Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Wishful Thinking (the dislike club part IV)

Episode Date: December 9, 2014

In 2007 writer, programmer, and horse trainer Kathy Sierra quit the internet because of misogynist hate trolling. She stayed off the social web for 7 years but last year she came back to see what Twitter was like. She tells us why she only lasted a few weeks and her theory about why so many women are targets online. Plus Danielle Keats Citron explains how we could use the law to drain the cesspool.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Wishful Thinking. The Internet is a truly sucky place for women. And this is not a statement I feel the need to defend or prove. This is something I take as fact. I do feel the need to say, though, that if you are producing a miniseries about how the internet is horrible for your podcast, well, then you do have

to address this fact. And that is why I called up writer and programmer and horse trainer Kathy Sierra. Back in 2007, she was subjected to terrible and sustained online abuse. I was the first high-profile example of someone who was simply a woman in tech blogging online. Now, there was nothing controversial whatsoever about her tech blog. I was blogging about topics like user interface design, programming, how to make users happy. Kathy Sierra became a target because she had hit the Kool-Aid point. And Kathy knew that she had hit this thing called the Kool-Aid point because she was the person who had actually come up with the theory of the Kool-Aid Point because she was the person who had actually come up with the theory of the Kool-Aid Point. A little while before my first real serious incident online in 2007,

I had written a very lighthearted post that I called the Kool-Aid Point. And it was looking at how, it wasn't looking at personal attacks, it was looking at what happens when a huge group of people start really be drinking the Kool-Aid. I'm putting air quotes around that. And that's the point at which the attacks really ramp up. So I called that the Kool-Aid point. And Wired, it picked it up in their little jargon watch. And it was all very funny. So in 2007, when my original incident happened, I realized that this was an exact example of that. In the eyes of the haters, there were a lot more people, quote unquote, drinking my Kool-Aid. Because it happened at the point at which my blog really became popular. And then I started going from just, you know, speaking in a room to 20 people, you know, in a sidetrack at a conference,

to suddenly I was keynoting. I did the opening keynote at South by Southwest Interactive. I was keynoting, you know, very large software development conferences. So I had this high level of visibility. And that's when I really realized that it was about the fact that other people were listening and paying attention. It's not like Kathy didn't have any experience with mean or aggressive comments. She had a thick skin. But once she hit the Kool-Aid point, she started getting death threats. I think my first one was, I'm going to, or someone should slit your throat and, you know, come down the gaping wound in your neck. A lot of times they would use third-person language,

which actually turns out to be kind of important. Like the free speech advocates will say, well, that isn't a threat. It's just wishful thinking. If someone says you should be raped or you should be murdered and here's exactly how they should murder you, right, that's not technically a threat. It's just wishful thinking. If someone says you should be raped or you should be murdered and here's exactly how they should murder you, right, that's not technically a threat. It's just wishful thinking. But from the perspective of the person who's experiencing it, those kinds of parsing technicalities don't make any difference at all. It's threatening.

It doesn't matter if you aren't 100% certain the person is actually going to come to your house and do it. It's clear that someone is trying to stop you. And they're trying to stop you with these really graphic, violent comments. And it's anonymous. And it's not any more comforting that they're saying this is what has to happen to you versus I'm actually going to do it. When Kathy wrote about her abuse, the media picked up the story, and a number of conservative pundits like the anti-feminist Michelle Malkin piled on. Probably my most surreal moment in my life was sitting in a restaurant, you know, with my

daughters, and there's, you know, CNN playing in this, you know, in the sports bar. And there's Michelle Malkin. And she's saying, well, you know, where the hell was everybody when I'm getting all my death threats, but one little tech blogger gets a death threat. And oh, my God. And I thought, yeah, but, you know, what'd you expect? You kind of, you know, it's not surprising because of the things that she was saying. Well, of course, now I'm horrified that I even thought that. But it's the natural reaction. And again, I think the fact that people couldn't do that with me is exactly why it became a story that caught so many people's attention. Because people kept saying, what did she do?

What did she do to piss them off? What does she talk about? And then they couldn't figure it out because there wasn't anything. Kathy didn't become a story or pundit fodder, though, because of the abuse. She made headlines because she dared to complain about the abuse. The Kool-Aid point is the point at which, again, other people are starting to read you to the degree, or follow you, or listen to you in some way, the degree to which you have to be stopped. But speaking out against threats, attacks, criticism, that's far worse. I saw these posts become more and more graphic and twisted and nasty.

You know, they weren't mean-spirited social commentary. They were taking posts that I'd made about user interface and turning them into a story about how I liked violent sex. They became more and more visually intimidating. They were doing photoshopping, you know, where they just take your image and manipulate it in some way that appears to be very intentionally to threaten you. And again, see, I've been trained over the seven years that I shouldn't even use the word threat because people jump all over that. But it felt incredibly threatening to me.

I was terrified. I had two kids. I didn't know what to do. So I stopped. I just quit. I never posted again. That was it. That was the end.

Would you have stayed if you felt like there was someone you could have turned to for help? Oh, wow. No one has ever asked me that. Wow. I would have stayed. I would not have disappeared if I felt as though people, you know, in the tech community, which was the community I felt like these were my people, if I felt that people were taking this more seriously, then I would have stayed. But it was clear to me from reading what was happening that even some of the people who really, who liked me, I mean, even people who were my friends still had this sense of, well, you know, she's kind of overreacting. You know, it wasn't that bad. I mean, we all get this, right? There was a lot of downplaying what it really meant. And because I saw that there was no reason for me to hope that anything would get any better

and that it was likely to get worse. That's why I felt like I really don't have any choice if I want this to stop, but to just disappear. So let's fast forward about seven years to 2013. One of Kathy's primary attackers, a man who had admitted doxing her to the New York Times, went to jail. Kathy Sierra decided it was safe to come back. She joined Twitter. She reconnected with a lot of her old friends. Once again, she was able to share her writing with people who were trying to solve problems. This, she told me, was the thing she missed most during her exile. She posted photos of her horses. It was awesome. Well, for like 30 seconds.

Things had gotten so much worse. I didn't actually see that coming until I was there in the middle of it. Now I can look back at what happened to me in 2007 and think, wow, I had it so easy compared to what women are going through right now. I mean, immediately, of course, when I went onto Twitter, I immediately found, you know, all sorts of women in tech. And really quickly, I could feel that the overall tone was just really grim. And I would say it wasn't even just women in tech, women in other science fields, really bleak and grim and depressing

and the whole tone, you know, and sometimes I felt guilty. It's like, here I am posting my smiley, happy pony pictures and in this environment and where it's just, it's really depressing. And they would talk openly about what was happening, and they would retweet horrible, really both horrible things, horrible examples of sexism, but also just that sort of everyday sexism. This was the ambient toxicity of being even just on Twitter. It's one of those things where I want to just stand up in the middle of the room and go, wait, and everyone's okay with this?

It wasn't long before Kathy's abusers discovered her on Twitter. Once again, she found herself a target. And when she started protesting, once again, she was told that she had it coming. And once again, she watched as she was portrayed as the ultimate enemy of free speech. She realized that she had made a grave mistake. And in an essay posted on her site, an essay called Trouble at Kool-Aid Point,

she explains why she has once again left the social web, this time for good. Once you become a target, you really have no way to win because you have three choices. You can do what I did and you can just leave. So they win. They got you out. You can try to ignore them, right? The ridiculously useless advice in this case when you're being targeted to, oh, don't feed the trolls. Because if you don't respond, if you just go on about your business and pretend like they're not there, they will have to escalate

until you respond in some way, until they've, you know, at the very least, destroyed some aspect of your life. So if you ignore them, they win. And if you try to fight back things will get so much worse worse even than if you just merely ignore them because they're you know now they really are they're determined not just to get a response from you but to win and you have upped the you know you've upped the game

so they win so you really have no option where they don't win. I literally said you win. We have evidence that it's systematic. Pew just came out with a study suggesting that at least 20% of all women within this age group of the 20s will experience online sexual harassment. That's a potent statistic. Daniel Citrin is a law professor at the University of Maryland Law School. She studies internet abuse. And in her new book, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, not her title choice, by the way, she shares with us stories of women who've been stalked, harassed, tormented,

and shamed online. According to Daniel Citrin, the internet is such a sucky place for women because of something that happened in 1996. In 1996, Congress passed a deeply conservative act called the Decency Act. And part of that act, which was basically about trying to get private actors to remove pornography from the internet, which frankly is hard to believe now, right? But the act immunized site operators and other online service providers for liability based on the speech or publication of other people's speech. Most of the decency act has been struck down as antithetical to the first amendment, but the provision that's remained and that has survived since 96 is a provision that was designed to protect good Samaritans who were blocking

offensive content. So I'm quoting the kind of subtitle of the statute. And rather than just applying to good Samaritans who were working on curating offensive, harassing speech from the internet, it has been interpreted very broadly to immunize all sites from liability for the postings of others, even when sites know about it and don't do anything about it. This law from 1996 is what gives third-party platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter the power that they enjoy today. They have absolutely nothing to worry about.

The immunity is that strong. It even protects revenge porn sites. These are the platforms that host nude photos of women who then must pay a fee if they hope to have their photos removed. Revenge porn sites are explicitly in the business, often of extorting people, of encouraging the posting of nude photos and demanding that people pay for their takedown. And some sites, they don't extort, but they encourage users to post nude photos, knowing that, you know, saying, look, we know

they're your ex-girlfriends, please put them up, shame and embarrass all you want. And revenge report operators, they are so brazen and shameless in saying to the press, no one can sue me, so too bad, so sad. And they're right because lower courts in interpreting Section 230 have held that even knowing that your site is hosting criminal content is not enough, that you've either got to pay for that content and then sell it or have to have had a hand in developing it. And the problem is that revenge porn operators, they don't create the content. They let users post this information. And so they have gotten off scot-free under this immunity. In her book, Daniel Citrin proposes an amendment to Section 230. It's a pretty conservative amendment, but still, she insists the law needs to be clear

that the web is not a safe haven for criminal scumbags. Carving out a very narrow amendment to Section 230, which would only remove from the immunity, sites that principally host cyber-stalking or non-consensual pornography, or sites that encourage users to post such content and then charge for its takedown. It's a very narrow set of actors. Basically, the worst actors should not enjoy an immunity from liability. It basically makes a mockery of the immunity, which was designed to protect good Samaritans, and I'm going to quote the statute, for blocking, quote, offensive material. It wasn't designed to give a free pass to the worst actors, right? Those who know that and encourage the posting of illegal content. Now, personally, I don't see how the law could solve this systematic problem. In fact, I imagine if we amend Section 230, things will most likely get worse. But perhaps that's just because I have no faith in our institutions

and I'm a cynic and a man. But you see, we have used the law before to make places like the home and the office safer for women. And according to Daniel Citrin, we could do it again. We've been here before. I mean, it's strikingly similar how in the late 60s and 1970s, we had sort of suffering in the home and suffering in the workplace that largely society ignored. And we said to domestic violence victims and to sexual harassment, women who suffered sexual harassment in the workplace, we kind of trivialized their problems in three central ways, right? We said, it's no big deal, that this is normal for men to do to their wives, or it's a perk of the workplace, something for men to enjoy, but it's no big thing.

You can't complain. We said to really both, you know, abuse partners and to folks in the workplace, women in the workplace, we said, look, it's just those are the norms that the family has to really discipline itself. And the workplace, this is just a normal thing in the workplace. We really we shouldn't and we can't step in. That's not for law to get involved. It's private. And we basically blamed victims. We said to abused spouses, yeah, you didn't clean up well enough. You didn't, your hair is not pretty enough. What did you expect? You were whining. Of course he beat you. And we said to women in the workplace, like, you look too pretty. What did you expect? And society with, you know with what the women's movement did in both cases was to educate the public about the profound harms that these women suffered and to show

them in the fullness of that suffering and that society suffered as a whole. And once society started to understand both domestic violence and workplace harassment as harms, not just to individuals, but to groups and society, law started to change. So you had courts in the mid-1970s accepting the arguments made by Katherine McKinnon in her sort of glorious work and saying, look, sexual harassment in the workplace amounts to sex discrimination. It's not permissible and it's illegal under Title VII. And you had lawmakers in states across the country listening to the Battered Women's Movement and saying we need arrest policies, like mandatory arrest policies. We need to

adopt and ensure that law enforcement enforces the law, assault law, it applies. And in the last 50 years, we've made seismic change. Think about it, what was once a normal occurrence in the workplace, something we ignored and trivialized and minimized, is now wrongful. Law helped make a change, right? Law helped teach us that it was wrongful behavior, that it in fact was sex discrimination,

and that it was no longer acceptable. So if we can do that in 50 years, I think we can certainly do that now. Did they win? Maybe by their definitions. But after a few weeks, I realized that I won. It only took Kathy Sierra a few weeks to realize how amazing it is to be free of the ambient toxicity of Twitter. In fact, she agreed to talk with me, not because she's been waiting to get her story out. This is actually her first ever in-her-own-words interview.

But the reason she agreed to talk with me is because she likes the idea of my dislike club. She thinks that all of you should join. I'm not happy about the narrative or the view that says women need to be visible. Women in tech need to stay visible for their careers. That if you leave Twitter, you're no longer quote unquote part of the conversation, especially younger women who really are still trying to establish themselves in their careers. They're being told over and over again that the answer is to be visible.

First of all, I don't, I don't agree with that, but I would really like for us to be able to challenge the assumption that this is what matters. It's not about your engagement and visibility in social media. It's about what you actually are able to do in your work. I mean, I can honestly say that much better things happened to my career during the time I was basically invisible online. There are so many private email lists, very big groups, private forums.

So if you feel that you have to stay on Twitter, that you have to stay visible, that you have to be there, please understand that you don't have to do that. You can step away. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Wishful Thinking. This is part four of a special Theory of Everything miniseries called The Dislike Club. It's a story in progress that's been playing out on the podcast over the past month. It'll culminate December 21st on Radiotonic from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's RN's Creative Audio Unit.

This installment featured Kathy Sierra and Danielle Citron. The program was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, with sound design from Bill Bowen. Special thanks to Gabriella Coleman and Jill Yesko.