Tag Archives: trolls

Hating the Anonymous Haters

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This is one of those posts I wrote for another site, but then it didn’t work out. So here it is; slightly off-brand for HU, but so it goes.
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Anonymity makes the Internet ugly. This is common-sense online wisdom, and there’s research to back it up. A 2014 article by Arthur D. Santana examining newspaper comment threads found that “Non-anonymous commenters were nearly three times as likely to remain civil in their comments as those who were anonymous.” Non-anonymous forums significantly reduced abusive comments, or, as Santana put it, “there is a dramatic improvement in the level of civility in online conversations when anonymity is removed.” Anonymity makes people meaner; it creates less civil, more toxic communities.

This is the context in which Kathleen Hale’s recent article about an anonymous reviewer was published at The Guardian. Hale is a writer and the author of the novel No One Else Can Have You. Her article is about one of the novel’s critics, an anonymous online reviewer who went under the alias of Blythe Harris. Harris, Hale claims, was notorious among authors on the Goodreads book discussion website for her negativity and for abuse. Hale cites one instance in which Harris and her followers targeted a supposedly 14-year old reviewer, swamping her with abuse and profanity (whether the 14-year-old was really 14 is open to question.) Hale’s lengthy essay goes on to describe how Hale tracked Harris down and unmasked her.
 

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Hale acknowledges that her obsession with Harris’ reviews and criticism wasn’t healthy; in the first sentence of the essay she characterizes herself as a “charmless lunatic.” But she also seems proud of her success as a “catfisher.” In online parlance, a “catfish” is someone who creates a fake identity online in order to deceive others, especially potential romantic partners. Harris, here, is the anonymous catfish — she’s a deceptive troll, and Hale reels her in and brings her down. Hale admits to being obsessive and pitiful, but the narrative presents her as a bit heroic too. She’s taking a stand for bullied authors and against the uncivil, anonymous hordes.

The problem is that, reading the essay with just a little bit of skepticism, Hale doesn’t come off as the good guy in this interaction. She presents her “lunatic” behavior as funny, obsessive, quirky, and sad — “Over the course of an admittedly privileged life,” she says, “I consider my visit to [Bythe’s] as a sort of personal rock bottom.”

But what she doesn’t say is that, if you identify with Harris for a moment, the stalking behavior is terrifying. Hale uses her influence as an author to get Harris’ personal information, including her address and work phone. She shows up at her house. She calls her workplace multiple times. And then, she writes an article in an international venue in which she shames and vilifies the woman she has stalked. The Guardian says that some of the names in the piece were changed— but Blythe’s online name is not changed, and her real name appears to have been used as well (at the least, there is no clear statement that the name was changed.) Even just printing the name Blythe uses online is problematic; attacking someone in a mainstream forum can send angry readers swooping down on their social media accounts in droves. The article itself is effectively an extension of a campaign of harassment aimed at someone whose main sin was that she didn’t like Hale’s book and didn’t use her real name online.

Again, there is evidence that anonymity is associated with incivility and bad behavior. But anonymity doesn’t cause incivility, or, at least, it’s not the sole cause. Santana’s report noted that 30% of non-anonymous comments on the news stories they surveyed were uncivil. Anonymous users are responsible for a lot of abuse online, but by no means for all of it. Personally, some of the most memorably unpleasant interactions I’ve had on the Internet have been with people using their real names — in some cases, with established journalists.

More, there are some good reasons why a writer online might want to be anonymous. As Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “The decision in favor of anonymity may be motivated by fear of economic or official retaliation, by concern about social ostracism, or merely by a desire to preserve as much of one’s privacy as possible.” To provide just one example, there are incidents of teachers being fired for expressing controversial opinions online; any teacher, therefore, has good reason to hide his or her identity in online forums. For that matter, as author Bree Bridges commented on twitter ,” “Why would a reviewer EVER use a fake name?” implored the author currently stalking the hell out of one. “I can’t think of one reason.”” Hale’s article demonstrates exactly why a reviewer might want to use a pseudonym. If you can avoid it, you don’t want an obsessive stalker like Hale to know who you are or where you live.

Hale’s article raises the disturbing possibility that anonymity may lead to less civility — and that decrying anonymity may also lead to less civility. Some people, clearly, feel empowered by anonymity to hurl abuse and threats, as the ongoing death threats against women in the gaming industry demonstrate. But at the same time, the association of trolling with anonymity, and the use of terms like “catfishing” makes people like Hale (and apparently her editors at the Guardian) feel like they are entitled to stalk and shame people they disagree with online. Decrying anonymous trolling, and the association of anonymity with deception and bad actors, can be used to justify further harassment and abuse aimed at the supposed bullies.

Hale’s essay unleashed a firestorm of criticism from book writers and bloggers (some examples are here and here. A number of blogs organized a blackout on reviews of new releases in an effort to bring attention to the fear many reviewers feel that they might be targeted by authors. Hopefully Guardian Books and other publications are paying attention. Just because a writer is anonymous doesn’t mean that it’s okay to stalk, harass, and humiliate them. Even though anonymity is often used for incivility online, a pseudonym, in itself, doesn’t make you a legitimate target.

Shut Up

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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Comments sections can be sewers. Anybody who’s been on the web knows this, of course. But there’s an extra special rush of bile when it happens to the comments section on something you’ve written. I think the low point for me was this review I wrote recently about the documentary Hitler’s Children. The film focused on how the descendents of Nazis like Hermann and Goering have tried to cope with their ancestors’ atrocities. Many of the comments were thoughtful and positive. Some, though, were flat out anti-Semitic.

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Again, that was unusually vile. But if you look at any mainstream site, you’ll see it isn’t off the scales. People in comments are regularly rude, insulting, inflammatory, racist, sexist, homophobic, and just generally cruel and vicious. In many cases, it’s clear that they have little if any interest in commenting on the article in question. Rather, they want to get upon their hobbyhorse and spew their own particular brand of hate in a venue where they can be assured of readers and visibility. Set up an anti-Semitic blog in a corner of the interwebs, and no one will hear you Sieg Heil. Spew your hate in the comments of an Atlantic article or a Slate article, though, and you’re assured of a good number of eyeballs passing over your invective.

So why do mainstream sites have comments at all? There are a lot of reasons, probably. Comments can be useful in catching errors — a boon in an age when even the big media outlets can’t afford to hire proofreaders or fact checkers. In addition,, comments are vital for that much-hyped web-buzz word “community”. And, of course, comments are good for clicks. An active, controversial comments thread can be its own draw, resulting in more links, more pageviews, and more advertising dollars.

Sites aren’t merely plagued by their trolls, then — they are actively in collaboration with them, in many ways. Trolls can make an article more popular — or at least more viewed. And, in return, for goosing the stats, the trolls get a chance to talk to a larger audience than they could find on their own. Everybody wins!

Of course, there remain some open questions. While trolls may increase hits in some instances, they also drive some readers away, and reflect poorly on the site as a whole. In addition, it seems like sites should have some ethical duty to pay attention to the messages being promoted under their names. In the US, at least, websites cannot generally be sued or prosecuted for the statements of commenters. But still, editors at large sites carefully vet the topics and language of the people who write for them. They do this because they want to preserve their brand, and also because, presumably, they have some professional pride in what is published on their watch. And yet, often no such care is exercised when it comes to the comments sections — where any moron with a grudge can say whatever inflammatory thing he or she wants, and have it distributed far and wide by the most reputable names in journalism.

Some sites have seen this as a problem, and taken steps to try to address it. The New York Times has a team of comment moderators who have to approve every comment posted. Ta-Nehisi Coates carefully polices the comments on his blog at the Atlantic — and as a result his comments section is widely regarded as one of the most civil and productive on the web.

The NYT and TNC are exceptions, though. Most large sites try, instead, to get by with shortcuts. Some sites have tried to use software to filter out obscenity, or else have asked users to register using Facebook accounts to cut down on anonymity (though the truth is that anonymity in itself isn’t really the problem. Otherwise, editors or moderators simply moderate on a catch-as-catch-can basis, perhaps deleting some of the worst comments (as in my article on the Holocaust)…or not, as time and energy permit.

I can completely understand why sites don’t want to moderate comments. I’m a very hands on moderator at my own site here — and it requires a lot of time and effort, even though our traffic is a rounding error compared to someplace like the Washington Post. The media industry has enormous cash flow problems and business model difficulties as it is. The last thing they want to do is hire multiple full time staffers to read through their comments.

Still, there are other alternatives. The cheapest of these, and probably the best, is simply to get rid of comments altogether. If you can’t afford to deal with them, it seems like the best thing to do is shut them down. This is what Andrew Sullivan does at his site. It’s also been the path taken by Tom Spurgeon at the Comics Reporter. Spurgeon will occasionally print selected correspondence from readers, and Sullivan often prints what amount to curated comments threads on individual topics of interest. They both, in other words, are interested in, and respond to, reader feedback. They just don’t use comments threads to do it.

I’m sure comments threads won’t ever disappear. People are always going to enjoy chatting about articles they’ve read, and as long as there’s a demand for that, someone will provide a venue. But surely we could start moving to a place where open comments was an option to be chosen, rather than the always-selected default. It seems to me that many sites would benefit from at least considering whether the comments are worth the trolls.