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A harassment campaign on Goodreads

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270 points ilamont | 3 comments | 06 Jan 20 20:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.537s | source
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Brain_Thief ◴[06 Jan 20 21:17 UTC] No.21973411[source]▶
Situations like this make me think that public educational systems should experiment with some form of "digital literacy" courses / exercises for young children with the goal of humanizing the processes of online communication. Teaching standards for how to treat others (and how to respond to observed and experienced abuses) may provide some reduction in the number of individuals that seem to be finding their ways to toxic online communities. From a lay perspective it really does seem that people who participate in extremely toxic online communities are exhibiting signs of serious personality deformations; since the internet acts as a significant force multiplier on an individual's ability to spread their perspective, and since the problem of policing online speech without creating a locked-down surveillance nightmare seems unlikely to be solved any time soon, perhaps one of the better options would be to arm adolescents with a proper mentality for handling online harassment under the assumption that it is likely to occur.
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1. schnevets ◴[06 Jan 20 22:55 UTC] No.21974427[source]▶
There is definitely value to gain from Digital Literacy as well as Digital Etiquette, but I'd take your suggestion a step forward and teach more people how to handle the mind games that stem from toxic internet cultures with lessons on Digital Fortitude.

A lot of people who grew up with the internet wised up and learned to tolerate/ignore troll behavior. This mostly comes with age, but we can do a better job teaching young internet users that the racist commenter is just looking for attention and should be ignored, that the 200 messages could be coming from a single anti-social person, and that a slew of 1-star reviews may not be coming from a reputable source. This would also involve warnings on the repercussions of handling a hostile situation the wrong way (by engaging in a troll and showing obvious signs of stress or by blithely trusting a DM who appears to be on your side) and more effective ways to cope.

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2. sp0rk ◴[07 Jan 20 02:52 UTC] No.21976330[source]▶
One of the most memorable things I've come across on Hacker News was a link to this article about avoiding trolls: https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...

Even as somebody that's used the Internet frequently for 25+ years, I was guilty of falling for some of the traps outlined in this article. I think something like this being taught in schools would shift the state of conversation on the Web dramatically.

3. lazyasciiart ◴[07 Jan 20 03:32 UTC] No.21976558[source]▶
So long as your lessons include the information that this advice only works when you're dealing with low-level harassment. It fails catastrophically when you're dealing with a mob. It's like the advice to "eat healthy foods" - while it's probably right for a random person, when you share that advice with someone who has cancer, you are an insensitive ignorant dick. So if you share it as "basic approaches to normal life", fine, but when you hear "x hasn't been well", maybe you should avoid responding with this helpful simplistic nonsense.

edit: a more complete article on this https://the-cauldron.com/you-can-t-just-ignore-the-trolls-8f...