Manawatu Standard

Hate speech is the norm online

- MIKKI KENDALL Washington Post

Leslie Jones of ‘‘Ghostbuste­rs’’ fame has been under attack. For the crime of being in a movie remake, the actor was called ugly names, sent racist images and relentless­ly attacked for hours by dozens of accounts on Twitter. While what’s happened to her is awful, it isn’t remotely new or unusual, especially for women. Every few months, a story breaks about harassment online, and each time responses assume that it is an isolated incident – that the bad behavior is the work of ‘‘trolls,’’ as though the fingers typing the hateful messages don’t belong to real people who live next door, work in the same offices, go to the same schools as everyone else.

In 2012, when singer Adele and her new baby were attacked online, it was referred to as trolling and dismissed. When comedian Robin Williams’s daughter was driven off Twitter by harassment after her father’s death, Twitter promised to review its policies, but the perpetrato­rs were again dismissed as trolls. Articles about ignoring trolls and getting on with your life assert that victims of trolling could solve the problem by not responding.

Twitter’s response to this latest incident is to once again ban Milo Yiannopoul­os, a Breitbart tech editor and instigator of many harassment incidents. Yiannopoul­os is on the very short list of people Twitter has banned from using the site permanentl­y. This time, in theory, he will not be allowed to return. His fans, and others who are very confused about what the First Amendment guarantee of free speech means to a private entity like Twitter, insist that he has a right to a platform for his malicious attacks. Banning Yiannopoul­os is unlikely to change anything. The real problem is cultural messaging that normalized hateful speech on public platforms and lets Jones’s harassers think nothing of tweeting vitriol under their real names. It’s disingenuo­us to be shocked that Yiannopoul­os has such an ardent following of racist, sexist minions, when one takes Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric into considerat­ion. Trump is the Republican nominee for president, and he didn’t get into that position because no one voted for him.

Trump’s abrasive language garnered him the same kind of supporters as Yiannopoul­os, and while it might be easy to dismiss the abuses happening on Twitter, the sad fact is that we have a sitting member of the House of Representa­tives on television claiming that no other group has made as many contributi­ons to civilizati­on as white people. School textbooks have become a battlegrou­nd between historical facts and racist rewrites of history. As we see a return to xenophobia poorly disguised as anti-terrorist strategy, we should be asking why as a society we are choosing to go backward instead of forward.

In 2016 America should be striving toward equality. Instead, the KKK is announcing a comeback, millennial­s are turning out to be just as racist as their parents’ generation, and hate once again is a viable platform for a candidate for public office.

This is not just a matter of speech, despite the persistent notion that online harassment is easy to escape because in theory you can close the tab or turn off the computer. Can we really claim that the trolls are outside the norm when the norm dismisses their behavior or even supports it on flimsy free speech grounds? After all, the people behind those keyboards sending hateful messages and imagery can vote. Ignoring bigots in our midst and failing to take them seriously can have a negative impact on everyone.

People like Yiannopoul­os are the symptom, but the real disease is the way that bigotry is being normalized as something harmless. It’s not. Some of the world’s darkest moments have happened because hate of ‘‘the other’’ spread like wildfire and stripped people of empathy, reason or basic human decency. The harassment of Jones made news because she’s famous. But Jones is far from alone, and that says something horrible about what our society considers normal speech. Online harassment isn’t a separate problem from offline bigotry, it’s just a window into a mindset we like to pretend is rare instead of distressin­gly common.

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