Hate Crimes in Cyberspace

Danielle Keats Citron

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674744653
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Diritto in ambito scientifico e tecnologico

Most Internet users are familiar with trolling—aggressive, foul-mouthed posts designed to elicit angry responses in a site's comments. Less familiar but far more serious is the way some use networked technologies to target real people, subjecting them, by name and address, to vicious, often terrifying, online abuse. In an in-depth investigation of a problem that is too often trivialized by lawmakers and the media, Danielle Keats Citron exposes the startling extent of personal cyber-attacks and proposes practical, lawful ways to prevent and punish online harassment. A refutation of those who claim that these attacks are legal, or at least impossible to stop, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace reveals the serious emotional, professional, and financial harms incurred by victims.Persistent online attacks disproportionately target women and frequently include detailed fantasies of rape as well as reputation-ruining lies and sexually explicit photographs. And if dealing with a single attacker's "revenge porn" were not enough, harassing posts that make their way onto social media sites often feed on one another, turning lone instigators into cyber-mobs. Hate Crimes in Cyberspace rejects the view of the Internet as an anarchic Wild West, where those who venture online must be thick-skinned enough to endure all manner of verbal assault in the name of free speech protection, no matter how distasteful or abusive. Cyber-harassment is a matter of civil rights law, Citron contends, and legal precedents as well as social norms of decency and civility must be leveraged to stop it.

Part One

Understanding Cyber Harassment

one

Digital Hate

The Tech Blogger

Like many other people, Kathy Sierra started a blog to advance her career. At Creating Passionate Users, she wrote about what she knew best: software design. She drew on her experience as a trainer of Java programming skills for Sun Microsystems and as the author of books on software design. With humorous graphs and charts, she argued that the most effective and popular software programs were those that made users feel good about themselves.

From its inception in 2004, the blog was a hit. It attracted vocal commenters, including some who were inspired by her advice and others who found it shallow.¹ Within two years, Technorati, the blog-ranking site, regularly included her blog in its list of the Top 100 most popular blogs. The blog was a boon to her career and visibility in the technical community.

All of that changed in 2007, when she received frightening e-mails and blog comments. In one e-mail, [email protected] wrote, “Fuck off you boring slut … i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob.” In a comment on her blog, “Rev ED” said he wanted to have “open season” on her with “flex memory foam allowing you to beat this bitch with a bat, raise really big welts that go away after an hour, so you can start again.” Someone commenting under the name “Hitler” wrote, “Better watch your back on the streets whore.… Be a pity if you turned up in the gutter where you belong, with a machete shoved in that self-righteous little cunt of yours.” Others said she deserved to be raped and strangled.

The abuse extended to the group blogs Mean Kids and Bob’s Yer Uncle, which were spearheaded by Chris Locke. Locke, a technologist and the coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto, started Mean Kids to “formalize (and goof on) the mean kids slur.” Frank Paynter, a Mean Kids blogger, described the site as “purposeful anarchy” for “pointed and insulting satire.”² Yet as the media blogger Jim Turner noted, the blog devolved into “ ‘who could be meanest,’ ‘who could one up the person with their next post.’ ”³ What happened to Sierra next made that quite clear.

A Mean Kids poster uploaded a picture of the tech blogger with a noose beside her neck to which the commenter “joey” responded, “The only thing Kathy Sierra has to offer me is that noose in her neck size.” Another doctored photograph of her appeared, this time on Locke’s Bob’s Yer Uncle blog. Under the title “I Dream of Kathy Sierra,” the picture depicted her screaming while being suffocated by red-and-black lingerie.⁴

Sierra was scheduled to deliver a keynote address at a technology conference days after she received these e-mails and saw the disturbing comments and posts. She canceled the talk, explaining on her blog, “As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I’m not. I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified. I have cancelled all speaking engagements. I am afraid to leave my yard. I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.”⁵ Sierra was frightened. She didn’t know the identity of the posters and could not even begin to guess the identities of “Hitler,” joey, and siftee.com. She had no idea who posted the doctored photographs.

After she blogged about what was happening to her, the online abuse began again, this time at the hands of a cyber mob whose members may have had nothing to do with the original attack. A self-identified Internet troll called “weev” told the New York Times that he posted her social security number and home address all over the web because he didn’t like her “touchy reaction” to the harassment. A fabricated narrative about Sierra’s career and family life appeared on the web, claiming that she suffered from domestic violence, got plastic surgery to hide her scars, cheated on her former husband with her current spouse, and turned to prostitution to pay her debts.⁶ Posters accused her of being an “attention whore” who made up the online abuse.⁷

Some high-profile bloggers and commentators told her she was being a “silly girl” and that this sort of roughhousing was an inevitable and harmless part of online life. She was told to “turn off” her computer if she could not take the “heat in the kitchen.” That is precisely what she did. In her final post, she explained, “I do not want to be part of a culture—the Blogosphere—where this is considered acceptable. Where the price for being a blogger is Kevlar-coated skin and daughters who are tough enough to not have their ‘widdy biddy sensibilities offended’ when they see their own mother Photoshopped into nothing more than an objectified sexual orifice, possibly suffocated as part of some sexual fetish.”

The Boulder police advised her to cancel her speaking engagements and sit tight. But their investigation went nowhere because they lacked the technical skills to figure out the posters’ identities to institute a criminal case. She did not consider suing her attackers, even if she could figure out who they were. A cyber mob struck back at her just for publicly discussing her experience. She guessed that a lawsuit in her own name would generate more, perhaps worse online abuse.

Many have asked the tech blogger why anonymous posters singled her out. After all, she wrote about technology, a topic that is not especially controversial. On this question she could only guess. Were posters angry about a comment she made a year before in support of a blogger’s right to delete uncivil comments? Some have suggested that possibility to her. At the time of her attack, she had no difficult personal dealings that might have led to the abuse. The cyber mob that exposed her personal data and spread lies about her, however, made their goal clear: they wanted to punish her for the “great crime of speaking out.” She assured me that she would not make that misstep again.

That was six years ago. To this day, people defend the bloggers who hosted the doctored photographs of Sierra, declaring them the victims of her “imagined” harassment. In 2011 several individuals tried to vandalize her Wikipedia entry with suggestions that she made up the online abuse. The attempted edits described the most recent phase of her life as her “decline.” They suggested that her behavior was “erratic” and “incoherent.”⁸ Wikipedia administrators rejected the edits, but the fact that people were trying to discredit her years after the attack troubled her greatly.

The tech blogger regrets that the harassment was a defining moment in her life. Few parts of her life were untouched by it. She feels less confident of her place in the tech community. She still worries about her family’s personal safety. The harassment changed the trajectory of her career, for the worse. Before the attacks, she frequently accepted speaking engagements. Now she rarely does. As she told me, the attacks took away her ability to do what she loves most—teaching and writing about software development—without feeling afraid.⁹ She has “stayed mostly offline.”¹⁰

When we spoke in 2012, she had not restarted her blog and doubted she would. On the blog Concurring Opinions, where I am a permanent blogger, she commented on a post discussing her experience: “I do know that ‘get over it/grow a thicker skin’ (or the more common, ‘grow a pair’) doesn’t work. That is, unless the goal is to get the ‘target’ to stay offline. Unfortunately, that does seem to be the goal of those who say, ‘can’t-take-the-heat-stay-off-the-’net,’ and it’s working.”¹¹

The Law Student and the Message Board

At the start of law school, “Nancy Andrews” (whom I will refer to as “the law student”) did not engage much online. Although her friends participated in online communities, most of her time was spent studying. But, as she soon discovered, online communities took an interest in her even if she had no interest in them.

AutoAdmit is a discussion board designed to help college and graduate students, but it is also used to harass (mostly female) students. The board attracts a significant amount of traffic, about a million visitors a month. Its operators generate income by hosting advertisements on their site through an arrangement with Google AdSense.

In 2005 the site’s users began a contest called “T14talent—The Most Appealing Women @ Top Law Schools.” Soon AutoAdmit began hosting discussions about female law students from various schools, including Boston University, Harvard, Northwestern, New York University, Virginia, and Yale. The law student was one of them.

Friends alerted the law student that she had become the topic of conversation at AutoAdmit. She was surprised, having never visited the site. After searching her name, she found several disturbing message threads about her. In a thread entitled “Stupid Bitch to Attend Yale Law,” the poster “STANFORDtroll” warned her classmates to “watch out for her.”

Pseudonymous commenters responded with sexually explicit threats, such as “I’ll force myself on her, most definitely,” and “I think I will sodomize her. Repeatedly” (posted under the user name “neoprag”). Under a thread entitled “Which female YLS students would you sodomize,” poster “:D” said, “i would like to hate-fuck [law student’s name] but since people say she has herpes that might be a bad idea.” Poster “Spanky” said, “Clearly she deserves to be raped so that her little fantasy world can be shattered by real life.” Posts linked to videos featuring her picture being bloodied and shot.

Posters spread lies about the law student. Poster “STANFORDtroll” stated, falsely, that she got a “159 LSAT score.” Readers were urged to “make sure all the Vault 50s know about [her low score] before she gets an offer.” The post was referring to Vault’s list of top law firms. According to other posters, the law student’s low LSAT score proved she got into Yale Law School only because she is a “nigger.” Others said she got into Stanford and Yale because she is Muslim. Poster “yalelaw” claimed she bribed her way into Yale, helped by a lesbian affair with the dean of admissions.¹²

The destructive posts gathered steam during the fall of her second year just as she began interviewing for summer associate positions. For law students interested in working at corporate law firms, recruitment season mainly occurs during the fall of their second year. The law student, an editor of the prestigious Yale Law Journal, had sixteen initial interviews. She received four callbacks and, in the end, no offers. That worried her. In contrast, her YLJ colleagues and fellow editors were struggling with choosing among several job offers.

As a friend suggested to the law student, Google search results of her name could help explain her inability to obtain a summer associate position. During the fall recruitment season, AutoAdmit posts dominated the first page of a search of her name. Perhaps, as the threads suggested, posters contacted their friends at the top law firms to dissuade them from hiring her. She could not know what happened. With the help of her law school mentors, she got a job with a California firm, long after the recruitment season ended.

The harassment interfered with her law school experience. Because several posters suggested they had physical contact with her, she could not dismiss the posts as rants of strangers. Posts provided updates on her whereabouts, the clothing she wore, and her prior jobs. A poster who claimed to be her classmate said she “seemed normal at first but once you get to know her it’s clear she is deeply disturbed.” At first, she skipped class because she worried that anything she said or did would be posted online. When she resumed attending classes, she avoided speaking. She stopped attending law school events, including those organized by her human rights student group, something that was important to her. ...