It may be worth noting that the authors appear to have chosen IRC because it permits multi-user chat as opposed to networks that only permit two-way party discussion.

I agree that this study alone does not prove the point that cyber gender harassment is a gendered phenomenon. It seems a helpful illustration of the statistics provided by WHOA, the Stalking Center, and other social science studies (such as those by Paul Bocij, Sheridan & Grant, and others). Moreover, it is important to see why this is uniquely gendered: the harassment involves sexually-threatening comments that would be more threatening to women given the prevalance of actual offline rape suffered by women (such as I want to rape you, threats of gang rape, suggestions that women should be sexually violated in other frightening ways, suggestions that a woman has rape fantasies while providing women’s home addresses) and demeaning comments that cast doubt on women’s competency in their work (such as “this shows why women are too dumb to be journalists and belong raising babies”).

Thank you for your thoughtful comments.

DC

Thank you for addressing this. This is in multiple places, but I’m hoping this becomes the thread were your points can be discussed.

With respect to the Univ. of Maryland study, I think the argument that you were dishonest is wrong and unfortunate. However, I think there is a reasonable argument that the study is misleading, and does not support your point. This was discussed in one of your older CoOp post (click my name). In that thread, I (partially) defended your use of the study, but another commenter convinced me that I was wrong.

Specifically, while it is true that, as you note, female user names received 100 malicious private messages while male names received only 3.7, the study does not report the number of total private messages that male and female users received. It does, however, say this:

“Among the private messages, on average, we found 30% of malicious ones for the female bots, 24% for the male bots, 23% for the ambiguous bots, 28% for the female human users, 26% for the male human users, and 25% for the ambiguous human users.”

In other words, the gender disparity in the number of malicious messages can largely be accounted for by the gender disparity in the number of total messages–most of which were not malicious.

There is also a good question of whether the IRC forum studied bears any reasonable relation to “the internet” as a whole. I strongly doubt that any conclusions drawn from the study, even if they are correctly stated, are relevant to how most people experience the internet.

First, cyber harassment is indeed a gendered phenomenon. The non-profit organization Working to Halt Online Abuse (WHOA) has compiled statistics about individuals harassed online. In 2007, 61 percent of the individuals reporting online abuse were female while 21 percent were male. Similarly, in 2006, 70 percent of its online harassment complainants identified themselves as women. Overall, from 2000 to 2007, 72.5 percent of the 2,285 individuals reporting cyber harassment were female and 22 percent were male. Half of the victims were between the ages of 18 and 40 and reportedly had no relationship with their attackers. Similarly, the Stalking Resource Center, a branch of the National Center for Victims of Crimes, reports that approximately 60 percent of online harassment cases involve male attackers and female targets.

Academic research supports this statistical evidence. The University of Maryland’s Electrical and Computer Department recently studied the threat of attacks associated with the chat medium IRC. Researchers found that users with female names received on average 100 “malicious private messages,” which the study explicitly defined as “sexually explicit or threatening language,” whereas users with male names received only 3.7. Indeed, contrary to what has been misstated, the study explicitly explained that the “experiment show[ed] that the user gender has a significant impact on one component of the attack thread (i.e., the number of malicious private messages received for which the female bots received more than 25 times more private messages than the male bots)” and “no significant impact on the other kinds of attacks, such as attempts to send files to users and links sent to users.” The study explained that attacks came from human chat-users who selected their targets, not automated scripts programmed to send attacks to everyone on the channel, and that “male human users specifically targeted female users.”

I am extensively quoting the study to make clear that my analysis is not my interpretation of the study but instead that of its authors.

Second, however one line of my BU article may be construed by others (i.e., the comment he deserves a Congressional medal), my editors, myself, Nathaniel Gleicher and others have read it as I have. But no matter, the work does not include lies (the suggestion that I am deceiving others is indeed defamatory as is the suggestion that the explanation of the Maryland study is) but instead includes exact quotes of the countless postings on AutoAdmit. And the various stories of the attacks on women are exact quotes as well and cannot be disputed.

I hesistated speaking to this issue as I fear cyber harassment, which I have clearly experienced personally and indeed as Dave notes in a prior comment on Prawfs has included menacing physical harm.

Danielle Citron

If there are more comments here, it may just be I’m more wrong-headed or something….

Would you object to a requirement that ALL leafletters be photographed (with the photographs to be stored confidentially, and the government or litigants required to jump through hoops to obtain those photographs)?

Indeed. While I assume that Professors Bartow wouldn’t object to being photographed each and every time she enters a Kinko’s (because as Marc Randazza points out, she has nothing of which to be ashamed), plenty of other, shadier people might.

JP’s comment hits the nail harder than anything anyone has written in this symposium, or any comment anyone has written in this, the only post on which the Peanut Gallery is permitted to intrude on this magic circle of law professors discussing the theory they’ll apply to the First Amendment once they become circuit judges.

Again, thanks for opening this post to comments, Professor Froomkin.

The problem is that if intermediaries are required to take on liability or to take on record-keeping requirements, on the off chance that someone might want to sue the primary speakers, then you’re going to find that intermediaries will be strongly discouraged from allowing online discourse of any kind.

For example, I didn’t have to own my words on this comment. I could have posted under Elmer Phud, if I wanted to. But, if the publisher, or on Froomkin (as the author of the post) were liable for something I might post, would they have bothered to open comments at all?

Ultimately, this is an empirical question, and I simply don’t have a firm source for an answer. I have a lot of anecdotes, however, and I could list a bunch more from my time at DOJ if you were interested. Some people trust assurances of IP anonymity and alter their behavior in reliance of them. The average lawprof and the typical reader of Concurring Opinions may not, but others do. They are the ones I fear will be chilled.

And I just disagree with you that the chilling effect which results from the knowledge that some providers promise IP anonymity but actually lie is comparable at all with the chilling effect of creating a rule which would have the practical effect of forcing all web servers in the land to store IP addresses.

The contemporary question is not simply the degree of chilling effect from a record keeping requirement coupled with a promise of legal process before the data is accessed by third parties. There’s also the extent to which one trusts participants not change the rules (”9/11 changed everything”) and whether one trusts them to play by the rules (”when the President does it, it’s not illegal”).

Currently people avoid some IP logging by using proxies and cutouts. In the past anonymous remailers were popular, although the supply of reliable ones seems to have largely dried up for the moment.

IP logging makes it much more likely that one is traceable than did the risk that someone would photograph you and ID you. It makes it, in many cases (but not all as David Robinson so cogently reminds us) much easier too. In the past our hypothetical anonymous self-published pamphleteer.

The Internet’s communicative dominance will only grow. Governments’ and marketers’ tendency to see all that data as an opportunity will not shrink. The extent to which we can trust large institutions will remain the same. Do we agree on those three trends? If so, what follows?

The question is whether a record-keeping requirement, unaccompanied by a universal identity-disclosure requirement, “completely destroys” that practical ability. The answer to that is clearly no; there are still plenty of hoops plaintiffs or the government will have to go through to get the records, and then turn the records into a name and address (and then, as David Robinson points out, turn that name and address into an actual defendant). There’s plenty of practical ability to remain anonymous left. While you may believe such a requirement would have harmful effects, that does not equate to a complete destruction of the ability to remain anonymous.

Paul, is there any substantial chilling effect now on sites that log IP addresses voluntarily? I think some recent lawsuits have indicated that you can’t trust such representations even when they are made. So if there’s a chilling effect we should worry about, it should already exist. If not, how would that change as a result of a record-keeping requirement? It might as the result of, perhaps, sensationalist news coverage, but I suspect that would fade pretty quickly.

“Lies”, you say? “Hysteria”? My Dear Randazza, when a gentleman, such as your style yourself, believes that a member Fair Sex has made a statement that perhaps might be argued to lack something in exactitude, it behooves him, out of consideration for her Gentle Sensibilities, to, should he see need to reproach her at all, to phrase such reproach more gently (and again, only should such be necessary) and then only transmit such through her husband, or, should she regrettably be unwed, through her father or elder brother or other guardian

Your lack of proper discourtesy has, no doubt, given these Fair Maidens a further case of the vapors and consigned them, once again, to their fainting couches.

Common sorts, of course, might believe that even in these post-decadent times, both the Fair Sex and our rougher selves might feel free to comport themselves with such common crudity, as though one were addressing a fellow gentleman, but one would have thought you were above such.

One can understand why the male guardians of said Ladies have protected them from such common crudity through the rest of this most cordial Symposium by closing it to commentary that might fall, unwelcome, upon such delicate ears.

Believe me, Dear Sir, yr humble & devoted, etc.

Jdog

I think you’re dead on. The “hard way” to confront the problem of incivility on the internet is to be someone who pushes against such incivility — but who does so knowing that strength comes from your ideas, not from pushing your agenda until finally a legislature breaks and next thing you know, we have all lost something.

The way to cure this bad speech is through more speech. The way to bring about more speech is through commitment by good people to speak up. Nobody seriously calls that “censorship.” Well, I think Clint Eastwood did after he said something bigoted recently, but Clint isn’t exactly a scholar.

We will all be victimized if we let the Academy play its “victim studies” game by simply re-defining very important concepts like “freedom” and “free speech” and “equality” to fit their publishing agenda. We similarly are victimized when “academics” rely on lies and half-truths to do the same.

However, we all lose a little something as well when the trolls win.

So, how do we beat the trolls while simultaneously holding back the academic/left-wing/censorship hordes? That is really what should be debated here. I think that Citron’s ideas are as much a threat to online discourse as a dozen “lonelyvirgin” posters.

Smack in the middle are a few people who still believe in the First Amendment and the search for truth. It is like standing between the Hutus and the Tutsis, both of which want to hack each other to pieces, but both of them are dead wrong.

The way to combat this problem, to the extent that it is a problem, is to:

1) wrest it away from the “victim studies” crowd, because they don’t own the internet, and they don’t own the problem. They don’t have a monopoly on internet related grief, and they have no more authority to whine about it than the rest of us.

2) Get in there and participate in the marketplace of ideas — instead of crying to the government to intervene or to create intervention mechanisms for individuals and corporations to abuse — because you can be damned sure that they will.

A couple of points in Nancy Kim’s post above confused me:

I’m not talking here about Citron’s article or governmental regulation (at least, not yet) — I’m referring simply to social norms. While some may argue that the government should not attempt to tame the Internet, that shouldn’t mean that one shouldn’t regulate one’s own conduct out of a sense of decency and self-respect or that one shouldn’t try to persuade others to adhere to a more civil code of conduct. Somewhere along the line, advocating civil behavior –socially responsible and even polite discourse –has morphed into “censorship” or “suppression” and all Internet activity has been lumped into the monolith “speech.”

Really? Do any serious people conflate advocacy of civil behavior online, or even calling out those whose speech transgresses the norms of politeness, with censorship and suppression? Perhaps in academia.

In the online world at large you’ll find many people who are quite supportive of civility, and even willing to intervene through argument on behalf of those who are targeted by boors. Yet they may still be concerned about the prospect of imposing tort (a civil rights action, in terms of remedies, is essentially the same as a tort) liability on websites and ISPs for the actions of third parties, as well as stripping the protection of anonymity from those who may need it for socially beneficial purposes. The law is too blunt an instrument to think craft a tool of discovery which will reliably protect a Mark Felt, while exposing a Lori Drew.

The notion that libertarians routinely describe calls for civility as censorship seems a strawman. That internet libertarians worry about the social and political consequences of removing what anonymity still exists on the internet, there can be no doubt.

Funny enough, it was the government that was instrumental in this collapse of distinctions when it specifically exempted websites from responsibility for content, treating them as public forums yet permitting them to maintain private status.

Until the government builds an internet of its own, private websites will remain the closest the internet has to a public forum. I take it that Professor Kim is not suggesting that the internet should be nationalized.

The link to the study she cites for her evidence of “attacks” is here:

http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf