Daily Archives: January 21, 2020

Last week, Facebook reaffirmed its hands-off approach to political ads, saying it wont ban them, wont fact-check them, and wont limit how granularly they can be targeted. Under siege, Facebook has continued to defend this stance by trying to position the tech giant is a bastion of free speech.

Whether in his testimony to Congress last October or his 2020 resolutions post last week, Zuckerberg has sought to frame the question of advertising as one of free expression. And in what was positioned as a landmark address at Georgetown, Zuckerberg cloaked himself in the constitution, invoking the First Amendment no fewer than eight times. He even cited the Fifteenth Amendment for good measure.

Curious, though, that Facebook never mentions the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures interpreted by the Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States to encompass digital privacy.

The inconvenient truth for Facebook is that these rights are inextricably linked. We cannot be truly free to speak our mind when we know that our every word and action is being tracked and logged by corporations and governments. The erosion of privacy threatens our freedom of expression, and it is hypocritical for Facebook to play at free speech champion while also being at the forefront of surveillance capitalism.

According to the new Freedom on the Net 2019 report by Freedom House, free speech and privacy on the internet also declined globally for the ninth consecutive year. And one of the main reasons cited by the reports authors for the decline? Increased surveillance on social media platforms.

Facebook has been central to the rise of a world where it is taken for granted that our personal lives are public by default and our private data is extracted and processed as a commodity, and as such, it is a direct threat to our freedom of speech. This digital panopticon creates a chilling effect, where people are hesitant or afraid about exercising their rights because of the potential negative ramifications that may result from their speech and actions being used against them.

Its not just theoretical: Following the Cambridge Analytica expos, The Atlantic surveyed its readers and found that 41.9 percent of the respondents said they changed their behavior on Facebook as a result of learning about the news, mostly by being more careful about what they posted. Over four in five (82.2 percent) said they self-censor on social media. The chilling effect even extended beyond Facebook to elsewhere on the internet, with 25.6 percent reporting that the Cambridge Analytica incident changed their behavior on other social media.

Theres a clear connection between Facebooks privacy failings and negative ramifications on open expression. So perhaps its time for Zuckerberg to stop being so pious and take user privacy seriously if hes genuine about his commitment to freedom of speech.

If Facebook intends to be a platform for people to express themselves, it needs to give people more visibility into and control over who gets to see what they express. Facebook should follow through on its commitment to full and clear disclosure of the data it collects, the people and organizations that have access to it, and what is done with this data. It has claimed it will do so in the past, but was caught again less than a year ago secretly sharing data in violation of stated privacy protections.

Facebooks control over what almost three billion people in the world can see, share, and express is unparalleled in human history. Without fundamental privacy protections and full transparency on its practices, that kind of power cant be good for freedom of expression.

The chilling effect of surveillance isnt complicated. Sitting before Congress a few months ago, with dozens of cameras pointed at him, Zuckerberg surely acted in a far more constrained manner than he wouldve in the privacy of his own bedroom. How does he expect Facebook to be the champion of free expression when it wont stop pointing evermore figurative cameras at us?

Published January 18, 2020 17:00 UTC

Go here to see the original:
Facebook and Zuckerberg keep getting freedom of expression wrong - The Next Web

LGBTQ+ leaders in Sheffield have called for the cancellation of an upcoming UK tour by Donald Trumps most prominent evangelical ally, claiming he promotes homophobic views.

Franklin Graham, the influential son of the late American preacher Billy Graham, has previously said he believes gay marriage is a sin.

Graham is currently on a tour of Florida which has attracted protests from thousands of other Christians and is to tour eight UK cities later this year. He is due to visit Sheffield Arena in June as part of his tour, which is not open to the public.

Sheffield City Trust, which runs the venue, has said it does not endorse Grahams views but supports the right to free speech.

But LGBT+ campaigners have written to the trust calling for the visit to be cancelled.

The letter, signed by 22 representatives of the citys LGBTQ+ community, says: Franklin Graham has repeatedly publicly promoted his homophobic beliefs, including but not limited to branding homosexuality a sin

We believe that these statements far exceed freedom of speech and are direct hate speech and incitement to violence against LGBTQ+ communities and individuals, which should not be welcomed in our city or anywhere else.

David Grey, chairman of the trust, said he had met faith groups from the city and taken advice from South Yorkshire police regarding the visit but supported the right to free speech and freedom of expression whilst promoting equality and freedom from hatred and abuse.

He agreed there was a potential conflict between these two moral stances, but added that the event was not open to the public and if individuals or groups arent breaking the law then their right to speak freely should be respected.

Heather Paterson, LGBT+ chair at the Equality Hub Network in the city and one of the signatories to the letter, said: While Sheffield City Trust defend their position on the grounds of free speech, hate speech is not free speech. Grahams rhetoric demonising some of our most vulnerable communities, referring to us as the enemies of civilisation and advocating for the harmful and abusive practice of conversion therapy inspires and encourages these attacks. As a community we stand together to reject his attempts to spread further hatred and division in our city.

A demonstration against Grahams appearance, Sheffield Against Hate Demo: Say No To Franklin Graham, is being held on 25 January at the Forge International Sports Centre in the city.

Earlier this month councillors wrote a cross-party letter to organisers of Grahams event warning that the visit could lead to protests.

And in November the bishop of Sheffield, Pete Wilcox, said Grahams rhetoric was inflammatory and represented a risk to the social cohesion of Sheffield.

Grey added: The Franklin Graham event is part of a series of closed events across the country. These events are not open to the public. Other religious groups hire the arena for similar closed events and we are happy to accommodate them as long as the law isnt being broken.

As an organisation, we take matters such as this immensely seriously. We are aware of views from some of our citys councillors and understand their concerns. [But] it is the view of the board of trustees that freedom of speech, and the ability to disagree with someones beliefs, are to be encouraged. If individuals or groups arent breaking the law then their right to speak freely should be respected.

The tour during May and June will also include venues in Glasgow, Newcastle, Milton Keynes, Liverpool, Cardiff, Birmingham and London.

Graham said: Im not coming to Sheffield to preach against anyone. Im coming to tell everyone about a God who loves them.

The gospels life-saving truth and power applies to everyone in this great city.

Read the original here:
Sheffield Arena urged to cancel event by 'homophobic' Trump ally - The Guardian

In Ferguson v. Waid, handed down Jan. 8, the District Court had concluded that Sandra Ferguson, a former client of Brian Waid's but also a lawyer herself, had libeled Waid in online reviews; it awarded Waid damages but also issued an injunction.

The Ninth Circuitin a nonbinding decision, but one that I expect will be fairly influentialheld that the injunction was overbroad, but could be constitutional if narrowed to ban only repeating statements found to be defamatory:

Ferguson appeals from the district court's post-trial order, entering an injunction "to protect Mr. Waid from further harassment." The injunction is overbroad at section (a), which prohibits Ferguson generally "from contacting past or present clients of Brian J. Waid, either in person, via telephone, or by electronic communications." That prohibition is not supported by the district court's findings of fact or conclusions of law regarding defamation, as its effect is to preclude Ferguson from having any communications with Waid's clients, including about topics unrelated to Waid or this lawsuit.

Accordingly, we reverse and remand with instructions to revise section (a) to add the underlined language: "Sandra Ferguson is enjoined from repeating the same or effectively identical statements found to be defamatory in this case to past or present clients of Brian J. Waid, either in person, via telephone, or by electronic communications." With that modification, the injunction will be "tailored to eliminate only the specific harm alleged."

The court also upheld a different part of the injunction, which more generally barred Ferguson from repeating the libelous statements:

Ms. Ferguson is enjoined from publishing again the same or effectively identical statements found to be defamatory in this case;

Ms. Ferguson shall remove or seek to remove any defamatory statements she has already published about Mr. Waid on the internet.

I had filed an amicus brief arguing that properly tailored anti-libel injunction were constitutional, but that they had to have certain procedural protections (see here and here); the court rejected, without comment, my proposed protections, though it agreed with the substantive point. Note that two of my procedural objections to anti-libel injunctionsthat they let people be criminally punished for libel (if they violate the injunction, which exposes them to criminal contempt) (1) without a jury finding that their statements were false and defamatory, and (2) without a lawyer who can argue that the statements weren't false and defamatorydidn't apply here: Ferguson waived her jury trial rights, and was represented by a lawyer (and in any event is a lawyer herself).

The decision leaves matters unsettled in the Ninth Circuit:

[A.] San Antonio Cmty. Hosp. v. S. Cal. Dist. Council of Carpenters, 125 F.3d 1230, 1239 (9th Cir. 1997), upheld an anti-libel injunction.

[B.] On the other hand, In re Dan Farr Prods., 874 F.3d 590, 596 n.8 (9th Cir. 2017), noted that "'[s]ubsequent civil or criminal proceedings, rather than prior restraints, ordinarily are the appropriate sanction for calculated defamation or other misdeeds in the First Amendment context'" (quoting CBS, Inc. v. Davis, 510 U.S. 1315, 1318 (1994) (Blackmun, J., in chambers)), but without discussing San Antonio Community Hospital, which seemed to take the opposite view.

[C.] District Courts in the Ninth Circuit are divided on the subject, for instance, focusing just on 2016 and 2017 decisions,

This can be pretty confusing, as aPriori shows. Broquard's Informal Brief argued that the injunction violated his "First Amendment Right to Freedom of Speech," and Broquard and his codefendant had made the argument below. Defendants Joint Response to Plaintiffs Supplement Memorandum of Points and Authoriities [sic], ECF No. 115, aPriori Technologies, Inc. v. Broquard, No. 2:16-cv-09561 (C.D. Cal. Oct. 10, 2017). But, given Broquard's lack of legal expertise, the Informal Brief did not offer any real legal analysis. The Ninth Circuit's disposition therefore said only that, "Broquard's contentions that the injunction violates his First Amendment rights [and other rights] are unpersuasive. We do not consider matters not specifically and distinctly raised and argued in the opening brief, or arguments and allegations raised for the first time on appeal." Perhaps the District Court in aPriori was right in issuing the injunctionbut it did so without sufficient guidance from the Ninth Court, and Broquard likewise lacked a clear statement of the legal rule around which he could have structured his argument.

Ferguson v. Waid, I suspect, will weigh in favor of allowing the narrow anti-libel injunctions (and against allowing broad anti-harassment injunctions that go beyond the material found to be libelous). But, as I said, the matter remains unsettled.

Go here to read the rest:
Ninth Circuit Affirms Anti-Libel Injunction, Rejects Overbroad Portion - Reason

Its natural to assess what sociocultural lessons weve learned from the previous decade, now that weve entered a new one and whether theyre the kinds that might help us make the 2020s a better era. No honest attempt at such an assessment can be complete without grappling with the messy human dramas and the increasing trend toward polarized, incendiary conversations that emerged in the latter half of the 2010s. And that means contending with the unlikely, unpleasant, and far-reaching watershed movement that was Gamergate.

As it was happening, many members of the media were quick to dismiss it. Sparked by a single blog post published in August 2014, Gamergate was still very much alive and well when an editor asked me, as a reporter who covered it since the very beginning, to write a recap of it near the end of that year. The editor wanted a piece that framed the entire event in the past tense, even though the hashtag was still going strong, the women it targeted were still being harassed, and supporters were planning offline actions to take place at upcoming geek conventions.

Soon after I recapped it, other publications wrote about Gamergate as if it were more or less over, too. One predicted that 2015 would be the year everyone forgot about Gamergate, noting that it is still around as a twitter hashtag and a forum topic, but the relevance is waning from its peak in the fall. Thats going to keep happening.

That did not keep happening. But the medias insistence that it would provides a key insight into why Gamergate endured, and why it ultimately coalesced into the larger alt-right movement that helped fuel the election of President Trump.

If you never really understood what Gamergate was to begin with, heres a brief refresher: In the fall of 2014, under the premise that they were angry at unethical games journalists a lie that persists today thousands of people in the games community began to systematically harass, heckle, threaten, and dox several outspoken feminist women in their midst, few of whom were journalists. The harassment occurred under the social media hashtag Gamergate, which is still a hotbed of debate and anti-feminist resentment today.

Harassment and misogyny had been problems in the community for years before this; the deep resentment and anger toward women that powered Gamergate percolated for years on internet forums. Robert Evans, a journalist who specializes in extremist communities and the host of the Behind the Bastards podcast, described Gamergate to me as partly organic and partly born out of decades-long campaigns by white supremacists and extremists to recruit heavily from online forums. Part of why Gamergate happened in the first place was because you had these people online preaching to these groups of disaffected young men, he said. But what Gamergate had that those previous movements didnt was an organized strategy, made public, cloaking itself as a political movement with a flimsy philosophical stance, its goals and targets amplified by the power of Twitter and a hashtag.

Again and again, throughout 2014 and afterward and, really, well before that, as women in online subcultures withstood years of targeted harassment many failed to understand and assess what Gamergate was. The media, tech platforms, the niche internet communities these reactionaries came from (places with marginally obscure names like 4chan, 8chan, and Voat, for instance), the corporations they easily manipulated, and the general public, who seemed to take it in as nebulous online noise; no one properly identified Gamergate as a major turning point for the internet. The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just trolls began to crumble. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.

Its tempting to wonder if we could have stopped Gamergate before it happened, in the years before it coalesced into a systematized movement. Perhaps we could have quashed these kernels of hate with better forum moderation, more serious attention to the problem of misogynistic harassment, and less reliance on the longstanding twin internet wisdoms of prioritizing free speech and starving a troll until it leaves. In truth, by the time Gamergate had begun, it was probably already unstoppable but our inability to learn any lessons from it is what allowed it to scale all the way to the White House.

Six years later, heres a look at some of the lessons we still need to learn from Gamergate in order to keep its victims safe and in order to keep the next decade from producing a movement thats even worse.

At the time Gamergate began, the question of how and when law enforcement should step in to deal with online harassment was a burning one, as multiple women reported being threatened and doxxed out of their homes. (Among them was Zo Quinn, the game developer who became Gamergates target zero after an ex-boyfriend wrote a blog post accusing her of entering an unethical romantic relationship with the reporter Nathan Grayson, of the gaming news site Kotaku. To that blog posts target audience of disgruntled gamers, the alleged infidelity rendered Quinn the poster child of hypocritical feminism and Kotaku the emblem of unethical journalism in the eyes of Gamergaters.)

Cyberstalking and revenge porn were also major issues that had been around for years but gained new prominence in 2014, as Celebgate saw celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Kim Kardashian joining the countless women whove had private photos circulated online without their consent.

Today, however, the justice system continues to be slow to understand the link between online harassment and real-life violence. Although the Violence Against Women Act made cyberstalking illegal in 2006, and although one in four young women report being stalked or sexually harassed online, women frequently have difficulty getting law enforcement to take online harassment seriously especially the veiled kind thats intimidating but not overtly violent or hateful. There are more on-the-books laws about online harassment now and more prosecutions, but police are often untrained and undereducated regarding what type of behavior constitutes harassment, how to legally counter such behavior, and what should be investigated. Frequently, people who report harassment are left unsatisfied with the response.

Recently, while I was researching a violent crime with an online component, one police officer told me that most of the time, officers in his department have never heard of Twitter, let alone other social media platforms and more niche websites. Evans told Vox that while he believes people in positions of power in government and law enforcement take internet threats much more seriously, the change has yet to fully trickle down.

When I started receiving death threats earlier this year, after I was on a documentary about 8chans [politics] board, he told Vox in an interview in 2019, I went to the West Los Angeles police department with pictures of this bounty on my head and Photoshopped images of me with a bullet in my head. I had to try to explain what was going on to them, and they had never heard of the website, didnt seem to really understand that an online threat was a serious thing, [...] and I spent most of my time with the police trying to explain Bitcoin to a bunch of 50-year-old Los Angeles police officers.

I would have expected as much in 2014, when Gamergate was first in the news, because many social media platforms were still niche enough that you might not expect law enforcement to be familiar with them or their communities. Hearing it five years later was an eye-opening moment but its a stark reminder that we still have a long way to go to protect the general population, and women in particular, from violence online and off.

I think they have very slowly, far too slowly, learned certain things that are valuable, Evans said. They do now take online threats of school and [mass] shootings much more seriously. So ... I am seeing things get better. But not nearly as quickly as it ought.

In order to increase public safety this decade, it is imperative that police and everyone else become more familiar with the kinds of communities that engender toxic, militant systems of harassment, and the online and offline spaces where these communities exist. Increasingly, that means understanding social medias dark corners, and the types of extremism they can foster.

One of the strangest side effects of Gamergate was its effectiveness at convincing corporations to stop advertising on media outlets it targeted as part of its ethics in journalism motto. Among the corporations that dropped advertising from various publications as a result of Gamergate petitions were Adobe, Mercedes-Benz, and Intel, the latter of which later said it had no idea what online politics it had waded into. Mercedes also later realized its mistake and restored advertising.

But despite wide discussion within the gaming community and the media about Gamergates manipulative tactics when it was drawing peak media attention, it seems that many corporations and other businesses failed to grasp a vital takeaway from these incidents: that its crucial to understand how, when, and why an online mob is expressing outrage before you decide how to respond to it. Gamergate should have taught businesses that online mobs can and do look for excuses to be outraged, as a pretext to harass and abuse their targets.

Theres a difference between organic outrage that arises because an employee actually does something outrageous, and invented outrage thats an excuse to harass someone whom a group has already decided to target for unrelated reasons for instance, because an employee is a feminist. A responsible business would ideally figure out which type of outrage is occurring before it punished a client or employee who was just doing their job.

Instead, companies have continued to fall for the manufactured outrage playbook Gamergate and its online heirs created, often blaming employees who are dealing with harassment rather than blaming the people doing the harassing. In 2016, Gamergate brutally harassed a Nintendo employee, targeting her on social media, unearthing her old writing in order to accuse her of pedophilia, and vilifying her to her employer. Instead of protecting the employee from the onslaught of misogynistic abuse, Nintendo responded by firing her. In 2018, game developer ArenaNet fired two of its employees after their responses to what they saw as Twitter harassment sparked major backlash from gamers, prompting the company president to blame the employees for reacting to the community with hostility. In both cases, the employers framed the employees outspoken response to prolonged and intense harassment as a liability.

Also in 2018, Marvel fired popular writer Chuck Wendig over reactionary outrage that was literally manufactured most of it was generated by bots rather than people. And in reaction to what was perhaps the most effective manufactured outrage of all, Disney fired James Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy 3 after a harassment campaign straight out of the Gamergate playbook, stripping past tweets of their context to generate contrived backlash. While Disney nearly a year later ultimately acknowledged it had made a mistake and rehired Gunn, its a familiar note in an exhausting, repetitive, and, crucially, easily avoidable cycle that companies have yet to learn how to sidestep.

This cycle is frustrating. And its the fault of corporations failure to understand whether an internet mobs outrage is hyperbolic, and the larger cultural failure to understand and deal with the way those mobs also spread violence, online and off.

The current debate around whether to privilege freedom of speech over the damage done by extremist rhetoric and other types of harmful speech arguably began with Gamergate.

Theres the perception of not having bias, particularly in American media, Evans told me. This idea that youre a veteran journalist if you dont take a side, even if its an issue that really somebody ought to be taking a side on, like Nazis. Dedication to free speech over the appearance of bias is especially important within tech culture, where a commitment to protecting free speech is both a banner and an excuse for large corporations to justify their approach to content moderation or lack thereof.

During Gamergate, Evans said, the movements members found out that with a little bit of plausible deniability, they could trick the media and social media platforms into taking their harassment campaigns seriously. When Gamergate found its Its about ethics in journalism mantra, it had a cloak under which to argue that all of its violent speech wasnt about a misogynistic abuse of women at all, but rather about a loftier philosophical purpose.

There were mouthpieces of the movement, like [Milo] Yiannopoulos, who were happy to provide enough of a justification that suddenly [they could claim] it was not just the story of a harassing campaign, he said. Research conducted by Newsweek in 2015 analyzing the Gamergate hashtag showed that its real purpose was abusive harassment, and that targeted women in gaming were more frequently responded to using the hashtag than the journalists whose ethics were ostensibly up for discussion. But even though the movements real motives were widely known, the community structures of platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube, to say nothing of the anonymous forum 4chan, all fostered Gamergate.

Reddits free-speech-friendly moderation stance resulted in the platform tacitly supporting pro-Gamergate subforums like r/KotakuInAction, which became a major contributor to Reddits growing alt-right community. Twitter rolled out a litany of moderation tools in the wake of Gamergate, intended to allow harassment targets to perpetually block, mute, and police their own harassers without actually effectively making the site unwelcome for the harassers themselves. And YouTube and Facebook, with their algorithmic amplification of hateful and extreme content, made no effort to recognize the violence and misogyny behind pro-Gamergate content, or police them accordingly.

Gamergaters chalked up the movements grievances over ethical journalism to confusion or self-deception. This was an intentional strategy, one that gained traction on social media with those unaware of the harassment component. And Gamergaters learned they could scale this approach. Gamergate showed them that they could make a difference in the real world, but it [also] showed them something else important, Evans said. They saw that not only could they get away with a harassment campaign like this ... they [saw that they] could do that shit all day long and nobody was going to do anything about it. They learned that it worked, and they kept doing it.

So the Gamergate movement merged into the larger alt-right sphere of online extremist culture that emerged in the middle of the decade, spreading hate speech throughout social media and setting the stage for the alt-right to influence the 2016 election.

Google, YouTube, and Twitter did eventually begin taking steps to moderate the rampage of extremist content Gamergate ushered in; Facebook continues to lean into on its free speech policies. Reddit finally isolated (though not ban) its biggest pro-Trump forum which has heavy overlap with its biggest Gamergate forum in 2019, but only after its members repeatedly violated rules and began threatening politicians with real-world violence. A recent Wired cover article profiled a Google culture in meltdown over ideological debates and Googles indecision over how to handle them. Mired in its own culture war, YouTube has become a haven for reactionaries and the alt-right, and its 2019 ban on white supremacist and conspiracy content may do little to quell the growth of extremism on the platform. And Twitter and Facebook, each with its own set of problems, are caught in the national conversation related to free speech.

All of these platforms are wrestling with problems that seem to have grown beyond their control; its arguable that if they had reacted more swiftly to slow the growth of the internets most toxic and misogynistic communities back when those communities, particularly Gamergate, were still nascent, they could have prevented headaches in the long run and set an early standard for how to deal with ever-broadening issues of extremist content online.

As things stand, many of these platforms are still wrestling with the most basic ingredients for keeping toxic elements out of their communities, even though these are the kinds of foundational building blocks inherent to good internet forum moderation. Its past time for leaders in the tech industry to learn how to be good stewards of the communities to which they are home.

2014 should have been the year the cultural conversation began to acknowledge how serious aggression toward women really is. It wasnt.

One of the most frustrating things about watching Gamergate unfold is that the seeds of it had been in place for years. Targeted online harassment against women had been occurring for years, across numerous communities, from men who spent years harassing one woman who complained of getting hit on at a professional conference to harassment of actors for playing unlikable women.

In 2012, male backlash against feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian over her attempt to expand her commentary on films into commentary on games was so intense it made international headlines and her harassment involved doxxing, death threats, rape threats, and bomb threats, some so serious that she was driven out of her home for weeks. One planned Sarkeesian lecture at a college campus was canceled over a mass shooting threat. And there were other signs prior to Gamergate that online harassment of women and minorities could escalate to real-life violence for instance, the 2014 Santa Barbara mass shooters misogynistic online manifesto and history of participation in deeply misogynistic online spaces.

All these events garnered widespread media coverage and attention but still, in 2014, when this misogyny escalated into a systematic, organized, scalable, and sustained attack on women through the establishment of Gamergate as a movement, the media and many members of the public initially dismissed it as a watershed event. During Gamergate, as Evans put it, gamers attacked women like Sarkeesian and Zo Quinn with horrific threats that escalated offline: They threat[ened] to murder people, mail[ed] them letters written in blood, sent dead animals to their door. But none of this harassment seemed to permeate mainstream discussions of Gamergate, which tended to center more on the personalities involved from profiles describing Gamergate target Quinn as troubled to those describing its hero Milo Yiannopoulos as a descendant of William S. Burroughs.

And in the same way that none of those years of escalating online assaults against women prepared us for Gamergate, somehow, the formation of Gamergate itself didnt prepare society for the cultural rise of the alt-right. The journalists who did anticipate that Gamergate could and would morph into something worse were, by 2015, drowned out by the general cultural idea that Gamergate had somehow failed even though it was a movement inherently meant to scale and grow. Somehow, the idea that all of that sexism and anti-feminist anger could be recruited, harnessed, and channeled into a broader white supremacist movement failed to generate any real alarm, even well into 2016, when all the pieces were firmly in place.

In other words, even though all the signs were there in 2014 that a systematized online harassment campaign could lead to an escalation in real-world violence, most people failed to see what was happening. Gamergate ultimately made us all much more aware of the potential real-world impact of online extremism. Yet, years after Gamergate, despite increasing evidence suggesting a connection between online violence against women and real-world violence including mass shootings many corporations and social media platforms still struggle to identify and eradicate extreme forms of violence against women from online spaces.

For instance: In early 2019, Valve, the parent company of the online game platform Steam, allowed a game called Rape Day, in which the object of the game was to rape women, to stay up in its store for days before finally removing it. Despite all of its algorithmic tweaking, Twitter is still abysmal at identifying and taking action against rape and death threats on its website. The 2019 murder of 17-year-old Bianca Devins, a well-known Instagram user, carried a disturbing online component that involved her killer posting graphic online photos of her death. The photos rapidly went viral, including on Instagram and Twitter, which were both largely ineffective at curbing their spread.

This failure to act has serious consequences, because many of the perpetrators of real-world violence are radicalized online first. In 2018, the International Center for Research on Women identified online gender-based violence as an emerging public health and human rights concern and linked it to a growing number of mass shootings, noting, Failing to detect and deter technology-facilitated GBV is a missed opportunity to prevent deadly consequences offline. Other research has found that more than half of the USs mass shootings involve the targeting of an intimate partner or ex-partner, and many of the most recent mass attacks involve a perpetrator who displayed or threatened violent behavior toward one woman or multiple women, either online or off. In the past year alone, multiple mass shootings have had an element of misogynistic or domestic violence targeted at women.

It remains difficult for many to accept the throughline from online abuse to real-world violence against women, much less the fact that violence against women, online and off, is a predictor of other kinds of real-world violence. The dots are there we just have to connect them.

Gamergate masked its misogyny in a coating of shrill yelling that had most journalists in 2014 writing off the whole incident as satirical and immature trolling, and very few correctly predicting that Gamergates trolling was the future of politics the political wave that would essentially morph into the broader alt-right movement.

But the movement was serious. It served as a rallying point for a lot of groups that wouldnt necessarily have gotten along, like more traditional conservatives and outright neo-Nazis, Evans said, and gave them all a banner to rally under where the Nazis could pretend to not be Nazis. And the conservatives could give themselves plausible deniability and pretend they werent working with Nazis. It acted as a blanket for all of this stuff.

Gamergate was all about disguising a sincere wish for violence and upheaval by dressing it up in hyperbole and irony in order to confuse outsiders and make it all seem less serious. As Evans noted to me, Gamergate was fueled in part by online extremists, who initially bonded with young men in gaming communities over what started as ironic humor and jokes about the Holocaust, jokes about racial differences and whatnot. And over time, all those things became less joking. This tactic was a deliberate strategy that formed the core of the alt-right playbook, and years after Gamergate, media outlets continued to fall for it.

Take, for example, the highly disturbing instigator Milo Yiannopoulos, who gained notoriety as a Gamergate commentator before he went to work at the alt-right blog site Breitbart in 2014. The media continued referring to Yiannopoulos as a troll, despite ample evidence suggesting his words and actions were associated with real bigoted or extremist beliefs, espoused by both him and his followers. Yiannopoulos was a prime example of a rabble-rouser who manipulated Gamergate toward his own ends. He benefited from the mayhem and chaos his rabble-rousing caused, whether he was making campus tour stops that inspired increases in hate speech as well as acts of serious violence, or just egging on the racist harassment of a public figure.

Yiannopoulos constantly exacerbated his followers and their anger. The danger posed to marginalized members of the communities he visited was immediate and real. Yet even into 2018 he would explicitly encourage violence and then claim he was just trolling. Just as Evans noted, the merest suggestion that none of his extremist rhetoric was sincere allowed him to continue spreading it.

Understanding this concept is crucial to understanding why Gamergate was able to morph into the alt-right. Gamergate simultaneously masqueraded as legitimate concern about ethics that demanded audiences take it seriously, and as total trolling that demanded audiences dismiss it entirely. Both these claims served to obfuscate its real aim misogyny, and, increasingly, racist white supremacy. By the time Yiannopoulos joined Breitbart, and Breitbarts Steve Bannon joined the Trump campaign, the links between Gamergate and the national political machine should have been clear. The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for the alt-right, Hillary Clinton said in a 2016 campaign speech. A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.

But three years after that, and five years after Gamergate, it seems that very few people have really learned how to tell when a troll is just trolling or when its about to commit real-world violence. Its hard to spot the terrorists among the trolls, the Wall Street Journal acknowledged in 2019, in response to the Christchurch mass shooting. The Christchurch shooter had posted a manifesto online; full of hyperbolic alt-right internet memes, it was intended to both obfuscate and amplify the genuine white nationalist rhetoric at its center.

The publics failure to understand and accept that the alt-rights misogyny, racism, and violent rhetoric is serious goes hand in hand with its failure to understand and accept that such rhetoric is identical to that of President Trump. Now we see similar ideologies as Gamergaters from someone as powerful as Trump. He retweets and amplifies alt-right memes on his Twitter; his son openly affiliates with the alt-right; Trump defended and continues to present the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as though it wasnt intentionally planned and organized as a white supremacist rally. (It was.)

As described by Voxs Ezra Klein, Trumps willingness to engage in incendiary racist rhetoric is similar to the tactics that have led many journalists to dismiss his followers as trolls: He chooses his enemies based on who he thinks will rile up his base. He uses outrageous, offensive insults to get the media to take notice. And then he feeds off the energy unleashed by the confrontation. In other words, he and his followers many of whom, again, are members of the extreme online right-wing that got its momentum from Gamergate are using the strategy Gamergate codified: deploying offensive behavior behind a guise of mock outrage, irony, trolling, and outright misrepresentation, in order to mask the sincere extremism behind the message.

Just as Yiannopoulos did before him, Trump speaks to his supporter base through wink-wink-nod-nod moments that lead them to respond in alarming ways, including with violence. But many members of the media, politicians, and members of the public still struggle to accept that Trumps rhetoric is having violent consequences, despite all evidence to the contrary.

That divide between reality and perception is part of the larger cultural epistemic crisis that has loomed over the US for the past five years and arguably began with Gamergate. The movements insistence that it was about one thing (ethics in journalism) when it was about something else (harassing women) provided a case study for how extremists would proceed to drive ideological fissures through the foundations of democracy: by building a toxic campaign of hate beneath a veneer of denial.

Five years later, it seems, the rest of us are still struggling to learn from the consequences.

The rest is here:
What we still havent learned from Gamergate - Vox.com

Montclair State University in New Jersey was hit with a lawsuit Wednesday challenging its policies regulating speech on campus.

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) says the university's speech and permit policies stifle the free expression of ideas and unconstitutionally classifies campus student organizations based on viewpoint.

The lawsuit stems from an incident last September. Three students affiliated with Young Americans for Liberty dressed in orange prisoner-like jumpsuits and held up signs expressing support for gun-free zones. As pretend criminals, their message was clear that gun-free zones only aid lawbreakers, and harm law-abiding citizens.According to a press release on the lawsuit, the ADF says the students were peacefully expressing their ideas in a common outdoor area of the campus when a campus police officer forced them to stop. They were told if they wanted to speak on campus they had first to obtain permission at least two weeks in advance and that the dean's office would assign them a time and place to speak.

The lawsuit alleges "this two-week requirement imposes an unconstitutional prior restraint on all students throughout the entire campus," and allows the university to deny or delay a student's request for a permit for any reason.

"A public university is supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, but that marketplace can't function if officials impose burdensome restraints on speech or if they can selectively enforce those restraints against disfavored groups," said ADF Legal Counsel Michael Ross.

In an e-mailed statementto northjersey.com, University President Susan Cole said Montclair State "is absolutely and unequivocally committed to freedom of speech" and the exchange of ideas. But, she wrote, that must be balanced with "the right of all members of the university community to be able to engage without disruption" in school activities.

"No member of the university community is subject to any limitation or penalty for demonstrating or assembling with others for the expression of his/her viewpoint," Cole wrote.

ADF counsel Ross disagrees. "Policing peaceful student expression that the university doesn't favor is blatantly unconstitutional and directly opposed to the mission of public universities to encourage and allow the discussion of ideas," Ross said.

The lawsuit takes aim at two other campus policies it says violates students' rights.

One policy gives the university's Student Government Association (SGA) complete discretion to rank student organizations into "classes." Young Americans for Liberty is ranked as a Class IV group, which means it is considered "entry-level," and unlike higher-ranked groups it can not request funding from the student fees its members and all students are required to pay unless it raises outside matching funds. The Student Government Association has sole discretion to determine if a student group is entry-level or "meets the needs of a very specific and unique interest of the campus community." This, the lawsuit alleges, is a criterion based on viewpoint and content of speech and is, therefore, unconstitutional. Young Americans for Liberty is still designated as "entry-level" even though it's been registered as a group since 2018.

In a statement to northjersey.com, the SGA says its policies and procedures for student organizations are "viewpoint neutral," and that the lawsuit "mischaracterizes" them.

The second school policy involves the university's Bias Education Response Taskforce. The lawsuit quotes the University as saying the Taskforce exists "to provide a well-coordinated and comprehensive response to incidents of intolerance and bias with respect to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion, and national origin." It also has various sanctions against students whose speech it determines intolerant.

The lawsuit alleges the Taskforce guidelines for determining bias and prejudice are "vague and overbroad," and the fear of violating some vague standard stifles the expression of speech protected by the US Constitution. The ADF says the purpose of the Taskforce "is to suppress speech that may make others uncomfortable."

ADF attorneys filed the complaint called Young Americans for Liberty at Montclair State University v. The Trustees of Montclair State University with the US District Court for the District of New Jersey on Wednesday.

Originally posted here:
Montclair State Univ. Sued for 'Unconstitutional' Speech Policy and Favoring One Student Group Over Another Based on Their Beliefs - CBN News