“Yet for some people online harassment, bullying, misogyny, racism or homophobia can end up poisoning the internet and stopping them from speaking out. We have responsibilities as online citizens to make sure the internet is a safe space. Challenging online abuse can’t be done by any organisation alone … This needs everyone.”
Contributors will be asked to provide ideas on five key areas:
- The role of the police and prosecutors.
- The role of organisations and employers.
- The responsibility of social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, as publishers.
- The role of individuals across society to tackle trolls and support victims.
- Empowering and educating the next generation.
This war on online harassment has been going on for a long time now, and the line between harassment and trolling still hasn't been drawn. To me the whole thing is coming across in the same way as the War on Drugs, with no real structure of clear end goal.
Unless you're overzealous in sharing your private information everywhere online or someone's out to get you, the internet is a relatively "safe space". Just like in the real world, you don't have to pay attention to everything that others are saying to you, no matter how nefarious it is. All forms of harassment are vile, but with the law in its current state, prosecution of people is so inconsistent that people are getting into trouble for trolling and real abuse is going unnoticed.
Saying that, policing the internet isn't something that I agree with, and the providers of the services also should have to police their services.
Internationally, more than 200,000 aggressive tweets using the same words (slut and whore) were sent to 80,000 people in the same period – and according to the study, more than half of the offenders were women.
Here in lies the problem. Blanket analysis of Tweets like this shows us nothing. You can determine the relationship of the people involved from one tweet. I think it's safe to say that a lot of people have sent aggressive tweets to friends as part of a joke.
With more than half of the offenders being women, is misogyny really the correct term to explain the aggression? Words lose their meanings when used on such large scales, and they mean different things to different people. For example, if I call someone a faggot, I'm not using it in a homophobic way, I'm using it as a general insult. Someone might hear me saying the word and instantly think I'm homophobic, when I'm not. Slut and whore are both words that I don't see as being that offensive. That could either be because I'm a man and haven't had them used in derogatory ways against me, or it could be because the words have lost their significance.
Presumption of innocence is still a thing. This war on online harassment feels like a manhunt in which no one knows the identity of the person they're hunting. Yvette Cooper has good intentions, but I don't think the campaign is informed enough to petition for change that won't accidentally adversely affect the internet.
/slightly incoherent ramble with no real structure of clear end goal