Montreal City Weblog

Kate 10:19 on 2020-07-13 Permalink Reply  

• walkerp 10:58 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  I am usually pretty anti excessive laws and punishment, but this is an area where our current legal system needs to get up to speed quickly. This is very good news that this old fart got busted. I hope he does time and that we see a lot more of these armchair terrorists get caught and punished publicly.

  Ultimately, the real fault lies with the platforms themselves (and the state actors and ideologically-driven political orgs who manipulate them), so going after individuals won’t solve the entire problem. It will slow down its poisonous effects, though.

  You cannot just say whatever the fuck you want without consequences. Especially on the internet. Your angry little retweets can actually kill people.

• david172 11:02 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  How does an angry retweet kill anyone?

• Kate 11:09 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  david, we would not have laws against incitement to violence if it hadn’t been shown that people are malleable and can be persuaded to do hateful things by words.

• Kevin 11:10 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  david
  Mass shooters are socially contagious. Someone with the mental understanding of a 12‑year‑old posts shit online for the lulz, and someone charges into a mosque or a pizza restaurant and opens fire.

  Unmoderated social media is poisonous. Always has been.

  I’m beginning the miss the good old days where we were able to take telephones away from people who were unfit to use them.

• david172 11:23 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  Agreeing that the fundamental freedom of speech is legitimately limited to punish incitement of violence ≠ “your angry little retweets can actually kill people,” which is just a very dumb statement and concept.

• Kate 11:56 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  david, I disagree. People can retweet effortlessly without giving a moment’s thought to possible consequences or repercussions. But those have not gone away because you’re online.

• walkerp 12:03 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  There is a direct causal relationship, but it is not one to one. Go google Justin Trudeau and you are overwhelmed by a wave of personal attacks and conspiracy theories. Many are bots, but many are angry individuals (often in Alberta) who are expressing their emotions (which are triggered by other social media posts) via their social media accounts. These become part of a brainwashing, radicalizing assault and every now and then somebody is already unbalanced enough that they decide to take action and then somebody drives across the country and rams his truck through the gates at Rideau Plaza. Or shoots up a pizza parlor. Or whatever atrocity is next.

  This is really happening. There are individuals who are responsible and there is right and wrong. They need to understand their role in what is happening.

• Kevin 12:42 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  david
  I see you’ve never gone online to find hundreds of slanderous and bullying messages targeting you and your family.

  There are many people who have died through suicide following cyber-bullying.

• Alison Cummins 12:47 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  I think that for certain people, to get them to think about online attacks you have to call them “doxxing.” Everything else gets shrugged off with “you’re obviously not thick-skinned enough to be on the internet, because bullying and harassment is just what the internet is.“

• Kate 13:16 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  But “doxxing” has a specific meaning, Alison: to discover the actual physical address and other personal particulars of a person, and post them publicly, i.e. to reveal their documentation, with the intention to encourage harassment. It isn’t generalizable to other kinds of online attacks, and in the case of a public person like Justin T., it’s not so applicable because we already know the names of his wife and kids, where he lives and so on.

• Alison Cummins 18:07 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  Kate,

  When white dudes are upset by internet harassment, they tend to call it “doxxing” whether it is or not. Because for them, online harassment isn’t a genuine problem—it’s just millennial snowflakes whining that they feel offended—but doxxing is. They work backwards: I am experiencing distress, therefore I am being doxxed. Or: my friend is experiencing distress and I am sympathetic, therefore it’s doxxing.

  One way to get through to these guys might be to link doxxing to other forms of online harassment.

  When you go online to publicly identify an individual as an enemy; out their online identity if relevant; and publish their real-life weak spots so that they can be harassed in ways that could *not* theoretically be dealt with by deleting an email or avoiding reddit, that’s doxxing and it’s generally recognized to be crossing a line.

  Ok, so what if two or three of those elements are already in place?

  Justin Trudeau is an individual whose address and public identity are well-known already. What if you supply the missing piece by identifying him as an enemy and dehumanizing him? Does that not have a similar effect to doxxing?

  Muslims are a group, not a particular individual, but they are often identifiable by their clothing, their names or their community centres. If you publicly identify them as an enemy, explain how to find them and dehumanize them, does that not have a similar effect to doxxing?

  Why is doxxing bad but “angry retweets” are ok? The most significant difference I can see is that the number of white dudes who can imagine being important enough to dox versus the number who can imagine themselves as targets of racial or gendered harassment.

• Alison Cummins 18:09 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  #notallwhitedudes

  Just the ones who dismiss “angry retweets” as being of no consequence.

• Alison Cummins 18:25 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  And #notjustwhitedudes either. Anyone who dismisses “angry retweets” as being of no consequence but who would personally object to being doxxed.

• Kate 19:07 on 2020-07-13 Permalink

  Alison, I don’t really understand what you’re arguing here. “Doxxing” has a definition – it’s a specific kind of harassment based on public revelation of personal information. Nobody has been saying doxxing is bad but other kinds of negative speech are fine, but it doesn’t make sense to stretch the “doxxing” label to include other kinds of harassment.

  Justin Trudeau has been threatened and it’s serious enough to have resulted in charges. He hasn’t been doxxed because in a sense he can’t be doxxed.

• Alison Cummins 00:18 on 2020-07-14 Permalink

  No, Justin Trudeau hasn’t been doxxed.

  There are commenters who are saying that it’s unreasonable to arrest someone for spewing on the internet. That spewing on the internet cannot reasonably held to have consequences. In general, people who make this kind of assertion tend to make an exception for doxxing as being the only possible bad thing that can happen through speech on the internet.

  1. Nobody did it here so it’s off-topic, but I do hear people claim to have been doxxed when they haven’t been. I just mention it to illustrate that *for some people,* no other form of internet harassment is real.

  2. Doxxing (while its own thing) has a great deal in common with hate speech targeting identifiable groups. If publishing someone’s name, address and phone number constituted doxxing by itself, then distributing the White Pages would be doxxing. It’s the act of bringing together several elements to facilitate collective harassment, of which publishing personal details is only one, that is doxxing. I maintain that if someone thinks that doxxing is bad — which they probably do, just because — but that hate speech in the form of angry retweets is neutral, they are being logically inconsistent.

  That’s all. Perhaps I’m rambling and not making sense. That’s very possible. In which case, please delete.

• Kevin 12:17 on 2020-07-14 Permalink

  Just because it came up in my twitter feed.

  Ben Collins
  @oneunderscore__

  I think about all of my colleagues on my beat who are on actual kill lists from neonazis, who wake up to viciously racist and sexist coordinated campaigns from groups whose ultimate goal is trying to incite domestic terror.

  Ain’t no news cycle for them. They just keep reporting.
  https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1283061959840149509