In the ’90s, Silicon Valley promised that in the Internet era, citizens of the world would all be free. Yet this technological utopia seems to have taken quite a turn for more of a dystopia. In 2014 and far from being free, a few global corporations with considerable power, and very little ethics rule the Internet.
Over the weekend of Sept. 1, hundreds of nude pictures of celebrities were stolen through an iCloud breach. That alone should upset anyone, but on the Internet, some people disagreed. On the social network Reddit, many men expressed not only their contentment with the leak, but also their contempt for the victims. These users had no quarrel with the hacker who had stolen the photos, but did laugh at these women for taking pictures of themselves. This is not acceptable. We as a public do not have any say in the private life of any one individual. The only one to blame is the hacker who shamelessly exposed these celebrities to the world.
With such a reaction, it is no surprise that Reddit soon became the primary platform to distribute the pictures. The very structure of the site easily facilitated the sharing of the questionable content. It’s a decentralized community composed of thousands of ‘subreddits’ dedicated to topics as various as travels, politics, Harry Potter and cat pictures. Each subreddit has its own rules, culture and moderators, and the company’s policy is to remain as little involved as possible with content moderation, which is why sharing the stolen nudes widely didn’t require anything more than the creation of a new subreddit for the matter.
When the company decided to take it down, it took the community by surprise. Accusations of censorship arose and angry users expressed shock that the administrators betrayed the very principles Reddit stood for. To some extent, they were not mistaken as the company has shown very little concern for actual individual freedom. Yishan Wong, the CEO of Reddit, defended the decision in a blog post entitled “Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul”, but without ever referring to the right to privacy. Rather, he cited the “DMCA requests from the lawful owners” of the pictures. He proceeded to confirm that they were “unlikely to make changes to [their] existing site content policies” because it is their firm belief that “you – the user – has the right to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, and that it is your responsibility to do so.”
It is striking that Wong reasoned not in terms of ethics, but of copyright law. In its current form, the laws are more protective of major rights holders than of individuals. Few victims of privacy violations have the means to file a lawsuit, which leaves Reddit unchallenged. The site is a major platform with a global reach, but few can influence its policies. Refusing to acknowledge the need of ethics to make good use of this power is nothing short of a self-conscious choice and a cruel strategy.
In fact, the website already has a long history of ongoing issues. To this day, it’s still a major source of harassment against women who speak out against sexism. Some subreddits such as /r/TumblrInAction have been pointed out for the anonymous insults and threats they directed against feminist bloggers of Tumblr.
These people are the victims of a massive power imbalance. Behind the excuse of free speech, they were stripped of their individual rights to privacy and respect. We are subjected to the will of a new kind of Internet overlords, and we have very few ways to shape their policies.
Associate professor Paul Booth believed change was possible. He noted that the community-driven Web is still in its infancy, and that a self-regulated platform might emerge in the long term. However, we’ll need to structure social media differently to achieve this goal. Booth noted that Reddit was primarily driven by outrage, because “the things that get uprooted are the ones which strike people the most.” On the contrary, Tumblr represented a “safe space”. Its user-base is composed of many women who thrive without fear of harassment in a very supportive community. Some simple, yet thoughtful design decisions are at the root of a respectful environment: “Tumblr doesn’t have a system of, this is the best, this is the worst. It just has reblogs. You just see what other people think. That might be more interesting as a community-building device.”
There is no doubt that we can build online communities where all people feel welcome, but we must voice our concern to the overlords of the Internet. We need to reject their free speech fallacy and value the simple, but ethical decisions, which make online spaces safe.
craplordprime • Jan 12, 2015 at 8:00 pm
Rights to privacy and respect? Yeah right – I can say I have the right to rape, but that doesn’t mean I actually have it, now does it?
Rights are absolutely meaningless unless they are backed by the promise of a superior authority to enforce them. They are not some arcane concepts floating around in nature until somebody conveniently needs something, whereupon they only need to affix the words “right to” to the particular concept that they want to have it automatically respected everywhere by everyone.
Rights are conferred by law. Well, actually, it’s better to say that the promise of their upholding by the State is conferred by law : that law is the contract by which the State promises to use all its powers of coercion and their ability to legitimate use force to bring those who transgress them to heel and punish them for their actions as efforts to enforce the respect of these rights.
Nevertheless, if you do not have a promise from someone with coercive powers (on the Internet, often private owners of websites) to enforce these “rights”, they do not exist de facto. That’s the thick of it.
This is the Internet. No State has any power here except that conferred by law, and that only applies to citizens of these particular countries. There is no central authority who can adjudicate regarding the violation of somebody’s “rights”. There are absolutely no law conferring to netizens the rights of “respect” and “privacy” because one violates the most basic human right of all, that one called “free speech” (there are laws conferring the right to dignity, which is very different), and the other becomes absolutely moot once one’s stupidity is posted online for all to see. Nobody can reasonably expect privacy as the law asks one to demonstrate by posting on tumblr or any other social network. They’re called social for a reason. These aren’t safe spaces, they simply cannot be because they are social. No social interaction with anybody is completely safe, even IRL. If you want a real safe space, get a pen and paper diary, or set up a password-protected website with a forum for you and your friends to use, otherwise known as an “echo chamber”.
Ethics are meaningless if they aren’t backed by anything tangible. Ethics are hot air in every sense of the term. It’s a nice subject for academic debate, but cannot be applied IRL for a good reason : what are ethics? What constitutes ethics? How does somebody know that something is unethical? There are as many answers as there are people and cultures in the world. Philosophers have tried to find a definitive answer to these questions for 3000 years and there are none yet.
Nice to see that cultural supremacist angle BTW, where the writer expects everyone to agree with his ideas of right and wrong because they are obviously correct, no matter a different person’s upbringing, opinion or cultural stock. I’m French – as could be constructed from Charlie Hebdo, to use a recent event, my idea of what is “acceptably free speech” probably differs a lot from yours. As a people, we tend to be irreverent and we call on anybody who we think deserves it. We love satire, we love being non-PC and we love being opinionated to the extreme. There’s a saying here : “if you aren’t worth being made fun of, you aren’t worth much”. Tongue in cheek here is an art form and there’s little that should be taken seriously. In many ways, we consider being grilled an honour, because we are at least worth the effort to be made fun of.
Why should your conception of free speech triumph over mine? This is exactly why the enforcement of free speech is left to the individual websites : because the Internet is international, and folks from different regions have different expectations. If you don’t like what’s on offer at one website, then don’t go there. I and most of my countrymen balk at the incessant SocJus noncontroversies stemming from the “progressive” American left, like the catcalling one, for example. Why should we be bent over our modems and made to accept your ideas on the matter by force? This is the great poison of the American “progressives”. I’ve often thought about it as a “we like you no matter who or what you are, as long as you think like we do and you aren’t a symbol of oppression” kind of deal. Tumblr, atheism+, freethoughtblogs…all these “progressive” places relentlessly chase away people with ideas that don’t fit the mold. In a way, that’s also what the writer is proposing : that everyone be forced to use their right to free speech in the way he would like everyone else to. It’s called “free speech”, not “partly free speech” for a reason.
Your text is the very reason almost nobody outside of their echo chambers take progressives seriously. You cannot demand everybody else to change their behaviour based on what you deem acceptable or not if what everyone else does is perfectly legal. You’re not that important. It’s up to you to protect yourself by not looking for things you don’t like.
The Internet is beautiful precisely because it allows everyone to set up communities to their liking. If the bigots on tumblr don’t like being called on their drivel, then they can just ignore the other websites who do the calling on. Isn’t that a beautiful, elegant solution? If videos of animals being tortured offend you (they certainly offend me), do you keep watching them? If you don’t like a TV show because it has crude gags, do you keep watching it?
BTW, yeah I’m calling them bigots. Tumblr is a safe space only for those who agree that “white male cishets” have no right to an opinion on anything. Is there anything more bigoted than judging the worth of an individual based on his/her race, gender and sexual orientation? I don’t think so. Why should they be allowed to repeat in their echo chambers that we should all keel over and die because we don’t check our privilege every second of our lives if we’re not allowed to call them on it? Why can they have their voice, but not us?
I’d be willing to go even farther : tumblr is unhealthy because it elevates the victim complex to the level of a cult. It provides an echo chamber for everyone there to whine about how oppressed they are. Anyone who is viewed as “the oppressor” (basically any “white male cishet”) is shunned and feathered. It reinforces the biggest entitlement there is : that everybody is a victim of somebody or something and deserves respect as they define it; that they deserve everyone else to modify their behaviour to accommodate the special snowflake. Tumblr is only supportive insofar as you match the kind of person that the community has decreed deserves their “support” : everybody else can go die in a ditch. Tumblr is a place where one can say “kill all men” and be applauded for it. It’s a place where white people cannot be victims of racism and males cannot be the victim of misandry, and God help you if you are both of these.
It’s not a safe space, it’s a bigoted space. I repeat : why do they have the “right” to respect but not us? Why should we curtail our own right to free speech in order not to offend them when they offend us and claim that it doesn’t count because of our “privilege”? “Progressives” can call us all sorts of hateful names and deride us because of things like our gender or race, but we can’t call them on how hypocritical this is because then that’s “going too far”? Even if such a thing as the “right to respect” existed (it doesn’t), it cuts both ways. There would be much less hate coming from Reddit and other places if whole swathes of people weren’t slighted on Tumblr based on nothing else but their race and gender. We’re not hateful people just looking for victims to make fun of : we’re criticizing and making fun of Tumblr because they themselves are hateful to the extreme, so much that it becomes ridiculous and funny, thus worthy of satire.
Really, once you read the question I’ve peppered throughout this post, it’s obvious what their answers should be.
Emily • Jan 11, 2015 at 6:12 pm
Really, Tumblr is a “safe space”? Tumblr has encouraged so much doxxing and harassment of people who dared to have a differing opinion that it’s ridiculous. Also, respect is not a right, I’m sorry. Privacy is, but anything you put on the internet is not private, and if you think it is, you are sorely and sadly mistaken. TumblrinAction also makes fun of white supremacists, and basically anyone else who holds an extreme, ridiculous view of society and ethics. Tumblr actually encourages extremism, which is universally bad, whether it’s extreme liberalism or extreme conservatism.
Lily • Jan 11, 2015 at 3:15 am
No one on that Reddit section is harrassing let alone threatening anyone. They just comment on things that are publicly posted on the web, which everybody does on all kinds of platforms. And, tumblr a safe place? Yeah, like there is no drama, insulting and such.