Trying to turn the tide against online abuse

If you're a UK parent, there's a very good chance you'll already know that this week is Anti-Bullying week, with a simple theme: ‘Stop and think – words can hurt’.  Beatbullying and other organisations are doing a great job in spreading the anti-bullying gospel - Beatbullying's global Big March will culminate with the delivery of a petition to the United Nations Building in New York; asking the United Nations to explicitly enshrine 'bullying' in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

But it's not just children who suffer bullying, on or offline. In the work eModeration does, inevitably we see an enormous amount of bullying and online abuse between grown people. This week, along with The New Statesman's Helen Lewis-Hasteley I spoke to Jane Garvey on Radio 4's Woman's Hour about the vicious attacks frequently levelled against woman who dare raise their head over the internet parapet and express themselves. Laurie Penny, writing in The Independent, concludes: "An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the internet".  With horrifying candour she writes: "You come to expect it, as a woman writer, particularly if you're political. You come to expect the vitriol, the insults, the death threats. After a while, the emails and tweets and comments containing graphic fantasies of how and where and with what kitchen implements certain pseudonymous people would like to rape you cease to be shocking, and become merely a daily or weekly annoyance, something to phone your girlfriends about, seeking safety in hollow laughter."

Some bloggers and journalists become akin to celebrities: at least public figures. They are easy-to-reach targets in a way they never were before.  See Laurence Green's great post last week in musician's blog Totally Vivid: "In one of the most high profile cases, Welsh Opera singer and Forces’ sweetheart Katherine Jenkins was subjected to continued online bullying by a specific user on Twitter for a year, culminating in the user sending a crude, insensitive question in to a chat show Katherine was participating in."  It's really sad to see such attacks against celebrities, particularly from young people, attacks that are incredibly personal and like playground bullying. We of course delete them but it's amazing how people use Twitter to openly abuse celebrities knowing they quite possibly will read them. I can only speculate that it's the sense of power which the direct communication of Twitter and Facebook gives to these individuals which provides the kick.
 
Much of our moderators' time is spent deleting the horrifyingly aggressive comments levelled against celebrities - or indeed levelled against each other for expressing like/dislike of celebrities.  Actually, against each other for expressing pretty much any opinion at all.  A moderator said to me recently that such a simple community engagement tactic as a 'love/hate' poll could stir up a virtual feeding frenzy amongst 'fans': she has come to know which areas of a forum or status updates on a Page will need her attention most.  And we have to rotate our moderators away from some projects because facing that amount of filth and grief every day becomes unbearable (thank heavens we get to moderate kid's hallowe'en pumpkin contents too).

We blogged recently on Facebook's lack of action over Pages with names such as: "What's 10 inches and gets girls to have sex with me? My knife." Though Facebook's terms of use prohibit posting content that is "hateful," "threatening," or "incites violence," getting the social network to take down user-created pages such as "I know a silly little b--ch that needs a good slap" took almost two months, thousands of people, and outspoken criticism on a multitude of social media sites. And even then, more than a dozen in the same vein remain. It seems that some of these sites are so frightened of upsetting a tiny percentage of sexist, aggressive men at the risk of not being seen as getting the 'joke', that they're chipping away at what becomes acceptable behaviour in society as a whole.

Image courtesy of Flickr by angelsk

And whilst anonymous commenting certainly brings out the worst in people, it seems that using your social network identity is not the moral safeguard that perhaps it once was.  I'm honestly shocked at the things people will post and 'sign'.  What do they do?  Write "I hate your f**king guts and I hope your daughter dies screaming' to some C list celeb - then get up and help the kids with their homework?

I don't think I'm being hopelessly nostalgic when I say that it wasn't like this on the internet ten, or even five years ago.  We seem to be locked into a downward spiral where prevalence begets acceptability; where the young - and the not-so-young - are hiding behind their shut doors and keyboard to express sentiments that they would never do face to face.  Because it's OK to do that; because those words are everywhere.

So, I think what I'm trying to say is this.  We have to set the bar higher.  Platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, publishers, columnists, celebrities, bloggers ... we need to start and maintain a culture of zero tolerance towards online aggression, abuse, bullying.  And that takes effort and determination and a lot of time (= money).  But what else can we possibly do?  I hope against hope that we can turn the tide.

I realise that of course I have a vested interest in this, but believe me, I would rather my staff spent their days nurturing communities and helping with customer service queries than scrubbing the excrement off Facebook walls.