The increasing influence of the Internet over the past two decades has been frequently accompanied by periodic bouts of public soul-searching about what effect it is having on society. Over the past week, two major incidents have questioned the Internet’s role in enabling unacceptable behaviour.
The first was the tragic suicide of 15-year-old Amanda Todd, a British Columbian teenager. While commonly reported as an incidence of “cyberbullying,” the facts of the case don’t perfectly support that characterization. Todd was originally harrassed by an adult male who lured her into taking inappropriate pictures, and then sent them to her friends. After changing schools, she was subjected to further bullying by peers after an incident involving another girl’s boyfriend. In the aftermath of this event, the role of the Internet is questionable. Did it create this behaviour or merely enable it?
In thinking about this dynamic, we should also consider the case of the man behind the infamous “Violentacerz” alias on Reddit, the popular link-sharing site. “Violentacerz” managed several forums on the site that dealt with topics of disputable legality and undisputably bad taste. They ranged from softcore pornography to a forum called “jailbait,” which featured sexual photos of scantily-clad teenage girls. Other forums he ran focused on rape and surreptitious photography of women in public places. The man behind “Violentacerz” was identified several weeks ago as a 49-year-old computer programmer from Arlington in Texas, by the website Gawker.
While there was considerable discomfort and outrage on sections of Reddit about these forums, a large contingent of the site’s userbase rallied to the support of“Violentacerz,” banning links from Gawker sites in retaliation. Those users alleged that these forums were protected by free speech, and therefore perfectly appropriate material for Reddit to host.
Both of these events are connected by one controversial idea: that the Internet has spawned a new frontier of bullying, and a new frontier of general nastiness. In reality, however, the Internet has only created new forums for old behaviour, making it harder to pinpoint ways to stop it.
In some respects, it is hard to counteract this sort of behaviour, even with new legislation. In response to the Todd incident, an NDP MP brought forward a bill authorizing Parliament to study the issue of bullying and come back with recommendations. This seems suspiciously like an attempt to “do something” in the wake of a high profile tragedy without doing anything involving actual political risk or action. Meanwhile, private sites like Reddit need to decide what sort of community they want to foster on their own spaces. The administrators on Reddit, with their generally soft-handed treatment of “Violentacerz,” played the dangerous game of profiting from the traffic he brought to their site while not considering the consequences of the content in terms of both exploitation and bad publicity, not to mention moral implications.
So where do these two incidents leave the issue of speech on the Internet? The administrators of Reddit have previously defended this more offensive content on the grounds of “free speech.” This is how the site responded to the CNN report last year that initially brought inappropriate forums like “jailbait” to mainstream attention, and they responded similarly to a BBC report on the current controversy. The inevitable problem with this stance is that a site influential enough to host Q&As with the President and other prominent figures can’t have it both ways when it comes to dubiously legal and moral content. Still, those who posted on “Violentacerz”’s forums won’t disappear if Reddit does crack down on this behaviour, much like those who bully and torment their peers won’t disappear if their smartphone was taken away. The only way to decisively change this sort of Internet-based behavior is to change the way people view who is ultimately responsible. At the end of the day, responsibility rests solely on the individual, and the Internet merely creates a forum in which bullying and other inappropriate acts can take place.
