nothing illegal or terribly inapproiate but ended up in the news with name, face and a video showing how the reporter knocked on their door and their response to the accusations. Why? well they expressed views on immigration (Sweden is by far accepting the most immigrants seeking refuge than ANY other contry in Europe) and naturally people have views about it.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions friends. I know it's tempting to call for regulation and control, but no system is entirely safe, and the information can and probably will be used for the wrong reasons sooner or later.

[krasnirex]

How about making online harassment a criminal offense like it is outside of the online realm.

[Pussycat Catnap]

@krasnirex: It already is. If you can prove harassment in any given situation, up to whatever standards the given laws require - you have a case regardless of the medium used to do that harassing.