Evil Online

Dean Cocking, Jeroen Van den Hoven

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781405154376, 9781405154369
• eBook ISBN: 9781119471189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

"I am delighted to offer my highest praise to Dean Cocking and Jeroen van den Hoven's brilliant new book, Evil Online. The confrontation between good and evil occupies a central place in the challenges facing our human nature, and this creative investigation into the spread of evil by means of all-powerful new technologies raises fundamental questions about our morality and values. Cocking and Van den Hoven's account of the moral fog of evil forces us to face both the demons within each of us as well as the demons all around us. In the end, we are all enriched by their perceptive analyses."
—Phil Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Stanford University Principal Investigator, Stanford Prison Experiment

"The internet offers new and deeply concerning opportunities for immorality, much of it shocking and extreme. This volume explains with great insight and clarity the corrupting nature of the internet and the moral confusion it has produced. It will play a vital role in the growing debate about how to balance the benefits of the internet against the risks it poses to all of us. Evil Online is an excellent book."
—Roger Crisp, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford

We now live in an era defined by the ubiquity of the internet. From our everyday engagement with social media to trolls on forums and the emergence of the dark web, the internet is a space characterized by unreality, isolation, anonymity, objectification, and rampant self-obsession—the perfect breeding ground for new, unprecedented manifestations of evil. Evil Online is the first comprehensive analysis of evil and moral character in relation to our increasingly online lives.

Chapters consider traditional ideas around the phenomenon of evil in moral philosophy and explore how the dawn of the internet has presented unprecedented challenges to older theoretical approaches. Cocking and Van den Hoven propose that a growing sense of moral confusion—moral fog—pushes otherwise ordinary, normal people toward evildoing, and that values basic to moral life such as autonomy, intimacy, trust, and privacy are put at risk by online platforms and new technologies. This new theory of evildoing offers fresh insight into the moral character of the individual, and opens the way for a burgeoning new area of social thought.

A comprehensive analysis of an emerging and disturbing social phenomenon, Evil Online examines the morally troubling aspects of the internet in our society. Written not only for academics in the fields of philosophy, psychology, information science, and social science, Evil Online is accessible and compelling reading for anyone interested in understanding the emergence of evil in our digitally-dominated world.

1
The Many Faces of Evil Online

Human wickedness is sometimes the product of a sort of conscious leeringly evil intent… But more usually it is the product of a semi‐deliberate inattention, in a swooning relationship to time.

Iris Murdoch¹

1.1 Introduction

In May 2008, hackers bombarded the website of the Epilepsy Foundation of America with hundreds of pictures and links. The site provides advice, news on scientific research and contacts for people who suffer from epilepsy. People who suffer from epileptic seizures have to manage their condition carefully and need regular checkups and medical advice. Epilepsy patients often take precautionary measures to deal with situations where they may be incapacitated and unable to act. Some patients suffer from what is called “photosensitive epilepsy,” which means that flickering and flashing images may trigger epileptic seizures. The hackers who attacked the Landover site exploited a security flaw and inserted links to pages with rapidly flashing images. These images were perceived inadvertently by epilepsy patients who were looking for medical information on the website and triggered severe migraines and near‐seizure reactions in some site visitors. “They were out to create seizures,” said Ken Lowenberg, senior director of web and print publishing for the foundation.² The hackers did not seem to be interested in money or in control over the victim’s computer; they just wanted to create this impact on vulnerable people. “I count this in the same category of teenagers who think it's funny to put a cat in a bag and throw it over a clothesline – they don't realize how cruel it is,” said Paul Ferguson, a security researcher at antivirus‐software maker Trend Micro Inc.³

This is just one of the many examples of evil online that we present in this book. The evils we discuss are not situated on a faraway deserted island, but in another place much closer to home, yet unfamiliar at the same time: our new world of the Internet and social media. Attitudes and conduct may no longer be set in a world of uncharted waters and land, but now they are set in the uncharted territories of our new virtual worlds in cyberspace. This is where our children grow up and teenagers hang out pretty much all day. It is where socialization, moral education, and psychological development takes place. It is the space where young adults live and meet their partners, work, and relax. It is a world that surprises us every day with new inventions and services. And it is a world that is not well‐ordered, and that is weakly regulated, monitored, and policed.

This protean cyberdomain is growing and developing at breakneck speed, and it is far from clear who is responsible for what. Facebook and Google earn astronomical amounts of money from the online social and information revolution, but when it comes to taking responsibility for contributing to the social infrastructure of future societies, they are not very active. The responsibility for fake news, the live streaming of suicides, and cascading violence are cases in point. The application of legal principles and moral values in this new territory is deeply problematic. New digital environments constitute a different world, where the voice of traditional moral authorities and the constraints of old social institutions are largely screened from view. Laws often cannot be enforced because of confusion about the nature and status of the phenomena, lack of clarity about jurisdiction, the ineffectiveness of enforcement, and the anonymity of the perpetrators.

It has become clear over the last decade that online contexts have created wonderful opportunities for a vast range of crimes, from cybercrime to child abuse, from cyber‐jihad to identity fraud. We are, however, not primarily interested in the online versions of the obvious and straightforward forms of wrongdoing, such as fraud, crime, deception, scams, war, aggression, hate, and violence, with which we are all too familiar from the offline history of humanity. These are, by now, all well‐known, extensively studied, and are usually referred to by means of prefixing “cyber,” “digital,” or “online” to the traditional catalogue of crimes and misdemeanors: cyber fraud, digital crimes, identity theft, online deceit and so on. As such, they are not so much novel, surprising, and puzzling as merely recent chapters in a long‐lasting arms race between criminals and crime‐fighters, between high‐tech frauds and cyberforensics.⁴ Neither are we primarily interested in the gross depravities that are sometimes seen in serious mental illness, and are now so easily supported and accommodated online. Paraphilias have blossomed online and there is no entry in the DSM classification under that heading without a large online repository of videos, images, and communities associated with it.⁵

Our primary interest is to assess how our new online habitats work against the “better angels” of our nature, and against aspects of our traditional environments and our relationships with others that enable our moral and prosocial capacities. We identify and investigate features of our online worlds that erode empathy and moral character, and that stifle moral and prosocial development.⁶ In so doing, we try to understand how young people, among others, are especially vulnerable to becoming victims of the online environments in which they increasingly spend their time. We do not want to take a Luddite or alarmist stance (more on this in Chapters 3 and 5 ahead), or add to the moral panic that sometimes surrounds discussions about social media and the Internet. On the other hand, evil online is an increasingly disturbing phenomenon across a wide range of fronts, and, as is invariably the case with revolutionary technology – and perhaps never more so than with the Internet revolution – our recognition of worries about where we are headed, much less our understanding of these worries, is lagging badly behind. More investigation into the rise of various forms of evil online, and the ways in which our online worlds differ “morally speaking” from our traditional worlds, is well overdue.

We evolved as moral and social beings in our traditional worlds of good old‐fashioned causality, contiguity of time and space, unity of action, physical proximity, and face‐to‐face interaction. In fact, it is in light of these conditions that the evolution of human beings as moral and prosocial creatures (of the kind that we are) makes sense. We have already struggled in the first part of the twentieth century with globalization and the stretching of our moral frameworks and sensibilities beyond the boundaries of our families, clans, cities, regions, and nation states. Now we are well into the twenty‐first century, we need to come to grips with our colonization of a digital space that operates under very different conditions, and obeys very different laws.

One thing that is clear is that the Internet and social media disinhibit people and easily escalate conflicts and problems. Once in existence, problems of any nature can cascade like a row of dominoes, and spread like a contagious disease in a large population of interconnected individuals. Chat and comment spaces are regularly filled with abusive language and denigrating remarks. The revolution in speed and access to wonderful ideas has just as effectively been a revolution in the spread of bad ideas. As indicated in our preface, the flourishing of evil online is not confined to the “usual suspects” – those already inclined from deranged, immoral, or criminal intentions. On the contrary, much evil flourishes online (as it long has offline) from the minds of more ordinary and normal people. In developing our account of this territory of evil online, we identify and bring together various characteristics of the online social environment, and of our capacities for evil, and illustrate how the latter may be appeased or summoned depending upon the former.

What we observe and experience at the surface of our online worlds is significantly determined by how the underlying contact network is structured, and by which software and algorithms are at work. All of these ingredients together guide people’s conduct online, and make them inclined to do things they could not have (easily) done offline.

A good deal of recent empirical research has shown the ways in which the design of the technology, the mechanisms, circumstances, imperceptible sensory cues, and the design of choice situations are hugely important for the way people behave online. So, for instance, in his book, The Dark Net, Jamie Bartlett provides excellent, well‐researched descriptions of the spread of some worrying phenomena online, such as assassination markets, suicide and self‐harm forums, racism and white supremacy networks, and anorexia and bulimia web sites. He is, however, reluctant to provide a normative analysis of the phenomena encountered online: “it is a series of portraits about how these issues play out at the fringes. I leave it entirely to you to decide what to think it means.”⁷

Some other scholars in the field have been a little more inclined to provide some moral evaluation.⁸ We aim to add to, and move beyond, these very useful though largely descriptive accounts of worrisome cyberphenomena. Not so much by means of more detailed description, but by means of morally relevant explanations, evaluations, and a general framework for ethical understanding of the moral life, and of the conditions under which it is enabled and sustained, or otherwise. As mentioned in our preface, while Hannah Arendt’s description of evil as banal has been massively influential, and much evil online may be seen as providing new ways in which evil can flourish and exhibit its banality, we argue that evildoing is often better understood as undertaken in a moral fog. Varieties of this moral fog can be encountered on a deserted island, or a remote and unruly corner of the world, or in an anonymous section ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 The Many Faces of Evil Online
• 2 Our Online Environment
• 3 The Transformation of Social Life
• 4 The Moral Fog of Our Worlds
• 5 The Fate of the Moral Life
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement