[Shiara]

Charlotte Dawson Twitter attack sparks call for changes to laws against cyber bullying

Social media abuse VS freedom of speech

Charlotte Dawson, an Australian celebrity, tracked down the contact details of Twitter user who had abused one of her fans and called her to confront her about it. The abusive Twitterer was subsequently sent on paid leave by her employer, Monash University, until the media "storm" blows over. It seems 9gag got a hold of this info and decided to flood Charlotte Dawson's Twitter account with hate and abuse, encouraging her to kill herself.

Quote

THE Federal Coalition is calling for changes to existing laws - or for new tougher laws - that would better protect people from cyber-bullying and harassment.

It follows TV host Charlotte Dawson's hospitalisation after she was attacked by Twitter "trolls" for naming and shaming a user in News Ltd publications who had told her to hang herself.

Quote

"Currently, it is difficult for police to gain access to the details behind abusive accounts in order to follow up complaints, and while I support strong privacy laws in maintaining users rights to anonymity, there needs to be a balance to facilitate the process around dealing with, and bringing accountability with abuse," Ms Evans said.

"At the very minimum, Australian law and Police need to catch up with the internet.

"We need to consider the benefits of a users privacy against the need to moderate dangerous behaviour as a community and as a Government, and implement a weighting towards safety, before its too late and we see a tragedy unfold."

Personally, I believe the carrier (in this case, Twitter) has a responsibility to comply with police requests for account information if there is a crime involved. Others may claim there is a "slippery slope" here, and that people should just harden the fuck up and ignore the abuse.

Thoughts?

[Coco with marshmallows]

little confused here Shiki - how was Charlotte hospitalised?

was she physically attacked in some way, or was it just a bit of a breakdown due to the verbal stuff?

[HoosierDaddy]

Some things go beyond the pail, and every decent person knows this. If they choose to do so, I say good riddance. Anonymity is great, but at some point what you say or do sheds that skin and you are liable for your actions.

[Macros]

I think its definitely a grey area
Usually id say get yourself a cup of cement and harden the fuck up
But

Some of the abuse that gets hurled at celebrities on social media these days is beyond acceptable
Its one thing to take stick from your peers and bounce it back at them, but having thousands of people call you every bastard under the sun and tell you to kill yourself is another thing.

Personally I applaud the lady for.trqcking down the initial troll and confronting them but she really should have been more careful and or prepared for the backlash of terrified internet nobodies who value their ability to abuse people without considerations of personal repercussions.

On the response side, anyone who posted to her account that she should hang herself should be automatically banned from twitter. That's my take on how twitter should.handle their end.

Should she have tracked the person? If the information was available on the persons account publically I dontthinl she broke any laws. I think they should make a to catch a predator type show of it.
Get the assholes who post this shit on twitter or whatever and sit them down face to face with their target, see how fucking big and smart they feel then saying it to their face on public tv.


I think I said what I wanted.
She had a good idea, executed poorly
Internet douche bags need to be called out publically oh their shit, let everyone, all their friends and family know what they said
Twitter needs to be banning people for being overly abusive

[Morgoth]

HoosierDaddy, on 30 August 2012 - 07:08 AM, said:

Some things go beyond the pail, and every decent person knows this. If they choose to do so, I say good riddance. Anonymity is great, but at some point what you say or do sheds that skin and you are liable for your actions.

I agree. I never understood how people could justify some sort of right to act on the internet in ways that would never have been allowed in any westwern country.

[Tsundoku]

I don't use Facebook or Twitter and I don't think I'm missing out on anything worthwhile at all.

The ability to communicate brief thoughts instantly lends itself more to poorly-thought out shitfests of meaningless drivel (at best) than enlightenment of the human race. For every Arab Spring hit, there are billions of misses.

This brief drivel has been brought to you by SombraVision: a glimpse of Utopia (where Entropy is the Mayor ... )

This post has been edited by Sombra: 30 August 2012 - 09:54 AM

[drinksinbars]

Sombra, on 30 August 2012 - 09:53 AM, said:

I don't use Facebook or Twitter and I don't think I'm missing out on anything worthwhile at all.

The ability to communicate brief thoughts instantly lends itself more to poorly-thought out shitfests of meaningless drivel (at best) than enlightenment of the human race. For every Arab Spring hit, there are billions of misses.

This brief drivel has been brought to you by SombraVision: a glimpse of Utopia (where Entropy is the Mayor ... )

agreed.

[JLV]

Thirded. In the current system, man the fuck up. Clearly the people were only hurling insults for a reaction. If that really bothers someone, that person can easily close their twitter account. It's not that hard.

I'd have little problem with a policy change, but the only reason for it is that people can't take care of themselves in the modern era.

[Silencer]

I'm guessing it's less to do with the police and more to do with the law being up with the times (regarding the second quote).

Case in point: in NZ law, personal details (or at least those held by banks) can be released to the police assuming the request is accompanied by a warrant. Is this not the case in Australia? I'm assuming the biggest issue would be whether the company is Australia-based or international, in which case, again, it is more a case of international law and company policy than anything else. There should not be any special protection given to a person just because they are interacting with people or businesses via the internet.

Following on from that it would necessitate some form of crime to have actually be committed and for the police to be investigating for anything to be done about it (as should be the case) OR for the company providing the service to do something about it of their own accord based on their user policies (as others have pointed out, this is therefore something for Twitter to be dealing with somehow). Simple.

[HoosierDaddy]

JLV, on 30 August 2012 - 12:29 PM, said:

Thirded. In the current system, man the fuck up. Clearly the people were only hurling insults for a reaction. If that really bothers someone, that person can easily close their twitter account. It's not that hard.

I'd have little problem with a policy change, but the only reason for it is that people can't take care of themselves in the modern era.

You heard it here, folks: "Man the fuck up."

You have no business being on the internets or its subsidiaries if you can't deal with the harshness of immature assholes and terrible people. It's your fault for not being tough enough!

[champ]

Trolling is a part of the internet, it's an unfortunate reality.

I go to McDonalds and expect to eat McDonalds, I go to a football game and expect to watch football, I go on the internet and I expect to read idiotic comments from immature fuckwits, it's a part of what comes with going online.

If I didn't want to read such comments or avoid the possibility of trolling I'd avoid going on Facebook, Twitter, comments sections of certain websites etc. If I go on these websites I open myself up to the possibility of trolling.

Aye it's not a good thing, it's not right but it frustratingly comes with the territory.

If the law is going to get involved and seriously try to cut it out the only way it would ever be solved is by handing out harsh sentences. I just cannot see it happening though.

The idiots that go to far with the death threads, no one deserves that and they should rightfully be punished. If I went up to a man in the street and said I hope his family burns in a house fire I'd expect to get punched/arrested. Why should it be different online?

But for all the other comments, well... man the fuck up, 'oh no, someone I don't know on the internet is saying that I am ugly, whatever shall I do?!' I just cannot see how people let it bother them.

The websites have to take a responsibility and simply get ban happy, set it up so you cannot have duplicate accounts and report any severe comments.

But for now, I cannot see trolling going away.

This post has been edited by champ: 30 August 2012 - 06:07 PM

[QuickTidal]

I think it would be decidedly hard to police trolling in twitter (for the Twitter company) without input from Twitter users directly since even if they made an algorithm to weed out unsavory words and have them checked for banning....I'm sure there are a million joke tweets that could be construed as ban-worthy as well.

Now I'm the first person to want to dickpunch internet idiots who get uppity and overtly nasty like telling someone to die, or calling them horrific names ect...because I know half those internet fuckwits wouldn't have the balls to say that shit in person.

But the bigger part of me just agrees that you can always delete twitter and FB, or ignore assholes hiding behind the anonymity veil.

I got REALLY fed up with the various people I followed on twitter either posting negativity or snark, or retweeting that kind of garbage, and I have since gone on an UnFollow rampage and made it clear that there would be no quarter, if you post negativity or snark even to retweet it in my feed you are swiftly and decisively UnFollowed....as simple as that and my twitter feed is a much nicer place. The other thing being that you can both BLOCK and REPORT offensive or spammy tweets and twitter users on any given tweet, so in my head this woman could just as easily have gotten up to doing that with the various asshats who came at her after the fact...

Just my two cents.

[worry]

So what, the definition of "trolling" is just large enough to encompass everything you don't feel like dealing with based on absolutely no principles and a "suck it up/man up" attitude? Does that include coordinated "trolling" with thousands of other people to make one person's online life miserable, as long as it doesn't escalate to death threats?

[D'rek]

If Twitter has a policy of not allowing abusive comments, it should be taking action by diligently following up on reported posts and banning those users, plus whatever other punishments it can do that would be appropriate (blocking them from creating another account somehow?).

If Twitter does not have any such policy, or has one but is doing a crappy job of acting on it, then some competing service should start itself, promising that it will take inappropriate behaviour more seriously than Twitter, and then anyone who wants to avoid this behaviour can switch to the other service (which, if it fulfills its promise, should become the new celebrity-favourite for social media)

[QuickTidal]

D, on 30 August 2012 - 06:39 PM, said:

If Twitter does not have any such policy, or has one but is doing a crappy job of acting on it, then some competing service should start itself, promising that it will take inappropriate behaviour more seriously than Twitter, and then anyone who wants to avoid this behaviour can switch to the other service (which, if it fulfills its promise, should become the new celebrity-favourite for social media)

That's actually a very good idea. I'd like to see that happen...but Twitter, like FB is a little too saturated in the populous these days to be trumped. As much as I'd like to see a service that was policed as such and stole numbers from Twitter.

[Macros]

Imo, what's going on in the op is not trolling.
Trolling is posting something inflamatory or blatantly wrong to.get a response.
Thousands of people calling for someone to kilp themselves is abuse, and if the poor woman had hung herself I'd like to think the people who posted those comments would feel fucking awful for it.

I'm all for harden up and accept it.
But the idea that the internet comes with trolling, accept it, really pisses me.off.
The world is full of assholes, the internet gives them a window to be complete dicks without fear of repercussion.
Doesn't mean the rest of us have to like it, you go to a football match to watch football, not listen to the racist.minority in the crowd abusing some man on the pitch because of the colour of his. Whomever posted the the football match analogy was quite wrong with it.

Like other forms.of abuse it should be stamped out, naming and shaming is the way to do this,not too many people will be telling someone to kill themselves if they know the world will be told.that they said it.

[Shiara]

Legally in Australia the kind of abuse she was receiving was harassment, a criminal offence. She received these hateful messages because she was naming and shaming people. It really sucks that all those arseholes who created dummy accounts for the sole purpose of piling vitriol on this woman are "protected" by their anonymity, while she is emotionally traumatised and hospitalised as a result. As a celebrity, having a Twitter account as a professional tool used to self-promote and maintain a loyal following would make it even more difficult to just go ahead and delete, so it's not really an immediately palatable option. Also, it's backing down from a public challenge to your moral standpoint - deleting your account (while far less extreme than hanging yourself) would certainly be seen as a win by the abusers.

And "harden the fuck up"? Not everyone is built the same, and some people just can't handle that sort of torment. My point is, THEY SHOULDN'T HAVE TO. There is a difference between ridiculing / arguing / telling someone off under your own name when you don't agree with them, and whipping up a following to anonymously mass spam them with messages encouraging them to kill themselves. The former is free speech, even when it's unpleasant, and it can be dealt with by confrontation or naming and shaming if necessary. The latter is cowardly and reprehensible, and is unfortunately a lot more difficult to police.

This post has been edited by Shiara: 31 August 2012 - 12:47 AM

[Sir Thursday]

While I feel that the people perpetrating the abuse are absolutely in the wrong and deserve to be brought to justice, I also feel that if someone is sensitive to criticism then they should think twice before joining and using Twitter. Twitter, by its very nature, is an intensely public medium. By signing up for an account you are implicitly giving people permission to talk to you whenever they like, and you have no control over what they might say. There are very few people in the public eye in this world that nobody has a negative opinion of, so if people know who you are it is inevitable that you are going to receive critical messages at some point. This is one of the inherent dangers of Twitter, and one that should be factored into your decision-making process about whether or not to use the service. It is not, after all, a requirement for you to be on Twitter as a celebrity.

ST

[worry]

Yah, but that's verging on talking about a different subject. What happened in the OP wasn't public criticism of someone with thin skin. You're not the first to make that comparison, but it's simply not analogous.

[Morgoth]

Yeah, if you don't want to be harassed you shouldn't join Twitter on facebook. If you don't want strange men to grope you on your way to work you should just buy a car, or find another job closer to home. If you didn't want to be treated like a lesser human being for being black you shouldn't have moved to Bumfuck, AC.

It's all about sucking it up and being a man.