Danielle Citron

“ So, I initially started by explaining–when I first stated talking about online harassment, I was told I was going to break the internet, that is, the internet as a forum for public discourse. And I think a crucially important lesson I think we’ve all now, with eight, nine, years behind us, is that we know that the First Amendment—as a doctrine—it doesn’t operate in absolutes, right? There are certain categories of speech that we know either receive no protection or less rigorous protection, because they give us so little and they cause so much harm. ”

“ Three features of harassment And it’s often a perfect storm of three key features. One, it really attempts to terrorize people, so by threatening them with physical violence, as Kathy Sierra experienced, by impersonating them online, suggesting that they’re interested in sex, and providing their contact information. It involves reputation—harming lies, like defamation, and then often the manipulation of search engines, to ensure that the lies are prominent in a search of someone’s name. ”

“ You know, we always think of civil rights violations, or have long thought of them, is when you interfere with people’s substantial and tangible life opportunities. And you do that, because of their membership in a protected group. So think about Anita Sarkeesian. Like, what did the cyber-mob know about Anita? But that she was a woman writing about sexism in video games, truly. And for that, the wrath of the rape threats, privacy invasions, defamation, intimidation, and attempts to basically stop her from doing her work. ”

“ It’s true that in my book and in my work, I am focused more on the person who is truly targeted and isn’t striking back, And that is the better part of the story for harassment and stalking, outside of Wikipedia, right? That is, when you face–either it’s in a domestic circumstance, which you then recruit and you have, sort of, cyber-stalking by proxy, you’ve got people that help you, right? You get a mob going. It’s sort of one person who knows the victim and then starts a flame. ”

“ So when victims and their supporters try to, sort of, talk back–and I’m not talking about Wikipedia–I’m just talking generally. You often see a cyber mob that then comes back so much harder at victims, right? So that it’s just perilous–it’s personally perilous–for victims and their supporters. But I hope that in thinking forward about your, kind of, policies and, sort of, norm-creation on your site, that you, you know, think hard about how hard it is for people who face, you know, their own photos have appeared on line, or doctored photos, and all that kind of abuse is so silencing. ”

“ So when victims... in describing some of the kind of trivializing that we do to online harassment.... You know, a key problem is that when people go to law enforcement, they’re bedeviled by the same social attitudes that many are bedeviled by, which is “turn your computer off”, is what they’re told. “Oh, boys will be boys.” Like, “Ignore it, it will go away.” And some of that comes from—I have talked to so many law enforcement officers, so it’s not to say that they are, you know, uniquely have really poor attitudes. They’re also just not used to the technology. ”

“ So much of online harassment is constituted by speech that has either no protection or very little protection. So, what kind of speech am I talking about? True threats, the defamation of private individuals about purely private matters, crime-facilitating speech like extortion and solicitation, and speech that enjoys less rigorous protection, are laws that protect the privacy of communications. So we think of wiretap laws and laws that intervene on behalf of privacy in our communications, we see that they get less — they’re not going to be subject to strict scrutiny. ”

“ Like, how to we know the kind of society we want to live in, if we don’t speak, if we don’t—I think for me more importantly—is to listen. If we don’t take in ideas, then we can’t figure out the kind of world we want to live in.
But I think it’s really important to realize, what is a rape threat, a nude photo of someone posted without their consent, and defamatory—like a iie—that contributes nothing to the set of ideas we need to figure out the kind of world we live in. ”

“ But she had this piece about online harassment in which she said, “Rape threats—what they say to all women, is that they can’t be at ease online.” And I think that that’s exactly right.
Online harassment is often designed to basically make people unemployable, right, and unable to express themselves, which is a fundamental liberty and right. ”

“ So much, I think we always look to at least–everyone is not a lawyer–looks to lawyers and folks in tech to say, “law, you fix it”, right? and lawyers always say, like, “we want the CS or computer scientists, we want the technologists to fix a lot of our problems”, right. We’re all pointing at each other. But I think, you know, you are all engaged in the process of. sort of, sorting through what your norms are on your site.
So, I’m excited to be here to talk to you about my book, which focuses on the problem of online harassment and stalking. ”

“ Civil law [1:06:36] So, what can law do right now? So often victims are told, just sue your harasser, if, of course–if–you can figure out who they are. There are civil claims that victims can bring against their harassers. And it’s absolutely true there are well-tailored torts, like defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress— [unintellible] , privacy tort, public disclosure of private fact. But really, the problem is the practicality of it. It’s so expensive to bring a lawsuit. I always think it’s sort of fabulous and fiery, but not in practical fact. ”

“ So I think, prioritizing the person who’s being targeted, so that they don’t slink away, and you lose their voices. It’s a real social cost; it’s not just a cost to the individual, but it’s a cost to all of us, right, who could hear their voices. So I think, if we don’t–if the balance is off, and we’re only thinking about the harasser’s access and ability to speak, and write, and you know provide “knowledge” if you call it that, if they’re posting nude photos, or whatever it is, and rape and death threats, I think we could be more circumspect, right. ”

“ Defining internet harassment [51:03] Okay, so how do we define cyber-harassment and stalking? And I have to say, I read Wikipedia’s description, and I know it’s not necessarily prescriptive, but your kind of...guidelines...and it was really sophisticated. I thought, this is terrific, right?
So what is harassment and stalking? It is a repeated and persistent course of conduct that’s targeted at a specific individual, that is designed to and intended to, and that causes substantial emotional distress, and often the fear of physical harm. ”

“ In fact, normally it’s just an everyday person. But it’s also the posting of people’s nude photos, in violation of their confidence and trust, like we see on revenge porn sites. And the last component is using technology to effectively shove people offline, whether it’s a DDOS attack or otherwise, like engaging in manipulation of technologies with brute force to silence people.
Who does cyber-harassment impact? So, I think that since I gave you a little, sort of, sense of what this abuse looks like, I’m going to give you.... ”

“ So, I get about twenty emails a week from women Wikipedians who don’t want to deal with any of the process on Wiki, because every arbitration committee case that has involved women in the last two years, has involved all of them being banned. The entire oversight team made a blanket statement that they were unwilling to oversight two words that were gender pronouns that had never been privately disclosed, or rather publicly disclosed. And in one of our breakout sessions about gender, the word I heard more than harassment, was Manchester. ”

“ Here we are on this wild tumblin’ website, and it’s supposed to be open to everyone, and if you implement non-harassment for everyone, well, that includes people just coming out of prison or still in prison, it includes people in war zones, it includes people in fire stations and emergency response who have a legitimate reason to defuse a little tension now and then, and a morbid sense of humor. It includes places like a place where I used to live overseas where it was considered perfectly normal to require women to sleep with their boss, that was just part of life in that society. ”

“ From the employers perspective, it makes eminent sense. Do you want a client saying to you, “Why would you hire that person? Did you see in a google search, like, what this person did?” And it’s not that employers believe that individuals have posted their nude photos online by themselves. It’s not that they believe that Holly’s a prostitute or whatever, right? It’s so much safer, and cheaper and easier to hire someone who doesn’t come with baggage. Just that simple. And victims really struggle emotionally. ”

“ Precision isn’t very good, if we for example made a rule that was very easy for people who are harassed to report that harassment, but it also enabled people to use reporting harassment to harass other people. ”

“ And so, they’re working the refs, is what I call it, keeping people from the situation, keeping people who want to enforce policy away from the situation, so they can do what they want. And the second point is we have this paradigm on Wikipedia, we come out of this paradigm: we have rights and access. We worry about the rights and the access of the harassers: we need to offer them a path to rehabilitation, what about their right to edit, and all this; we don’t think about the people they are harassing off Wikipedia — what about their right to edit? ”

“ If we think about, sort of, women in the workplace in the 60s and 70s, right, the workplace that my mom, right, a lot of our parents grew up in, you know. If a woman objected to sexual harassment in the workplace, the response was like “beat it”. ”

“ So you, sort of, spoke about gender, right, how is it that we’re going to ... how can a man adjudicate where another man is the harasser. It’s not always men who are the harassers, it could be women, of course, too, right? But I think we haven’t, at least in the law, that lesson, we’ve never said that, right, We think really narrowly about the way in which we understand a impartial decision maker, right? But the due process tradition also teaches us that we should give people a chance to bring evidence forward, and have the ability to present evidence and to have council if they so want it. ”

“ So even if the system will work, we need to convince people that they should sign on to it, so we can even try it in the first place. And so the thing that we’re struggling with now is, yes, we’re making, like, a place where you can safely report harassment, and somebody will turn around and well, now somebody is going to in a very hidden place, report that I’m harassing them, and you know, work against me, And it’s probably a boogy man, and definitely something that we can iterate on and improve, but getting past that threshold is the thing that we’re really struggling with. ”

“ Because online searches are our CV. So, we know that over ninety-five per cent of employers tell us that they are searching people in order to figure out if they are going to interview or hire people. And there are companies that are working on mining data online, to identify candidates. So sometimes you don’t have control over this, right. What a Microsoft study found, that over 80% of employers who are searching people, there’s a negative result. ”

“ The law recognizes harassment as a civil rights issue You know, the idea that we would bring law to bear against threats—privacy invasions like the spreading of social security numbers, that can aid and abet identity theft, defamation—the idea that we would bring law to bear against it was...I was told I was going to break the internet, right? ”

“ And if that’s what is motivating you, your attempt to silence and destroy peoples' careers and lives, I think we should be less, frankly, worried about their speech. And the law is less worried.
Private companies: policing norms on their own sites [1:19:15] But of course, we’re limited in what law can do, although there’s plenty that the First Amendment lets us do. But that leaves a huge gap. So often we rely on all of us. We rely on private companies that are not constrained by the First Amendment. Twitter and Google and Facebook, they’re not constrained by it. They’re private actors. ”

“ What happens is, you have a community which is 90% male and who will tend to sympathize more with the male half of that conversation than with the female half of that conversation. So while–it’s difficult to get consensus that something is harassment, or that something shouldn’t be allowed, Someone mentioned Manchester earlier, the situation here a British contributor who uses English in a British way so he uses the c-word differently than people in the states would use it. ”

“ Low profile people: Holly Jacobs [57:04] But of course, it’s not just the high profile, whether it’s Kathy Sierra or Anita Sarkeesian. Really, more, I think, importantly, more prevalently, it’s the every day person, right, the grad student, the nurse, the dentist. I can’t tell you the countless people I talked to in research and writing my book. So I’ll just tell you about one, so we can get a full understanding of what this abuse feels like from the perspective of the victim. ”