Expanding arenas and Justin Bieber

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SOLOS likes to refer to bullying as harassment (and consequently cyberbullying as online harassment) because such terms are more in line with legal definitions and concepts, while avoiding the slightly irritating “cyber-” prefix.

I’ve discussed the confusion around these concepts before and don’t want to retrace old posts, necessarily, but I did want to articulate that usage distinction somewhere, and where better than a post that deals with a handful of new angles to the topic?

According to a new study [.pdf] by the American Sociological Review, it seems the online and offline incarnation of what old-timers used to call plain old adolescent bullying is not at all simple or straightforward (and probably never was); particularly in terms of the relative social standing of both victims and perpetrators. To put it simply, the traditional notion of a marginalized victim tormented by a maladjusted, overly aggressive perpetrator is all wrong, and that most instances of harassment occur between individuals closer in status—in other words, it’s more a social response to rivalry than it is some individual pathology-based behavioural anomaly. And it is woven into our institutions. Therefore solvable (it’s worth noting). As I said, it’s complicated and even counterintuitive, but this New York Times blog post is as good a summary as any, and well worth your time.

And to combine two perennial Hot Topics favourites—online harassment and Facebook—there’s this interesting spat between a school whose teacher was personally insulted on a student’s Facebook profile. If nothing else, this story illustrates some of the nuanced ways in which technology affects human interactions. The hurt feelings (and the impact on individual reputations) are the same but the legal and ethical aspects have proliferated and changed somehow. What is private and what is public? If a behaviour is deemed off limits in the real world, is that same behaviour online considered more censurable, or less? And in this case, it’s the online world that appears to be getting the pass, or at least as far as the ACLU is concerned. What, if any, are the limits to free speech in these types of scenario? Oh, and in case you were wondering, the student won the case, although others in roughly similar situations have not been so fortunate. To me, it feels like the gladiators haven’t necessarily changed, but the arena and the sheer size of the audience has, and it’s confusing the hell out of everyone.

The final story probably only merits a passing glance, but I would be remiss among a certain demographic if I didn’t mention that Facebook has enlisted “popular teen idol” Justin Bieber (along with MTV) to be the face of a public awareness campaign against online harassment. Except—and feel free to call me cynical for this—since it’s almost certainly a mostly cosmetic knee jerk reaction to the fairly steady external criticism of the site, it still calls it “cyberbullying” and probably doesn’t offer much in the way of practical solutions.

So endeth today’s lessons in, uh, cyberbullying.

Plus ça change…

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You just knew it would take something like this to get Hot Topics back on the blogging trail.

After the frustrating, lone-voice-in-the-wilderness experience of defending Craigslist (with caveats) over the whole prostitution debacle, after nodding vigorously at danah boyd’s eminently sensible take, after seeing the forces of vote-pandering mediocrity win out, and right here in Canada too, we have now arrived here. “Here” being evidence that, instead of being conveniently housed within the contained arena that is Craigslist, the banished sex trade diaspora might well be now hiding in the form of individual profiles on social networks, particularly the biggest social network of all, Facebook. As in real life, when the NIMBYs win and sweep the whole circus from out of their neighbourhood, it fragments and scatters, making it tougher for law enforcement to track and (in the case of the street trade at least) more dangerous for the women. How many times does this pattern have to be repeated?

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some smart people in law enforcement, but the profession as a whole is a bureaucracy, and there are some within it (a few attorneys general spring to mind) who would prefer to inflate their own political careers than to, uh, catch the bad guys. As a monolith, the field in its entirety can not only be the bluntest of tools, but can also be dumb as an ox.

Trust me, in this case, it doesn’t give me any pleasure whatsoever to say “I told you so.”

Censoring the Classifieds

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Come on, America, please don’t make me repeat myself… uh, okay, too late.

In the story that will (apparently) never die, once again U.S. attorneys general—17 of them, this time!—are appealing to Craigslist to can their adult services section, forcing Hot Topics to find new and interesting ways of regurgitating and reconstituting old posts. Sigh.

The latest round of attacks on the service surfaced on August 24, 2010, when the 17 attorneys general—citing a case in which two girls reported they were trafficked for sex via Craigslist—sent a joint letter [pdf] asking the site to remove the adult services section due to its promotion of prostitution and child trafficking, despite the fact that Craigslist’s team of attorneys had (among other measures) managed to reject 700,000 ads “in the year following implementation of manual screening”. Shortly thereafter, late on September 3rd to be exact, the site removed the “adult services” section and replaced the former link with an ominous block of text that read, simply, “Censored”. The unannounced nature of this development alongside Craigslist’s initial silence led some to speculate that the site was playing games, ostensibly by highlighting the ease with which similar ads would likely migrate to other sections. Whether or not this was initially the case, the point is now moot after the “Censored” bar itself was removed just yesterday (Wednesday September 8).

Now, right off the bat, I want to be honest about something: having previously lamented the virtual media silence over the child exploitation angle, it would be hypocritical of me not to acknowledge that particular aspect of these developments. Great, I’m glad we’re finally talking about kids.

However—and there are sufficient “howevers” here that I will be spreading them over a couple of posts—it’s worth noting that Craigslist actually has the law on its side, which renders its apparent capitulation a tad strange, to say the least. I’ll sign off on this post by simply quoting the relevant section of the Communications Decency Act linked to above:

Section 230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an “interactive computer service” who publish information provided by others:

  • No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

In analyzing the availability of the immunity offered by this provision, courts generally apply a three-prong test. A defendant must satisfy each of the three prongs to gain the benefit of the immunity:

  1. The defendant must be a “provider or user” of an “interactive computer service.”
  2. The cause of action asserted by the plaintiff must “treat” the defendant “as the publisher or speaker” of the harmful information at issue.
  3. The information must be “provided by another information content provider,” i.e., the defendant must not be the “information content provider” of the harmful information at issue.

Dire warnings and common sense

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When discussing with young people the perils and perks of online activities, it’s sometimes easy to overlook everyone in the equation. Take, for instance, the familiar caution not to post explicit or revealing photos online, or even to avoid sending them on handheld devices to that one intimate person in your life. Dire warnings range from future employment snafus, current humiliation leading to possible bullying, even to child pornography charges. But sometimes we forget an even more obvious recipient of our well-meaning advice—the individual who receives or otherwise acquires the photos in the first place.

Well, consider this story that overdue warning. In a teen drama played out hundreds of thousands of times everywhere, a recently-dumped boyfriend has a tough time dealing with those feelings of rejection, tries to exact revenge by trash talking about his ex with her new boyfriend, general hurt feelings ensue, eventually everyone calms down and gets over it… but wait, that familiar scenario is decidedly not what happened here. In fact, instead of hurt feelings, we end up with the potential lifelong exploitation/trauma of one party and the incarceration of the other.

Here’s the synopsis: post-breakup, boy (18) posts explicit photos of girl (16 — hence, no names) on Facebook, boy faces child pornography charges as a result, is released on bail then immediately breaches one of the conditions by contacting girl (actually to apologise), so boy is rearrested and charged with criminal harassment. Boy is sentenced to 6 months in jail.

Two things here:

1) if you get all butthurt after a relationship meltdown—and who hasn’t?— it’s a really good idea to drop all ideas of retaliation,

2) child pornography charges are overkill, and it seems to me that treating this less as a sex offence and more like domestic violence makes more sense, which is something wisely and sensibly acknowledged by all three parties here (from the CBC story):

A court-ordered pre-sentencing report recommended the teen be released immediately into a community-based domestic-violence treatment program. [Crown Prosecutor Terry] McComb and the man’s lawyer, Michelle Bright, told [Judge Kelly] Moar the case was more akin to one involving domestic violence and not sexual deviance.

At the request of the lawyers, Moar declined to have the man’s name placed on a federal database of sex-offenders, calling such a move “grossly disproportionate” given the circumstances of the case.

Sexting plus extortion equals “sextortion”

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Plenty to catch up on, so without fanfare, let us (ironically) cheer a new buzzword as coined by some anonymous federal bureaucrat somewhere in the U.S. Take a bow, “sextortion”!

Okay, facetiousness aside, this is a genuine phenomenon and while both noteworthy and concerning, it’s often difficult to resist mockery when some no-doubt sincere party deliberately or even inadvertently feeds the flames of the media’s tendency to make a beeline toward our old friend, the moral panic. Apparently it’s just as difficult to resist mixing metaphors, too, but moving on…

Even the generally prurience-free zone Salon falls for it right here. In what is a new take on an old crime, there are numerous cases in which someone uses a young person’s online indiscretions (a spontaneous-yet-compromising web cam image or cell phone photo) to blackmail them into committing further unwilling, usually sexual, acts. Acknowledging that no one agency is currently tracking all the cases, the article summarises a handful of examples from all over the United States:

  • In Alabama, Jonathan Vance, 24, of Auburn was sentenced to 18 years in prison in April after he admitted sending threatening e-mails on Facebook and MySpace extorting nude photos from more than 50 young women in Alabama, Pennsylvania and Missouri.
  • In Wisconsin, Anthony Stancl, 18, received 15 years in prison in February after prosecutors said he posed as a girl on Facebook to trick male high school classmates into sending him nude cell phone photos, which he then used to extort them for sex.
  • A 31-year-old California man was arrested in June on extortion charges after authorities said he hacked into more than 200 computers and threatened to expose nude photos he found unless their owners posed for more sexually explicit videos. Forty-four of the victims were juveniles, authorities said. Federal prosecutors said he was even able to remotely activate some victims’ webcams without their knowledge and record them undressing or having sex.

Worth keeping an eye on, and definitely another handy tidbit of information for kids to be aware of before they venture out into the semi-Wild West that is the internet.

The cyberbullying spectrum

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This third, loosely-related post will concentrate primarily on the New York Times and its excellent education-focused series on cyberbullying. Some of the impetus for the Times coverage appears to have been the tragic suicide of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince which, while occurring largely in a school environment, also involved elements of cyberbullying (texting and websites are referenced in the linked article).

For all you educators reading this, here’s a hybrid lesson plan/resource list that is quite comprehensive and (hopefully) provocative. Obviously, its focus is the United States, but I can’t emphasise enough how useful a resource hub it promises to be for teachers, students and parents alike.

Finally the motherlode. Lengthy yet well worth anyone’s time if this topic is even marginally of interest, the article delves into the very real ways in which online cruelty blossoming amid the confusing tangle of adolescent (and even pre-adolescent) peer relationships can have a devastating effect on young people and their sense of self, equilibrium, belonging. It’s also admirably frank, acknowledging that traditional in-school bullying is far more prevalent than its cyber cousin, but a picture nonetheless emerges of how wounding it can be for the kids, and how stressful it can be for school staff.

The concept of “cyberbullying” is itself questioned, in that it tends to refer to a disparate collection of behaviours, some far more traumatic than others (consider the gulf between a teasing text or two on the one hand, and a website dedicated to how ugly/fat/stupid one is on the other). It’s tempting to break it down paragraph by paragraph, but I’ll refrain. Seriously, if you read nothing else about cyberbullying this year, read this one article, and maybe even hop on over to its offshoot in which readers ask the questions you are probably also wondering about, not least this one. I’ll just end with a quote from the parent article:

Affronted by cyberspace’s escalation of adolescent viciousness, many parents are looking to schools for justice, protection, even revenge. …

Can a student be suspended for posting a video on YouTube that cruelly demeans another student? Can a principal search a cellphone, much like a locker or a backpack? It’s unclear. These issues have begun their slow climb through state and federal courts, but so far, rulings have been contradictory, and much is still to be determined.

A Maritime tale

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This story needs a little unravelling, or demystifying, since most reports tend to assume we know the background. What is interesting is how many intriguing aspects of the wider issue it raises.

So. Where to begin…

A 15-year-old girl from Halifax, Nova Scotia, discovered that someone had created a fake Facebook profile — complete with her actual photo (likely lifted from her actual Facebook page) — that contained defamatory comments about her appearance and sexual behaviour. As a result, on Wednesday May 26, 2010, the girl and her family turned to the courts in order to find out who was behind it. The family’s lawyer, Michelle Awad, confirmed that Facebook had provided the IP (Internet Protocol) number assigned to the computer that created the account, but she was more interested in finding out actual names of individuals from the ISP (Internet Service Provider) in question: Eastlink, Inc. Adding to the complicated nature of this story was Awad’s request for a publication ban on the victim’s name as well as on the specific contents of the fake profile.

The following day (May 27), the court ruled that Eastlink must provide the family with the customer information, but lawyers from local media outlets managed to convince Justice Arthur LeBlanc to reject the publication ban, on the grounds that Ms. Awad had failed to provide evidence showing a ban was necessary.

Undeterred, the family then appealed the decision to a higher court, while the girl’s identity and details of the defamatory comments remained under a publication ban.

Subsequently, Nova Scotia Court of Appeal Justice Linda Oland extended the ban until a December 7th hearing, during which a panel of three Appeal Court judges will hear arguments on whether LeBlanc’s original ruling was correct. At stake is this (from that last link):

If the court sides with the family, they would be able to take the order to EastLink, which would then disclose its information on who created the now defunct page. If the court rules against a publication ban, the girl and her father would have to decide whether to pursue the matter.

And of interest to a wider world are a host of questions, as discussed in the Comments sections of most of those linked stories, not least the weighing of the right to privacy of a minor against the public nature of the justice system. Here (without endorsement or comment) is a selection:

  • If the 15 year old and the parents laughed at it and made a joke about it, people would have forgotten about it. – WYSIWYG2
  • you have a reasonable expectation to a level of anonymity on the internet, but that expectation does not afford you protection when you break the law through slander, defamation and harassment. - Fed Up in YHZ
  • If we had a responsible media who actually considered the well-being of people to be more important than tabloid style journalism this would not be an issue. - Imhotep
  • She was defamed publicly by those hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. So, their rights to the privacy of their IP is superseded by their responsiblity not to break the law using that right privacy. - j_wilson
  • If she commits suicide because someone said sh!t about her and she couldn’t handle it, then the parents did a bad job raising her and helping protect her self esteem… In my opinion an ISP should be locked down and completely private not even allowing a court order to release the information. - WYSIWYG2
  • Trust me employers, customers, clients, and co workers do google names and check people out. Competition among co workers is one reason you want to keep your reputation and online profiles intact and clean. - jason rohlig
  • Either a crime has been committed or it has not, if it has start a legal action. If no crime has been committed, revealing identities becomes a crime in itself. That crime is one of violating individual Privacy Rights. Our legal system is particularly slow in understanding & reinterpreting our current laws to reflect the vast differences between the physical & cyber worlds. - ThePope
  • You couldn’t get away with this behaviour on the olde fashioned telephone, yet somehow doing it with a PC is different and worthy of protection? - BazzaRichie​
  • This will probably hurt the girls reputation even more and she will get that much more harassment. The parents should be more concerned about teaching her how to deal with a situation like this herself. This kind of stuff happens all the time in everyday life. Are you going to call the police every time someone says or does something mean? - gman5556
  • To further complicate things, an IP address only identifies the computer & the account holder of the Internet service being used. An IP address does not identify who physically used said computer or service. - ThePope
  • I think its appalling that media outlets are fighting this media ban. Bullying can be a traumatic event for children growing up and the situation has now been exacerbated by the advent of social networking sites. - humantraffi​c
  • How many bullied kids and their families will be brave enough to take their abusers to court if they know that their names, in addition to all the slurs said against them, could be splashed all over the national media? - clairehall

Anyway, you get the idea. Plenty of touchpoints, both emotional and philosophical.

One final thought that occurs to me is that, despite the obvious wrinkle of the alleged offence being located in cyberspace, the Criminal Code of Canada arguably covers it here:

Identity fraud

403. (1) Everyone commits an offence who fraudulently personates another person, living or dead,

(a) with intent to gain advantage for themselves or another person;

(b) with intent to obtain any property or an interest in any property;

(c) with intent to cause disadvantage to the person being personated or another person

Press release bullies online media into distorting story

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First things first: happy birthday, Canada.

Now, it seems we can’t ever escape this topic, but a gaggle of recent discussions involving cyberbullying have been begging for our attention.

I’ll begin with a study by McAfee/Harris [pdf], which appears to show a decline in online bullying in spite of a sensationalist press release that encouraged negative reports media-wide. While there are a number of areas of potential concern (e.g. 37 percent of 10- to 12-year-olds are on Facebook), a closer reading of the study indicates that the press release claim (“cyberbullying on the rise”!) is well off the mark, with the percentage of teens reporting that they have “ever been bullied or harassed online ” down from 15% in 2008 to 8% in 2010. Again, where the press release brays: ”Nearly 50 Percent of Teens Don’t Know What to Do if Cyberbullied,” back in the real world of the report, we learn that ”1 in 4 teens say they wouldn’t know what to do if they were bullied or harassed online” and that a ” significantly higher proportion disagree with this statement in 2010 than in 2008, suggesting that teens may now be better equipped to handle cyberbullying.” The report also adds: ”many youth who have been bullied or harassed online say they have made some adjustments to their online behavior as a result (72 percent).”

I’d be really curious to know how the author(s) of the press release reconcile all that with the aforementioned “cyberbullying on the rise.” Beware the distorted filters of the information-glut which is the Web, I guess.

Anyway, if you want to read a sane breakdown of the report, Larry Magid’s your man.

Plato, Socrates, social media and hippies

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So this is what it looks like when observers and pundits kneejerk all over a new study, seemingly at random singling out [insert latest bête noire du jour of your choice -- in this case: social digital media/technology] for blame. What am I talking about? The recent University of Michigan study which has concluded that today’s college students are 40% less empathetic than their ’80s and ’90s counterparts. First of all, and I do have to say it appears to be fairly rigorous, employing a timeline of 30 years as well as a decent sample of almost 14,000 students, but regardless, I feel obliged to add that I’m always fairly suspicious of anything that parallels the conclusion of that old chestnut tenuously attributed by Plato to Socrates:

What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?

In other words, every so often somebody (almost exclusively a member of a previous generation) decides that those young folk just aren’t bringing the goods any more, and in fact may well be morally reprobate to boot. Funny, isn’t it, how civilization has managed to limp along for well over two millennia since then?

But over and above those misgivings, the ease with which the authors’ speculations on causal factors leap so quickly to blaming social networking and texting –

technologies that allow people to tune others out when they don’t feel like engaging [...] physically distant online environments [that] functionally create a buffer between individuals, which makes it easier to ignore others’ pain, or even at times, inflict pain upon others

– feels premature and unfair. Granted, they also speculate about reality television and changing parenting styles and (sigh) violent video games, but that’s all it is; speculation, however interesting a launchpad for future studies such theorising may be.

For me, it’s just as easy to surmise that the rise of the internet has broadened peoples’ circles of empathy via exposing them to a wider swath of humanity, and that, in order to distort these findings to the degree they have been distorted, something far more nefarious must be going on… such as the increasing emergence of right wing political ideologies which promote the individual over the common good, say.

My point is, we can all play the blame game, but I think it’s fairly irresponsible to point random, unsupported fingers, even if our initial data is good. Correlation is not causation, in other words. Or even better: intuition alone is not science.

I mean, my own anecdotal experience of young people is that, increasingly, they possess a well-developed sense of irony and are very much inclined to mock any displays of earnest sincerity, even when answering test questions (or especially when answering test questions like these — take a look, and do the test if you like). Part of this is an instinctive recoil, on their part, from the self-aggrandizing nature of the Baby Boomers, alongside a corresponding desire to not be seen as a “hippie”. Quite simply, it’s a front, and one not qualitatively different from the pop cultural hip-hop braggadocio/swagger which also happens (not coincidentally?) to get their Boomer elders all a-twitter (pun not intended, although I could pretend it was and reap dubious kudos).

Anyway, point is, this is not the same thing as lacking in empathy, even if it appears to be. Overall, young people demonstrate, if anything, more empathy and kindness and gentleness than previous generations, although to stave off accusations of hypocrisy, I will completely own the subjectivity of that particular generalisation, and leave it there.

The games we play

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Here’s a particularly distressing story out of South Korea: last week (Friday, May 28, 2010), a couple were convicted of abandoning their 3-month-old baby, who starved to death while they fed their online gaming habit. It goes without saying that this is an awful, appalling scenario, and that, beyond any punitive sentences, these two people will surely need intense therapeutic intervention in order to rehabilitate their respective criminal lapses in parental responsibility. You don’t really need to be a “think of the children” type to come to that conclusion.

But the story, as sad as it is in isolation, has become somewhat of a bellwether for the larger issue of internet addiction in South Korea, something we’ve touched on here before. While instances of teenage addiction have dropped slightly, it appears that adults (almost one million, according to the Ministry of Public Administration and Safety) are becoming more addicted to internet gaming such as large multiplayer online role-playing games. In response, the government  has announced plans to open adult rehab centres, and to expand counselling for students and the unemployed (groups considered especially vulnerable to compulsive internet gaming addiction).

Interestingly, while there don’t appear to be many calls for censorship of the games themselves — something markedly different from how this would likely have played out in the English-speaking world — the reason for that absence of moral outrage might not be as refreshingly admirable as it first appears. Because, well, it’s probably down to money. Turns out South Korea has a huge and leading stake in the $28.5 billion global video game industry, in which combined revenues of some 1,200 online gaming companies in Korea reached an estimated $1.94 billion last year.

On the one hand, given the self-serving nature of most countries whenever revenue is threatened, Korea’s response is both pragmatic and apparently sensible, and yet we’re still left with the nagging sense that the overall point has somehow been missed, that addiction itself is a symptom of something more fundamental in the lives of those afflicted, and that focusing on internet gaming alone feels strangely unsatisfying… as if when dealing with alcoholics we only provided help for beer-drinkers. Plus, is anyone asking (I mean really asking) why the number of adolescent addicts has been decreasing, particularly given the rise for twenty- and thirty-somethings? And then, of course, there are those who engage in online gaming who are wondering why their own particular hobby is being so negatively singled out in contrast to others:

“Online games are a culture. [...] To me, people who hike or fish are as crazy as they think I am.”

In other words, something still feels off: if two million Koreans of all ages are addicted, and there is only a single case of a baby starving to death (which admittedly is one case too many), how large is the overall problem in terms of human misery? Sigh. But we’ve been here before, asking questions instead of providing answers. Hopefully, before we move on, we can point our readers toward any potentially productive trail markers we may have noticed up ahead.