Ach. This has nothing to do with political parties. Ms. Lee, you know that if Emily Ratajkowski started supporting Trump she’d get the same or worse; and if you don’t believe that, just look at the feed of any vocal supporter. And I’m not American, mind you, I don’t live there or even plan to visit, I have no horse in that race so please don’t ascribe this opinion to my own partisanship. If anything, I think I’d also support Sanders, if it were relevant to me.
It has little to do with gender, too. She gets sexist insults because she’s a woman, so people who want to get at her use those because they’re more likely to have an effect. I get racist shit instead. Big deal.
None of this is important. At all. These are First World problems, the sort of thing that makes people chuckle and shake our heads in disbelief watching you: “crikey, is this really what young Americans use their energy on?” It’s just banter, for crying out loud. It’s what impolite people do when they disagree. You banter back, or you ignore and carry on with your life. It is that simple, really.
What is important is this bit of yours: “[t]he companies running these websites do little or nothing to change the environment, and we continue to use their products in spite of that.”
So you’d want these companies to do “something,” evidently. Otherwise, what would be the point of this whole writeup? You don’t specify what it is that these companies should do, but it’s not like there are options: you’d want them to curb this, to remove these offensive little ripostes, to make things so that it’s not possible, or at least not easy, to be impolite on the Internet. And this means you want someone out there with responsibility to identify such interactions, and the ability to suppress them.
Please don’t shut down on me at this point. I swear to God I am not trying to put things in your mouth, to construct a straw man here just to disagree with you. I’m only noting that this is what you are asking for, because there are no other ways to do something about crass Internet content. If you can think of any other course of action, then please enlighten me, I’d be in your debt.
My point is: even if this were feasible, as matter of what is practical (sifting through the volume of people’s interactions online, every day, to weed out the offenders), it is not a good idea because “offensiveness” is not something you can define objectively. You can’t teach a machine to identify it, you can’t even write legislation to characterise it—seriously, look at harassment laws from any country you like: it’s all vague guidelines for a court to ultimately decide on a case-by-case basis. And so you want this person, this flawed human like we all are, to wield the power to suppress by making judgment calls, based on their own morals and values.
Do you recognise what this is? Do I have to tell you stories from Chile and México in the 70's, or point to ones from communist China, Russia, or Eastern Europe in the Cold War? Please see that you yourself will end up on the wrong side of the censor — necessarily, unavoidably, because we’re all human and we’re all different. And when that happens, you will be silenced, summarily and with every consequence you envision for the “show me ur tits” troll. We humans excel at this. Don’t take my word for it; just skim over any history book.
It’s a spectacularly bad idea. Please don’t push for this.
