I don't think this accurately characterizes the article and the discussion. Saying that this is a "teachable moment" is sugar-coating the character of the responses here. I'm not arguing that the agency of the harassment victim, and what should be "common sense" precautions, can't be discussed at all. But it's a distraction and a cop-out, and it fits a destructive pattern. When our first response, collectively, is to dismiss the person whose life is still being actively dismantled with "well that's what happens," then all we're doing is blaming the victim. We talk about what the victim of this harassment campaign should have done differently, but not about what the perpetrators should have done differently. "Common sense" should dictate that you don't try to get someone fired and harass them relentlessly in this way because they took a jab at you on the internet.

I don't think that the basic facts of what she did to "provoke this" are in dispute, at least if we take the article's account at face value. What I'm saying is that it's stupid that we don't talk about the nature of the harassment. That's what's really hidden from the discussion.

The peanut-gallery reaction to things like this ALWAYS centers on what the victim did, and there's an extra edge to it when the victim is a woman. (see the later "clarification" by the original commenter in this thread -- why use that language instead of "she definitely deserved it"?) And when somebody points out that we're blaming the victim, everyone's ready to jump in and make sure it's clear that that's appropriate this time. Well, there's almost always someone arguing that it's appropriate "this time."

I'd like this to be a teachable moment about how we excuse and perpetuate this behavior by focusing solely on what the victim could have done differently. That starts with somebody saying "hey, you're blaming the victim" and it'd be nice to get to "why focusing on the victim is a distraction from the actual problem" and then "how and why is this kind of thing happening and what do we do about it?" but we don't get to go there in this forum. It's trivialized to the point where even suggesting that it could be an alternative course of discussion is snarked at (see other responses). Yes, I'd argue that talking about the intersection of anonymity and technology that enables and encourages wanton and massively effective harassment campaigns is what I'd like to see from a hacker news discussion. (I'll put my thoughts on that in another comment, if anyone's still paying attention a day later.)

I got dinged for talking about the real nature of how a woman's sexuality is used both as a weapon of harassment and an excuse for that harassment, and for pointing out that hypothetical landmine analogies have no bearing on reality. Well, that seems a lot more relevant to me than trying to construct a thought experiment proving that the victim of this harassment had agency in order to defend a useless thats-what-happens comment. And while comparing it to how we lock up and take precautions in general is entirely reasonable in isolation, the comments here aren't isolated and they mostly add up to "she provoked it, end of discussion." The pattern of people responding that way reinforces the culture that accepts this as normal. I'm not ignorant of the argument that risks can't be entirely mitigated, or that anonymous groups also do good things. But the perpetrators of this harassment are liability-distributed and unaccountable in ways that individuals and even organized groups aren't. That's interesting, and scary, and we're not talking about it.

These are some interesting points.

You're absolutely right that the anonymous and distributed nature of 4chan means that the "/b/" entity can react to perceived slights (trolling, mockery) in a radically disproportionate way.

If the individual provoker annoys /b/ with "strength" 1, and (e.g.) 10 000 /b/ denizens are each sufficiently annoyed to push back at the provoker with equal "strength" 1, that means that the reaction to the individual is profoundly out of proportion to the original attack. By a factor of thousands.

It's like burning someone's house down with their family inside because they dented your bumper without leaving a note. But as you point out, few individuals were all that nasty - the culpability is distributed across a large, anonymous mob, with a few critical nodes, such as those persons who leaked the individual's contact information, or made prank phone calls to her work place.

The crowd / mob dynamics gives massive strength to the anonymous group that is absolutely unmatched by the individual. Mob dynamics in physical space are understood well enough, and police have had various means of dealing with large groups of disorganized people in town squares and so forth. This is not the case for internet-distributed mobs, which are still relatively new.

The process is like leaderless, decentralized, crowdsourcing of cruelty (cf. "Anonymous: because none of us is as cruel as all of us"). And of course, the greater the crowd, the greater the possibility of someone recognizing the individual victim - which is exactly what happened in this case. Once this happens, with a name and identifying characteristics, the positive feedback loop and mob excitement can escalate and boil over.

You may already have seen this video about a thought experiment about the potential power of distributed, internet-powered mobs and the way things could go wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyMdOT8YJgY

I hadn't seen that video, thank you! That's an excellent analysis.

On the subject of policing strategies, my feeling is that the relative newness of internet-distributed mobs (and less mobbish but still easily-formed groups) could be a significant factor in the rise in warrantless wiretapping that we're seeing in the U.S. The police recognize that this is a new problem, but they don't have precise strategies to deal with it, so they're left with an imprecise one, which is ubiquitous surveillance. If it's very hard to target individual contributors, you want to cast as wide a net as possible and then sort them out later. My hope would be that strategies for dealing with this will be refined with time and we'll be able to reign in the surveillance too, which has already done a lot of damage.

That's just a hypothesis and it might be refuted by actual cases where members of anonymous groups have been arrested. But the most recent overreaching in U.S. government surveillance does seem to roughly correlate with the increased ease of anonymous group formation.

Well, that or fear of terrorism. It strikes me that destructive 4chan campaigns are an inversion of "terrorism" as it's usually defined. With a terrorist cell you have a small group of people trying to intimidate a much larger group through extreme but limited acts. In an internet campaign like this one, you have a large group of people trying to intimidate one person through a collection of acts which might be fairly innocuous if it were only a single person doing one of them once. The large power imbalance is still there, but turned on its head.

In any case, better strategies to catch up with technology aren't going to solve the basic moral problem, which is how to assign appropriate culpability to individuals who each barely participate in a leaderless action that is massively destructive in aggregate.

The angry mob analogy seems most appropriate to me:

- you have people who feel invincible because they are part of a crowd, so they strike out harder than they might if they were personally 100% accountable for what they did

- you have positive feedback loops where the crowd builds its momentum up in a way that would not happen with a small group

A similar trend is definitely taking place in file sharing. Mob action gives people permission (or at least a feeling of power), surveillance is deemed necessary by the aggrieved parties (and their government allies), and then eventually there's a "shock and awe" action to make an example of a big target, such as the takedown of Megaupload. (The distinction here is that unauthorized copying of movies or music is arguably less destructive than 4chan's focused viciousness.)

Hadn't thought about the similarity to file sharing, but it makes sense. Sort of a chaotic neutral in contrast to mass retaliations. Early on with file sharing, I thought that a system might arise where people would voluntarily pay into legal defense or settlement funds for the people randomly targeted by enforcement agencies. A kind of insurance system against the possibility that you might be next. It didn't turn out that way, and in retrospect I think it would mostly have encouraged the RIAA etc to keep pursuing random sharers instead of trying to go after the center of bigger hubs such as megaupload.

Back to the point at hand, once again we have a division of culpability, but a little more deliberate in the case of modern filesharing services like megaupload. The systems are legally and technically engineered so that the responsibility for "unauthorized" actions rests as much as possible with the distributed mass of uploaders and downloaders, per the provisions of the DMCA (in jurisdictions where it applies). And within that mob the accountability for the sum total of infringement is spread thin. It's an unpalatable choice for the enforcers, I think, with the current tools available to them. Or maybe not, and they just go where the money is.

I'm one of those who thinks a good portion of the spectrum of copyright infringement is overblown and outdated. I'm much more concerned about the feedback loop of bad behavior on /b/. But I wouldn't at all want to see Christopher Poole pursued like Kim Dotcom, either.

That's the conundrum for me. I'd rather come up with ways to combat the feedback loop during destructive mob events. I think the level of feedback is a function of both moral-alignment and attention-alignment in the mob. I put forward another wordy hypothesis about it elsewhere in the comments here. Attention alignment is somewhat novel because in a physical mob people can't jump out of the situation as easily switching to a different browser tab.

I'm sure there are more dimensions to it, but these two seem like possible attack vectors if you want to dissolve an angry distributed mob. But you have to do it in an appropriate and ethical way. The shock-and-awe of the megaupload case is, I think, clearly based on fear, but also an attack against the moral cohesion of the file-sharing mob. They're sort of pushing the guy into the role of criminal, extremist, profiteer.. any of which might resonate with any of us and knock people out of moral alignment with each other. If you make enough peers associate file-sharing with criminality or profiteering, you can shrink the mob.