Lucy Mangan Online threats have real-world consequences
Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions, has announced that the Crown Prosecution Service is to crack down on online hate crime. At last. Institutional thinking has finally caught up slightly with modern life and realised that the internet is not a separate country, or planet, but very much part of the real world and should therefore be brought within the same legal framework as everything else.
I’m lucky enough only to have had one rape threat online. This really does count as good fortune. Most of my fellow female journalists on Twitter and other social media platforms have to spend a far greater time blocking and reporting all the trolls who claim they want to kill, maim, assault and otherwise harm them in various detailed ways.
I remember, with a strange form of compassion, one who, frustrated by the 140-character limit of tweets, directed the object of his vile abuse towards a longer post on Facebook, where his delightful imagination could find full expression. She replied helpfully: “Did you know you can thread tweets?”, and reported him to the police.
Some people objected to the crackdown (and presumably would object to my and my friend’s reporting of our experiences to the police) on the grounds that overstretched forces should spend their time and other limited resources investigating “real crime”. And, yes, of course, online hate crimes and death or rape threats should take their place in the pecking order – no actual homophobic or Islamophobic attack or real-life rape or murder should go unattended in favour of the inarguably lesser crime of threatening to do so online. And, crucially, no one is suggesting that they should, or would.
The point is, rather, that online threats and abuse should be given a place in the pecking order. They are a real thing. Just because they are written down rather than shouted in someone’s face doesn’t make them meaningless. They aren’t intended less maliciously. You might be less immediately fearful for your physical safety than if they were delivered face to face, but you don’t receive them with a sanguine shrug either. They worry you. They intimidate you. To receive online abuse or a threat feels awful. No, it’s not like actually being assaulted (and, again, I speak from experience), but remember – that’s not the metric. The metric is how it compares to a face-to-face threat, and there it compares very well. Or, of course, very badly, depending on how you look at it.
An online threat or piece of abuse (though they rarely come along singly online, incidentally – “dogpiling” is a frequent occurrence because it’s easier to put the call out for fellow mouthfrothers online than it is on a random street, when a passer-by has displeased you in some way) feels and works almost exactly like a “traditional” one: it brings back bad memories, it feels like an invasion, it gets under your skin and it frightens you. At the very least, it reminds you (in the unlikely event that you had ever forgotten) that the world is filled with terrible people and makes you alter – maybe only a fraction, maybe only temporarily, maybe not – your behaviour accordingly. Online threats have real world consequences for the victim and should for the perpetrator, too.
From a wider perspective, there are real-life effects of much greater import. Foremost among them is the way the lack of restraint or control on what people say has given rise to a dangerous set of beliefs (or professed beliefs) among a certain demographic. Social media platforms’s and law enforcement’s hitherto almost total unwillingness to insist on the standard of behaviour we collectively expect to uphold and be upheld in real life has resulted in people convincing themselves that they have: a) a total right to free speech, and that b) free speech means being able to say exactly what they want to say without punitive results. The increasingly unsavoury members of the alt-right gained confidence on the consequence-free proving ground of the internet, which provides no hint of the principle underlying all civilised societies – that your right to swing your fist ends where it meets another’s nose.
So first you lurk anonymously, then you put a few feelers out and attract a few other like-minded souls. Still no one stops you. On and on it goes, a few digital steps, a few more followers at a time and eventually you are emboldened enough to swap real names, come out into the real world and start making a real, perilous difference.
And when, out in the real world, on the real streets in Charlottesville and elsewhere, you meet people who do seek to restrain your behaviour and stop the untrammelled advertisement of your beliefs, this seems like an unconscionable infringement of your liberty. Suddenly you are, to you and your kind, at least, demonstrably the victim in the struggle, and so your position hardens and the opposing sides entrench.
The internet is young and we are all like children learning their way around a new house, a new toy, a new concept. We need to be trained in its arts, its uses, its possibilities, its ramifications. The owners of social media platforms should have acted as our parents, dispelling or telling us off when we went too far and handing down condign punishment for further infractions. They didn’t – not out of the highfalutin’ cyber-libertarian principles, as so many would like to believe, but because, like most parenting, it would have cost them money.
And so now it is up to the CPS and other outside institutions to play catch up. There must, for all children, be consequences.