A topic came up at dinner with friends recently that hit a nerve. I’ve written and/or tweeted about, more than once, the loss of hope I feel for humanity when I start to read online comments. And I’m not just talking about comment threads in typically hi-contention hot-topic areas like religion or politics. I had recently encountered contentious and offensive comments on websites as simple as DIY instructional content intended to be helpful. That’s just one of many examples. Snark is everywhere including places it just should never be.
It is incredible how rude, dismissive, and argumentative many people can be online when they’re hiding behind their cloak of anonymity. And that is exactly where the problem lies. Anonymity. It’s very easy for a “troll” to gain and maintain a sense of self-satisfaction and importance by belittling or contradicting any and everything they can. What an odd and disturbing phenomenon to observe.
This is a topic I am familiar with from a professional position. The company I work for has a website that supports comments, and we have had to spend a significant amount of time architecting and implementing filtering, reducing and omitting comments based on keywords and patterns. We have suspended accounts of long-time members who have utilized our site, a site intended to enable taking action to promote positive change in the world, for their having digressed to negative and uncivilized engagement with other members through their comments.
Anonymity is a huge component of our struggle. We enable people to sign petitions without their names being shown, and if we do show names, we don’t show full names. We show their first name and last initial. And I think that’s just fine. Hell, it might not even be a real name.
People are signing petitions about social and political causes, and in some cases, they’re sensitive topics. Taking a public stance to promote action in the social arena can bring about backlash. I, for example, want to promote the enforcement of stricter gun laws, yet I might not want to deal with pro-gun friends and family using my public support of this as a launchpad to engage in a dialogue I know will be fruitless and thus have no interest in engaging in. So, in this case, hiding my name on the petition seems like a reasonable thing to do.
But what about comments I might leave? Should I be allowed to go to a pro-gun website and use the discussion board to engage in an articulate and reasonable, mature, adult discussion about my views and concerns? Absolutely! As long as their terms and conditions allow such actions, I think that’s healthy. It’s a necessary step towards having conversations centered on facts, not conflict and assumptions. On data, not cultural beliefs and norms. These are essential discussions and debates that can change our society for the better.
The constructive use of comment sections is not what I am concerned about. What upsets me to no end is the petty, immature, entitled, offensive attack position I see far more than a well-stated and well-thought-out point. People aren’t bringing up valid information for me to consider making a decision. They’re calling me names. They’re slinging mud, belittling my intellect, attacking my political leanings without knowing me at all, even my lineage, on occasions. They are offensive, judgmental, dismissive and shut down healthy communication.
What makes anybody feel they have a right to call people names? We’re not 6yr olds fighting over a swing set at lunchtime. To make dismissive characterizations, observations and generalizations without any backup or data? How is it people feel like they have a right to just ignore that our evolution as a species in a society relies on a well-balanced dialogue and discourse in order to come to a mutual point of agreement and understanding?
Every time I find myself reading comments related to anything about opinion or fact, I’m finding infantile, childish ignorance and offensive responses in these threats. And I think I know why. Because the authors are never accountable.
There was a South Park episode where Gerald Broflovski became a “troll“. It perfectly represents the dynamic I’m referencing. So yes, in a roundabout way, I am referring to South Park as a moral compass our society needs to follow :-). Gerald gets this innate primal gratification from getting online and calling people names. But when a foreign power hacks and threatens to expose the name of all the trolls, he loses his shit. And rightfully so. Because that’s where these people are hiding. Behind innocuous made-up bullshit ID names and not their own identity.
So how do I think we could solve this? I think it’s really simple, and I believe the level of effort to manage this would be dramatically less than the level of cost and effort it takes for every company worldwide to try and manage their own policing of this—an international online registry.
Just think about this for a minute and don’t respond with “I need my privacy “complaints. it’s paranoid to worry about anybody knowing anything about you. because they already fucking do! Worrying about your online privacy today is as ridiculous as worrying about tearing up carbon copies of a credit card slip was back in the late 70s. The information that you’re so worried about anybody getting is already out there in droves.
Wait, I think I’m getting snarky and dismissive. Let me start again
What if there was an international online registry of validated users, and access to post comments on websites required account/ID validation of your identity. Your name, location and even contact information become public. How would that affect you, personally? How would that affect your usage of the Internet? How would that affect the population of the Internet users responsible for the degradation and “fake news“ nature that is the cesspool of the web?
I am not against a platform where people can engage in rational, reasonable debate. That’s healthy. We need that. For example, by being open to arguments related to gun rights, including reading dialogues on websites with posts by supporters, I changed my view. It changed my view about guns in America. That’s substantial. It didn’t change because somebody called me a hippie left-wing socialist fuckwad. It happened because somebody engaged in a simple explanation of their circumstances and live events and why they felt I need to have some measure of protection for themselves and their family. And it made sense. Again, it changed my mind. I recognized and incorporated their points into my position on guns.
It boils down to the simple expectation that you should be fully accountable for your actions. We all are, aren’t we? That’s why we have laws. That’s why crimes reduce in areas with better policing and the identification and subsequent apprehension and prosecution of people who break our society’s laws. Free speech is the right we all throw out as justification to say whatever we want to say, but free speech and anonymity should not be synonymous. If I go to Hyde Park in London and listen to one of the many people standing on saltboxes, espousing their beliefs, they’re not doing so with a bag over their head or from behind a partition. They are accessible, they are accountable, and they are identifiable. Why should we, as a society, not expect the same thing in the public forum that is online comments?
I am convinced that if every person who wanted to go on and make some dipshit comment had to do so with their full name and city of residence mandatorily visible, they probably think twice about the language and words they use. If the submission and posting of a comment required validation and visibility of their identity via an international registry of users, nobody would be able to hide anymore. I would see not only their “you are a fucking idiot you left-wing liberal douche bag“ comment but also their full name and location. And so what everybody else in the world. Including their neighbors, family, friends, and co-workers. Everybody would know that Bob Smith at 123 Anystreet, Portland, Oregon, had either a valid intelligent point to share in an online forum,… or that he was just being a dick again.
We’re never going to get rid of the dicks. They’re always going to be there. And I know because I’ve been one on occasion. I don’t expect everybody to be on their best behavior in every way possible every minute of the day. We all have our stressors, our urgency, our agenda, and our opinions. But we should not be allowed to use a public forum architected for social engagements without complete social transparency and accountability.
I recognize that many of the barriers to implementing this are based on financial impact for businesses, but the success of the business should not be at the cost of the success of our society working together to come to agreements and understandings instead of disputes and division.
I want to see this happen in my lifetime, but I know I won’t. I just have to hope that the balance of power between the political and the business aspects of our global society will eventually care more about our population and human rights over the almighty dollar in pursuit of wealth.
Oh, and I want to pony.