Tim's journal

[CW: suicide]

Elizabeth Waite was a trans woman who committed suicide last week. I did not know Elizabeth, but several of my friends did. In an article for the Daily Beast, Ben Collins described what happened after she died (CW if you follow the link to the article: it quotes extremely transmisogynistic and violent comments and images, including some that incite suicide.)


The night the article describes, I sat in my office after work with Elizabeth's profile open in a tab, watching the stream of hateful comments pour in almost faster than I could report them to Facebook. My friends had mentioned that members of an online forum known for terrorizing autistic trans women were flooding her profile (particularly her last post, in which she stated her intention to commit suicide) with hateful comments. Since I didn't know Elizabeth and wasn't emotionally affected by reading these comments in the same way that I would have been if I had known her, I felt that bearing witnesses and reporting the comments as abuse was work that I could usefully do. Since many of the comments were obviously from fake accounts, and Facebook is well-known for its desire for good data (read: monetizable data), specifically accounts attached to the names people use in everyday life, I reported those accounts as fake as well.

And later that night, I watched dozens and dozens of emails fill my inbox that were automated responses from Facebook's abuse reporting system. Most of the responses said this:

Thank you for taking the time to report something that you feel may violate our Community Standards. Reports like yours are an important part of making Facebook a safe and welcoming environment. We reviewed the comment you reported for displaying hate speech and found it doesn't violate our Community Standards.
Please let us know if you see anything else that concerns you. We want to keep Facebook safe and welcoming for everyone.

Because the posts in question were eventually made private, I can't quote the comments about which a Facebook content reviewer said "it doesn't violate our Community Standards", and in fairness to the person or people reviewing the comments, some of the comments weren't obviously hate speech without the context that they were in a thread of people piling on a dead trans woman. Facebook lacks a way to report abuse that goes beyond "the text of this individual comment, in the absence of context, violates Facebook's Community Standards." That's part of the problem. If trans people were in positions of power at Facebook, you can bet that there would be a "report transmisogynist hate mob" button that would call attention to an entire thread in which an individual was being targeted by a coordinated harassment campaign.

Likewise, even though Facebook is notorious for harassing trans people for using the names we use in everyday life as our account names, when I reported an account with the name "Donny J. Trump" for impersonation, I got an email back saying that the account would not be suspended because it wasn't impersonating anybody:



Facebook's tools don't address this problem. Imagine you're the family member of a trans woman who just died and whose profile is receiving a flood of hateful comments. Dozens of users are posting these comments -- too many to block, and anyway, what good would blocking do if you don't have access to the deceased person's account password? The comments would still be there, defacing that person's memory. Reporting individual comments has no effect if the harassment is conducted by posting a series of memes that aren't necessarily offensive on their own, but have the effect of demeaning and belittling a person's death when posted as comments in response to a suicide note. And getting an account converted to a "memorial account" -- which allows someone else to administer it -- can take days, which doesn't help when the harassment is happening right now. Again: you can look at Facebook and know that it's a company in which the voices of people who worry about questions like, "when I die, will people on an Internet forum organize a hate mob to post harmful comments all over my public posts?" are not represented.

But Facebook doesn't even do what they promise to do: delete individual comments that clearly violate their community standards:

Facebook removes hate speech, which includes content that directly attacks people based on their:

Race,
Ethnicity,
National origin,
Religious affiliation,
Sexual orientation,
Sex, gender, or gender identity, or
Serious disabilities or diseases.

Out of the many comments in the threads on Elizabeth Waite's profile that clearly attacked people based on their gender identity or disability, most were deemed by Facebook as "doesn't violate our Community Standards."

At this point, Facebook ought to just stop pretending to have an abuse reporting system, because what they promise to do has nothing to do with what they will actually do. Facebook's customers are advertisers -- people like you and me who produce content that helps Facebook deliver an audience for advertisers (you might think of us as "users") are the raw material, not the customers. Even so, it's strange that companies that pay for advertising on Facebook don't care that Facebook actively enables this kind of harassment.

If you read the Daily Beast article, you'll also notice that Facebook was completely unhelpful and unwilling to stop the abuse other than in a comment-by-comment way until one of the family members found a laptop that still had a login cookie for Elizabeth's account -- they wouldn't memorialize it or do anything else to stop the abuse wholesale in a timely fashion. What would have happened if the cookie had already expired?

Like anybody else, trans people die for all kinds of reasons. In an environment where hate speech is being encouraged from the highest levels of power, this is just going to keep happening more and more. Facebook will continue to refuse to do anything to stop it, because hate speech doesn't curtail their advertising revenue. In fact, as I wrote about in "The Democratization of Defamation", the economic incentives that exist encourage companies like Facebook to potentiate harassment, because more harassment means more impressions.

Although it's clearly crude economics that make Facebook unwilling to invest resources in abuse prevention, a public relations person at Facebook would probably tell you that they are reluctant to remove hate speech because of concern for free speech. Facebook is not a common carrier and has no legal (or moral) obligation to spend money to disseminate content that isn't consistent with its values as a business. Nevertheless, think about this for a moment: in your lifetime, you will probably have to see a loved one's profile get defaced like this and know that Facebook will do nothing about it. Imagine a graveyard that let people spray paint on tombstones and then stopped you from washing the paint off because of free speech.

What responsibilities do social media companies -- large ones like Facebook that operate as completely unregulated public utilities -- have to their users? If you'd like, you can call Facebook's billions of account holders "content creators"; what responsibilities do they have to those of us who create the content that Facebook uses for delivering an audience to advertisers?

Facebook would like you to think that they give us access to their site for free because they're nice people and like us, but corporations aren't nice people and don't like you. The other viewpoint you may have heard is: "If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product." Both of these stories are too simplistic. If you use Facebook, you do pay for it: with the labor you put into writing status updates and comments (without your labor, Facebook would have nothing to sell to advertisers) and with the attention you give to ads (even if you never click on an ad).

If you're using something that's being given away for free, then the person giving it away has no contractual obligations to you. Likewise, if you are raw material, than the people turning you into gold have no contractual obligations to you. But if you're paying to use Facebook -- and you are, with your attention -- that creates a buyer/seller relationship. Because this relationship is not formalized, you as the buyer assume all the risks in the transaction while the seller reaps all of the economic benefit.

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This post is the first in a 4-part series. Part 2 is "Phone Books and Megaphones."

Defame and Blame

The Internet makes it cheap to damage someone else's reputation without risking your own. The asymmetry between the low cost of spreading false information and the high cost to victims of such attacks is an economic and architectural failure, an unintended consequence of a communications infrastructure that's nominally decentralized while actually largely centralized under the control of a few advertising-based companies.

We do not hear a lot of discussion of harassment and defamation as either an economic failure or an engineering failure. Instead, we hear that online harassment is sad but inevitable, or that it happens "because people suck." As Anil Dash wrote, "don't read the comments" normalizes the expectation that behavior online will sink to the lowest common denominator and stay there. People seem to take a similar approach to outright harassment as they do to comments expressing bad opinions.

The cases I'm talking about, like the defamation of Kathy Sierra or the Gamergate coordinated harassment campaign, are effective because of their use of proxy recruitment. Effective propagandists who have social capital have learned how to recruit participants for their harassment campaigns: by coming up with a good lie and relying on network effects to do the rest of the work. Spreading false information about a woman -- particularly a woman who is especially vulnerable because of intersecting marginalized identities -- is easy because it confirms sexist biases (conscious or not-so-conscious) that we all have. Since most of us have internalized the belief that women are less competent, convincing people that a woman slept her way to the top doesn't take much effort.

"Don't read the comments" isn't good advice for people who are merely being pestered. (And anyway, we might question the use of the word "merely", since having to manage a flood of unwanted comments in order to receive desired communication tends to have a certain isolating effect on a person.) But it's especially bad advice for people who are being defamed. What good does it do to ignore the people spreading lies about you when ignoring them won't change what set of web pages a search engine returns as the top ten hits for your name? When you advise targets of harassment to "ignore it" or to "not feed the trolls", you shift responsibility onto victims and away from the people who benefit from the spread of false information (and I don't just mean the people who initiate harassment campaigns). In short, you blame victims.

Algorithms, Advertising, and Accountability

We neither talk much about the democratization of defamation, nor know how to mitigate it. It happens for a reason. Online harassment and defamation campaigns are an inevitable consequence of a telecommunications infrastructure that is dominated by for-profit advertising-supported businesses governed by algorithms that function autonomously. However, neither the autonomy of algorithms nor the ad-supported business model that most social media and search engine companies share is inevitable. Both are a result of decisions made by people, and both can be changed if people have the will to do so. The combination of ads and unsupervised algorithms currently defines the political economy of telecommunications, but it's by no means inevitable, natural, or necessary.

Broadcast television is, or was, advertising-supported, but it didn't lend itself to harassment and defamation nearly as easily, since a relatively small group of people had access to the megaphone. Likewise, online services don't have to encourage bad-faith speech, and discouraging it doesn't necessarily require a huge amount of labor: for example, eBay functions with minimal human oversight by limiting its feedback function to comments that go with an actual financial transaction. However, online search engines and recommendation systems typically use an advertising-based business model where customers pay for services with their attention rather than with money, and typically function with neither human supervision nor any design effort paid to discouraging defamation. Because of these two properties, it's relatively easy for anyone who's sufficiently determined to take control of what shows up when somebody looks up your name in the global distributed directory known as your favorite popular search engine -- that is, as long as you can't afford the public relations apparatus it takes to guard against such attacks. Harassment campaigns succeed to the extent that they exploit the ad-based business model and the absence of editorial oversight that characterize new media.

What This Article is Not About

Three topics I'm not addressing in this essay are:

• Holding public figures accountable. When people talk about wanting to limit access to the megaphone that search engines make freely available to sufficiently persistent individuals, a common response is, "Are you saying you want to limit people's ability to hold powerful people accountable?" I think it's important for private citizens to be able to use the Internet to expose wrongdoing by powerful people, such as elected officials. I don't agree with the assumption behind this question: the assumption that private citizens ought to be exposed to the same level of public scrutiny as public figures are.
• "Public shaming." What some people call "public shaming" refers to criticism of a person for a thing that person actually said. When Jon Ronson wrote about Justine Sacco getting "publicly shamed", he didn't mean that people falsely accused her of using her public platform to make a joke at the expense of people with AIDS. He and Sacco's critics agree that she did freely choose to make that joke. I'm talking about something different: when people use technology to construct a false narrative that portrays their adversary as having said something the adversary didn't say. This is not an article about "public shaming".

  The difference between defamation and shaming is defamation is defined by the behavior of the subject rather than the emotional reaction of the object; the latter sort of rests on this idea that it's wrong to make certain people feel certain ways, and I don't agree with that idea.

• Censorship. I'm not advocating censorship when I ask how we entered a technological regime in which quality control for information retrieval algorithms is difficult or impossible without suppressing legitimate speech. I'm pointing out that we've designed ourselves into a system where no fine distinctions are possible, and the rapid dissemination of lies can't be curtailed without suppressing truth. As Sarah Jeong points out in her book The Internet of Garbage, the belief that discouraging harassment means encouraging censorship is founded on the false assumption that addressing harassment online means suppressing or deleting content. In fact, search engines already filter, prioritize, and otherwise implement heuristics about information quality. Some of the same technologies could be used to -- in Jeong's words -- dampen harassment and protect the targets of harassment. If you object to that, then surely you also object to the decisions encoded in information retrieval algorithms about what documents are most relevant to a query.

What's Next

So far, I've argued that social network infrastructure has two design flaws which serve to amplify rather than dampening harassment:

• Lack of editorial oversight means that the barrier to entry to publishing has changed from being a journalist (while journalists have never been perfect, at least they're members of a profession with standards and ethics) to being someone with a little charisma and a lot of free time.
• Advertising-supported business models means that a mildly charismatic, very bored antihero can find many bright people eager to help disseminate their lies because lies are provocative and provocative stories get clicks.

In the next three installments, I'll elaborate on how we got into this situation and what we could do to change it.

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