- 18 Sep 2011, 13:18
#2285858
Cyber bullies are vile, but should we be locking them up?
An 18-week sentence for Sean Duffy, a young man who posted astonishingly malevolent messages on a Facebook memorial page, one set up to mourn Natasha MacBryde, a teenager who had committed suicide, has been attacked by some people as too lenient.
(...)
In practice, you find shameless homophobic abuse on the Daily Telegraph's website, lolz about dead public school boys from a professional writer on Twitter, jests from a US academic about a raped reporter, another distinguished scholar, Orlando Figes of the University of London, trying to destroy a rival historian on Amazon, and now Johann Hari, secretly prosecuting his curious personal vendettas on Wikipedia.
Anonymous malice is, you might think, most readily forgiven when it is most unforgivable: when the authors are educated, prepared to threaten libel actions and, even, already command prominent platforms for self-expression. Then again, as Lanier has argued, it is ready, online anonymity that tempts all these wrongdoers. From Duffy to Hari, websites just encourage them. The "troll-evoking design" he characterises as: "Effortless, consequence-free, transient anonymity in the service of a goal, such as promoting a point of view, that stands entirely apart from one's identity or personality. Call it drive-by anonymity."
Duffy's 18 weeks for extreme drive-by nastiness is certainly harsh when compared with more privileged trolls, for whom re-education or a period of disgrace are considered ample. But it is in comparison with episodes of sustained bullying, of the living, that his punishment looks most disproportionate. That Natasha MacBryde's suicide was preceded, according to evidence given at her inquest, by "teasing" from a clique at her private school, then, still in her lifetime, by anonymous abuse on the Formspring website, caused less consternation than the later, random tormenting of her parents, which the coroner called "vile and disgusting".
A similarly restrained reaction, in comparison to the revelations of memorial trolling, greeted last week's report from the EHRC, "Hidden in Plain Sight", exposing a level of harassment, attacks and bullying of disabled people that is so commonplace, yet so rarely taken seriously, that many victims hardly bother to complain, staying housebound instead.
The lead inquirer, Mike Smith, who was himself harassed in the 90s, with "cripple" and swastikas painted on his front door, expressed amazement that this kind of barbarity is still widespread.
"It's not just some extreme things happening to a handful of people; it's an awful lot of unpleasant things happening to a great many people, almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands each year."
If – and it is hard to reconcile with free speech – the random malice of a Duffy is better punished by imprisonment than, say, by merciless public exposure, it would indeed be a sick and weird society that put such prosecutions before action to deal with the tormenting of people who can't simply log off.
ceo txt na: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... t-bullying
An 18-week sentence for Sean Duffy, a young man who posted astonishingly malevolent messages on a Facebook memorial page, one set up to mourn Natasha MacBryde, a teenager who had committed suicide, has been attacked by some people as too lenient.
(...)
In practice, you find shameless homophobic abuse on the Daily Telegraph's website, lolz about dead public school boys from a professional writer on Twitter, jests from a US academic about a raped reporter, another distinguished scholar, Orlando Figes of the University of London, trying to destroy a rival historian on Amazon, and now Johann Hari, secretly prosecuting his curious personal vendettas on Wikipedia.
Anonymous malice is, you might think, most readily forgiven when it is most unforgivable: when the authors are educated, prepared to threaten libel actions and, even, already command prominent platforms for self-expression. Then again, as Lanier has argued, it is ready, online anonymity that tempts all these wrongdoers. From Duffy to Hari, websites just encourage them. The "troll-evoking design" he characterises as: "Effortless, consequence-free, transient anonymity in the service of a goal, such as promoting a point of view, that stands entirely apart from one's identity or personality. Call it drive-by anonymity."
Duffy's 18 weeks for extreme drive-by nastiness is certainly harsh when compared with more privileged trolls, for whom re-education or a period of disgrace are considered ample. But it is in comparison with episodes of sustained bullying, of the living, that his punishment looks most disproportionate. That Natasha MacBryde's suicide was preceded, according to evidence given at her inquest, by "teasing" from a clique at her private school, then, still in her lifetime, by anonymous abuse on the Formspring website, caused less consternation than the later, random tormenting of her parents, which the coroner called "vile and disgusting".
A similarly restrained reaction, in comparison to the revelations of memorial trolling, greeted last week's report from the EHRC, "Hidden in Plain Sight", exposing a level of harassment, attacks and bullying of disabled people that is so commonplace, yet so rarely taken seriously, that many victims hardly bother to complain, staying housebound instead.
The lead inquirer, Mike Smith, who was himself harassed in the 90s, with "cripple" and swastikas painted on his front door, expressed amazement that this kind of barbarity is still widespread.
"It's not just some extreme things happening to a handful of people; it's an awful lot of unpleasant things happening to a great many people, almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands each year."
If – and it is hard to reconcile with free speech – the random malice of a Duffy is better punished by imprisonment than, say, by merciless public exposure, it would indeed be a sick and weird society that put such prosecutions before action to deal with the tormenting of people who can't simply log off.
ceo txt na: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... t-bullying