[p2p-research] Jimmy Wales against on-line culture of violence

[Andy Robinson]

But the danger is, who decides what counts as "uncivil"?

These standards often vary culturally, subculturally, along lines of
psychological difference, etc.

There's a real problem in terms of certain sites becoming unsafe spaces
because of persistent abuse, and there's sometimes issues with bullying
(such as cyberstalking).  But there is a *massive* gap between what's taken
as 'uncivil' in dominant Anglo-American discourses expressing middle-class
hegemony, and what actually creates unsafe spaces.

At present, a far bigger problem is that owners/moderators on most sites
have a huge amount of arbitrary power and very few if any constraints on how
they use it.  They abuse very generic terms and conditions regarding
rudeness, abuse etc for purposes such as political censorship, protecting
themselves from legitimate criticism, taking sides in fights, or shutting
out nuisance but legitimate contributions.  This also creates unsafe spaces,
and since it isn't usually apparently until one has been on a site or list
for awhile, it is also extremely 'dangerous' - a new user has to put in
considerable investment before they encounter the problem.

There is a big danger of indirect, neurotic speech-codes being favoured over
direct, immanent and immediatist speech-codes; and of emotionally repressed,
passive-aggressive personalities being favoured over people who express
emotions in a more direct way.

There is another big danger of 'harassment' or 'bullying' in the full sense
being confused with simple rudeness, insults, etc.  Harassment and bullying
occur in the context of oppressive relationships, and it is the relationship
which gives meaning to the specific action.  Crucially, the action is
necessarily non-reciprocal.  It is also usually targeted at a vulnerable
other, and is persistent and repeated over time.  Hence it's quite different
to calling someone a name in annoyance - which can occur in all kinds of
relational contexts - as frankness on a horizontal field, as rebellion by a
subordinate, as a speech-code specific to a subculture, etc.  If
'harassment' or 'bullying' are redefined as any kind of non-positive action,
this not only trivialises them massively at the expense of real victims, but
also empowers bullies to find new means to abuse the rules - for instance,
through passive aggression (such as the misuse of reporting/informing in
contexts where everyone breaks the rules, or provoking predictable reactions
which can then be reported).

Another point.  If people are always (falsely) nice to each other (without
meaning it), nobody knows who likes them and who doesn't.  Niceness loses
its meaning.  If everyone is being nice out of social conformity, nobody
knows when someone is being nice for real.  It turns an emotionally
communicative gesture into an empty phatic gesture, and hence impoverishes
language.  Social life becomes all the more anxiety-inducing because nobody
knows if others being nice are doing it for real or because of the rules.

There are endless cases where someone will make a basically oppressive or
intolerant remark, and when the victim of this remark gets angry, it is the
victim who is punished - because the offensiveness of the oppressive remark
is a subject of "sanctioned ignorance".  Right-wingers and bigots (and
authoritarian personalities wherever they are politically) tend to be very
closed-minded, and speak in a blunt, dismissive tone which is obviously
going to offend and upset anyone on the other side - but they stop short of
the kind of stuff that other right-wingers would recognise as offensive.
They basically get away with provoking people and then getting other people
into trouble.  The problem is, it's built into how they think - they
function on outrage, on certainty in their own naturalised assumptions, on
seeking to defend the integrity of their own unsteady identity by creating
and policing border-lines.  If they participate (and there's a few of this
type in all parts of the political spectrum), they are going to cause
incivility without meaning to (they treat people like idiots, so they're
bound to get called an idiot in response sometimes).  They aren't usually
doing it on purpose, but blaming the victims who get annoyed with these
people and their oppressive discursive tactics, so as to create a false
appearance of "civility" which covers up the fundamental antagonism, is
simply empowering them further.

Another difficulty: to have 'civility' rules without them turning into the
imposition of a worldview and favouring of conformists, one would need to be
able to identify anything which is oppressive or creates an unsafe space for
others.  This requires a *lot* more critical literacy than the overwhelming
majority of people, including those who moderate websites, have today.

A lot of sites also use disproportionate responses.  For instance, bans and
even IP blocks are quite widely used for all kinds of trivial "offences".
This could cause massive psychological damage to people who are regular
users of a site and who could suffer trauma, loss of online friends, etc.
People suffering from wrongful banning are just as much victims and suffer
just as much as people who are harassed online, I strongly suspect.

A related problem is the "sphere of legitimate dissent" problem - this can
really distort political appearances.  In the British media, this means that
all kinds of hateful right-wing garbage gets onto pretty much all the
comment threads of national newspapers, but leftist comments deemed
offensive to the political sensibilities of the in-group are deleted.
People are allowed to incite racism and human rights violations, to call for
a thousand kinds of cruel punishments, to endorse torture, to advocate for
the BNP, to call multiculturalism a "failure", to call for the Internet to
be banned, sometimes even to completely misrepresent what's just been
reported in the article, and yet something as modest as questioning the
designation of rebels who target Chinese paramilitary police as
"terrorists", or suggesting that people who call for banning the hijab are
inciting racism, will be deleted rather than published.

A big problem is that, since these policies are done on the sly, it is very
hard to prove that they exist, and spaces often have an appearance of being
free and open discussions when in fact they are constrained in a great many
ways.  It looks like the right-wing bilge that's getting through is a fair
cross-section of opinion, or as if everyone agrees with the editorial line,
etc.  It isn't only a kind of propaganda, it's a kind of 'black' propaganda
in which the distorted message is very cleverly made to seem neutral.

There is also an even worse version, found especially in online gaming and
some networking sites, where sites will develop ways of profiling
'suspicious' activity which leads to user bans, punishments or warnings, but
which in fact is catching a lot of innocuous activity and hence is grossly
unfair (see for instance: Facebook users banned "for adding too many
friends"; various mechanisms to catch real-world item trading in games).
Someone can put years into building up a character, and build up an
extensive community of friends in-game (who they are often required by game
rules to keep in-game), only to lose it all overnight, for being wrongly
profiled for something they didn't do.  It must be devastating, particularly
for the small proportionof players who for reasons of disability, mainly
connect to the world online - I'm surprised there haven't been reports of
suicides over this (though I suspect it's because there's a secret rule that
if someone threatens suicide, their account is reinstated).

Thus, from a whole range of points of view - as matters of free speech, *and
also* as matters of equality, of avoiding discrimination against minorities,
of avoiding propagandist manipulation, of preventing misrepresentation of
sites, of protecting consumer rights of web users, of creating safe spaces,
of not encouraging insidious neuroses, of not empowering oppressors, of
avoiding deterring people from online activity - the stick needs to be bent
*the other way*, towards a vast reduction in tolerance for censorious abuses
and perhaps even "banning" some of the more obviously abusive.  This is hard
to see how to do without stifling freedom, but I could imagine a ratings
system for websites/lists where cases of alleged abuse could be posted and
investigated, similar to consumer rights in other fields; or where reputable
discussion sites would be expected to display a symbol like the Kite mark,
which is voluntary but provides certain guarantees for users (things like
proportionality, clarity of rules, right to criticise moderators,
non-discrimination, etc).

It's a matter of priorities, because harassment and exclusion-by-flaming are
also harmful, but framing the question wrongly, or emphasising this priority
at the expense of far bigger issues, can do a lot of harm.



PS:  Before anyone mentions it, I reject absolutely the absurd
American/neoliberal view that owners/moderators have a right to do what they
like by some analogy with owned property in real life (or for that matter
the view that owners of privately-owned public-use spaces in real life
should have privileges at all similar to those of owners of personal spaces)
- if someone creates a public space accessible to strangers, they are
providing a service for use (regardless of their motive for doing so), and
therefore, the legitimacy of their privilege is absolutely dependent on the
quality, inclusiveness, etc., of the service.  Exclusion, prohibition, etc.,
are always VERY serious matters which cannot be handled trivially or at
whim, because of their real effects in terms of constructing dominatory and
inegalitarian social relations.  Hence at present, there is a very big
problem of accountability, or possibility of reciprocal response, or
possibility of diffuse sanctioning for oppressive actions.

PPS:  I'm not talking here about cases where a group/list/etc is
specifically set up for a particular group (e.g. is right-wingers only,
anarchists only, dog lovers only) - I'm talking about cases where something
is portrayed as open discussion but is in fact closed in clear ways.  It's
the difference between segmenting space and hegemonising space.
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