A cyber nightmare for women
Trolling can turn the online world into a dark, dangerous place where girls and young women are especially vulnerable
That the Internet crawls with trolls is not surprising.
That so many teens and young women feed those trolls is shocking, and inexplicable.
Girls fill the ugly maw of the most exploitive websites, either willingly with porn-y self-portraits — “selfies,” as they’re called — or inadvertently because they let their boyfriends shoot them in compromising positions, or because they were careless with privacy controls.
There’s nothing a cybercreeper likes better than catching a revealing Instagram shot on an unprotected Facebook page and then posting it on a “parasite porn” site.
And there are the comments. Oh, the comments. Sick, obscene and hateful. Vicious and violent.
But then, that’s what much of trolling is about, pressing on the bruises of a person’s political or personal beliefs, just for the attention, the disruption, the cruelty or the “LULZ” (laughs).
Trolling, which has been part of the Internet since the first anonymous comment was ever posted, took a turn in 2012 that exposed just how much of a dark dangerous alley the online world is for women, especially young women.
We saw some of the fallout last September in the cyberstalking and sexualized attacks that led to the suicide of B.C. teen Amanda Todd.
It doesn’t even take sexy photos to make women targets of the most explicit sexual violence
We also saw it in three Irish teens and a girl in Texas who, in much-less-publicized cases late in the year, killed themselves after posting their images to Ask.fm, a site where anonymous posters can comment on submitted pictures and ask all sorts of questions.
Questions that, sadly, too many vulnerable, fragile girls answer, no matter how rude, crude, lewd or hurtful. “MY IMPULSE, which I have to check all the time, is to blame the girls,” observes York University Prof. Jennifer Jenson, who has been teaching pedagogy and technology for 15 years. “When you ask questions like, ‘Why do you do this?’ they say, ‘Well, all my friends are doing it.’ But the problem is so much larger than that, and they’re not even aware that it’s so much larger.”
“It’s systemic; it’s on all levels,” agrees Alice Marwick, an assistant professor of communication and media studies at New York’s Fordham University. “When you live in a culture that sexualizes young women overwhelmingly, it is not very surprising that, when you give young women the tools to objectify themselves, they use them in the same way.
“But the onus of responsibility for what’s happening online is on the young men. Even if girls are posting scantily clad pictures of (themselves) on the Internet, it’s not an invitation for sexual violence, comments or hate speech.”
Yes, well, tell that to the guys at some of the sex SubReddits, the niche forums on the user submission news and entertainment site Reddit.
Last fall, when Gawker.com outed “Violentacrez,” one of Reddit’s more active contributors of “creepshots” and “racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed,” the world learned of how unsuspecting young women were subject to dirty uncle activities on the content aggregation site. And not an obscure site. It’s owned by the publishing giant Condé Nast, which also produces The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Architectural Digest. THE YEAR 2012 may well go down in cyberhistory as the one in which the world realized it had created a sociocultural nightmare, one made up of accumulated years of media objectification of girls combined with a generation of boys who can just Google for free porn online, anytime, anywhere.
Mix those up with smartphone pictures that can be instantly uploaded to millions of darkened rooms across the globe and you have a situation in which any teenager can be an inadvertent child porn superstar.
Last fall, the Internet Watch Foundation released a study that showed online images and videos of young people, which researchers had identified on 68 websites over 48 hours, had been pirated from their original locations and posted in not-so-benign websites.
And yet, Jenson says that when she ran a workshop for women last spring, the attendees felt there was nothing they could do about online abuse.
“One of the things that we heard was that women blame themselves when they get harassed or when they get objectified in ways they didn’t expect. They think, ‘Well, what did I do wrong that I am being singled out?’ They don’t understand the larger structural issues that support that kind of (harassing) behaviour, the structural framework that they are themselves part of and don’t recognize.”
Avner Levin, director of the Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute at Ryerson University, has seen similar responses in his research.
“I wish I could tell you that men and women look at the Internet in the same way, but they don’t,” he says.
“I have to say that it’s anecdotal because it’s coming out of focus groups. But there are terms that keep coming up, like creeper or lurker, that are used by women to describe their online experiences — that somebody is creeping on their page, or stalking them online, or using any of those verbs. These fears and concerns are expressed almost exclusively by women. It seems to impact women a lot more than it impacts men.”
Marwick maintains that online interactions are not novel, just different.
“It’s not that men making sexist comments is a new thing. It’s just that they are so prevalent on the Internet and can be so easily accessed by people. The other new thing is the persistence of these comments. If I am walking down the street and somebody called me a sexist slur, it’s gone a second later. If somebody does that on the Internet, it can be accessed by Google, by searches on my name, and it has a more longterm impact. So that persistence and visibility on the Internet are the two things that differentiate the behaviour that goes on online from the day-to-day sexism that most women experience on some level or another.”
But it doesn’t even take sexy photos to make women targets of the most explicit sexual violence.
Just having a female username is enough to attract 25 times more threatening and/or sexually explicit private messages than male or gender-ambiguous usernames, according to a 2006 study by the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering.
“Women can write any kind of blog they want about fashion or cooking or parenting and they are not going to get hate comments; those are realms where it is acceptable for women to have opinions,” notes Marwick. “But as soon as they start on politics or other subjects, the amount of hate they get is beyond the pale.”
One high-profile example was the case of feminist pop culture blogger Anita Sarkeesian who, last May, launched a fundraising campaign to fight against the sexist stereotyping in the gaming world. The usual misogynist comments soon escalated into death and rape threats, and even an online game called “Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian,” in which players could virtually bash her face in.
Last month, when Sarkeesian did a TED talk about her experience, the comments on the YouTube video had to be shut down because even talking about the hate campaign against her inspired a hate campaign.
Then, when Toronto feminist and political activist Stephanie Guthrie jumped in to denounce the threats against Sarkeesian, she too became a target. She ended up filing a police report.
In November, she went to the police again in relation to a separate series of incidents on Twitter. As a result, Gregory Alan Elliott was charged with criminal harassment and breaking a peace bond.
Earlier this month, police announced that two more victims had come forward, and more charges were laid.
“We need to understand trolling for what it is; it’s engineered to be socially and personally destructive,” Guthrie tells the Star. “It’s a factor of not sitting in the same room with your target, and not dealing with the negative consequences of being face-to-face.”
SOCIAL SCIENTISTScall that the online disinhibition effect: when one is anonymous, distant or disconnected, anything goes.
It’s almost impossible to stop it once it has started. Under Canada’s Criminal Code, victims must be able to show that they feel physically threatened before criminal harassment charges can be laid. That can be hard to prove.
“There’s a kind of gap in the law,” says Toronto police Const. Scott Mills, who monitors social media.
“We need legislators to know we are inundated with this and it needs to be looked at. It’s an international issue. We need to think globally and act locally. We need a social media fusion centre that connects social services and law enforcement.”
Levin says society should expect more from the giant corporations that own most of the big social media sites. “I have never understood why they have an entire system in which they are effectively screening content to protect corporate interests — intellectual property and copyright — but are doing nothing to help women and girls defend their dignity. The best they offer is, ‘Write me an email, or use my online complaint form, and we’ll look into the matter.’
“We have to decide as a society that we have had enough. The corporations have to act. They know the identity of the people who abuse these platforms. This is an area just crying out for action.”