I was reading something on a website this morning about internet harassment (I won't link to it because I don't want to give them hits). It was the same old garbage. Why? Because it implied that internet harassment was a problem specific to women. All women, all the time.
Let me tell you something about internet harassment. It is universal. Everyone is at risk of being harassed on the internet regardless of gender, race, or politics. People are jerks and people on the internet are bigger jerks. I've written before about the various campaigns to harass people that everyone likes to forget about but there were plenty of men on that list. It isn't a liberal/conservative issue either because both sides have done it.
Here are the ways trolls choose to pick victims for internet harassment:
1. Someone makes a public statement on a highly charged political issue. Usually in a poorly thought out or needlessly cruel way. This will piss off everyone else on the other side. The only requirement here is that someone makes it go viral among the other side of the issue and the bad actors in that group will attack the original person. Every single group on earth has bad actors. That is worth repeating and emphasizing. Every single group on earth has bad actors! Liberals, Conservatives, Libertarians, Marxists, Neo-Reactionaries, Feminists, MRA's, all of them have their share of people that like to punish people for having the "wrong" opinions. The trolls involved in these kinds of attacks are both looking to silence their enemies and to signal their political affiliations
2. They find someone that looks like an easy target.These are a bit different then the politically motivated trolls. These people are looking for entertainment, not political signalling. Like the political trolls they may target a major controversy, but they don't care about the politics of it at all. They just want to cause chaos and drive their target into making rash decisions and angry statements. These kinds of trolls thrive on the reactions of the target. There only goal is to make the target get angry enough to react to them. These kinds of trolls love it when people engage with them so the best move is to ignore them completely.
That's it. It has nothing to do with what gender you are because man or woman, if you say something people don't like or make it clear that you will lose your mind if you are challenged in anyway, you are making yourself a target. It doesn't pay to complain that your situation is unique because it is a universal human experience. It will look like whining to your enemies and like stating the obvious to your friends.
Everyone should know by now how this works. I know how it works and I understand that there could be consequences to what I say. Those consequences could be completely unfair and completely unrelated to how well argued they are or how true they are. And no matter what the "sin", the reaction would far out weigh whatever I said that made people mad in the first place. I say what I want anyways because If I ever were a target of trolls I would just ignore them. If it got really bad I would just unplug from the internet for awhile. If it got "Indiana Pizzeria" or "Trevor Noah" bad I would become such a ghost that not even my friends would know where I was. Everyone who posts stuff on the internet should be aware of this, and nobody should act like they are immune.
I guess I am beating around the bush here. I should make it clearer but, I worry if I make it too clear I could become the target of the very same harassment I am decrying. The article I read was about the treatment of women in the tech industry. Now I am not saying that there aren't issues in the tech industry with sexism. There is, but from what I understand it is incredibly variable depending on where you work. I've heard women say that they have never once been harassed in the tech industry and I have heard other women say the harassment was terrible. My guess is that some companies treat women better then others.
To make it clear, I'm not really interested in either case because I don't work in the tech industry and I don't really care about the people that do, other then the general belief that nobody deserves harassment regardless of their industry. But that's the context for the issue. The article goes on to say that women who write about the issues in the tech industry, or about anything in general, get harassed by trolls.
So are women who write about these issues targeted by trolls? OF COURSE THEY ARE! But not because they are women. It is because they are almost always radical feminists/Social Justice Warriors. At the very least they are perceived that way. Guess what issue the internet is tearing itself apart about? Radical Feminism/Social Justice/Identity Politics. Dipping your toes into that water is just asking to get burned. I'm risking it right now, from the other side mind you, just for mentioning that their might be other reasons for the harassment described in the article. It's the hot button issue that everyone on the internet is talking about, and talking about it in any way is very dangerous. Everyone knows this and nobody should be surprised when someone gets harassed for taking a political stand on the issue either way. Right now the internet seems largely unable to talk about the issue without going completely insane, which makes it a great target for the 2nd kind of trolls as well. Is that fair? Of course not, but that is the reality we live in.
Of course, it seems impossible to me that anyone can make any kind of point about internet harassment period, other then the fact that it is terrible. I perceive the harassment and trolling to be a lot worse from the radical left because I live on the right. No matter how bad my side gets they aren't going to target me, but since I'm part of the outgroup for the left in general, and specifically radical feminists/social justice warriors so I am much more aware of all the bad things they are doing. I also feel like no matter what political stance I would take I would always be in the outgroup for the radical left for reasons that I'm not going to get into here.
Now, of course, the people on the left are much more aware of all the bad things the people on the right are doing too. And there are enough people on both sides that know that this dynamic is in play that they try and reign in the bad behavior from the bad actors in both groups.The problem is that the bad actors in both groups greatly outnumber the good. There are far too many people that think that there is nothing wrong with trying to troll and harass the "other side" because the "other side" is "obviously wrong" and "evil". But when the outrage cannon gets focused on their side they respond with outrage.
And that outrage is like the article I read this morning that made me go on a multi-paragraph rant. The article was dishonest because it made it seem like only team Blue was the target of this kind of harassment when Red has had the very same problems. Sure, instead of labeling it Liberal vs Conservative, they labeled it Woman vs Men, or more accurately, Feminists vs Nerds, but everyone who read the article knew what they were talking about. It's tribalism, pure and simple. It did nothing to actually enlighten people about the problem of trolling, it just tried to score political points.
I don't know if there is a solution to trolling, other then not making yourself a target and disappearing from the internet if you are one, but one thing is for certain. Turning it into a political issue is not helping anyone. But every issue is politicized these days...
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