What is the connection between State-sponsored disinformation and online harassment? Well, closer than you'd think. See how this works and get 3 suggestions for how to fix it in my latest article in the Colorado Journal of Law and Technology. ctlj.colorado.edu/?page_id=1283
Many works discuss online harassment harms; few discuss harassment's influence on elections/democracy. Online harassment has created serious policy, technical, and structural vulnerabilities that are exploited by malign actors & go largely unnoticed—or unprioritized—by companies.
Online harassment became mainstream with Gamergate. The problem is still plaguing social media, with progress being made in fits and starts after publicized incidents of bullying or silencing of minority voices. However, the problem has grown past these applications to new harms.
Trolling has become the vocabulary and testing ground of digital authoritarians, primarily State actors who use the internet to enable mass manipulation & intimidation to meet their political ends and silence dissent. @benimmo & I discuss this at RSA 2020
Understanding how online harassment works is integral to combatting State-based disinformation and efforts to undermine faith in both democracy and the internet.
What begins online often moves to offline consequences. Outside authorities—be it platform content reviewers, school officials, or police officers—are enlisted as "useful idiots," squandering their resources while further victimizing the targets.
Furthermore, in many cases, the perpetrators are intimately familiar with the contours and weaknesses of the law. They use this knowledge to their advantage to weaken enforcement or enable their own ends.
Increasingly, online harassment is being used to target entire communities—everyone who looks like or identifies with a particular target—and to exacerbate social divisions and societal fissures.
Russian actors impersonating Americans magnified US divisions, particularly in flashpoint areas like race relations. Targeting minority groups is most effective when it provokes domestic actors, fusing aggression & hatred into legitimate political expression by unwitting proxies.
Examples from Brazil, Vietnam, and China show “brigading,” or how sometimes masses of people will organize to harass political opponents and abuse the platform architecture designed to protect people from harassment.
While attribution is difficult, the pattern is clear: pro-government forces report critics and manipulate platform mechanisms to silence critiques of the government. The groups comprising useful idiots are not always the usual suspects—and are increasingly volunteer conscripts.
I concludes with 3 suggestions of how industry can counter harassment-based disinformation and the targeting of vulnerable persons and groups: (1) companies should commit to a risk-based allocation of resources...
2) companies should follow best practices in other industries by conducting human rights impact assessments. Harassment should be included in the survey; 3) companies should take a systemic approach to online harassment by looking at behaviors instead of actors and content.
If these are accomplished, online harassment can be taken out of the digital authoritarians’ toolbox as a means to influence elections, undermine democracy, and eliminate political critics— which means it is more critical than ever to take online harassment seriously.
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