Twitter and the limits of conversation

Two British women, Caroline Criado-Pérez, a journalist and women’s right activist, and Stella Creasy, a member of parliament, last week received a series of insulting messages and rape threats via Twitter—up to fifty of them an hour over a 12-hour period—after it emerged they had campaigned for 19th century writer Jane Austen be featured on the new 10 pound note.

The messages, apparently the result of a coordinated campaign, and which have so far led to at least one arrest, have raised the issue of applying the law of the land to the internet. Bullying, insulting behavior and issuing threats are punishable by prison in the real world, but tend to be dismissed when they take place on line as trolling, and those responsible seemingly enjoy impunity.

The question is a simple one: to what extent should services like Twitter act to prevent hate speech? Over the last two days, tens of thousands of people have signed petitions calling for legal measures to make it easier to tackle abuse on the web. In response, Twitter has finally issued a note on its corporate web site promising to take action by making it easier to report abuse.

At stake here is the balance between freedom of expression and the current situation whereby anybody can insult and threaten with no comeback. If nothing is done, the most likely outcome is the something in line with the broken windows theory: widespread abuse, insults, threats, and personal attacks that create an atmosphere nobody wants to be part of. There is still not much hard evidence, but it would seem that abusive behavior on the internet is on the rise: seemingly normal people who would never insult anybody normally, seem to think that they have the right to threaten and bully online.

Establishing limits is no easy task. Aside from the need to establish what exactly constitutes bullying, insulting, or threatening somebody online, all of which are extremely subjective terms, and there is the danger that by imposing excessively legal rules could result in an avalanche of legal cases.

In the offline world, insulting somebody in public could see you in the dock for defamation, but only the most extreme cases tend to make it to court. Sometimes the defamation laws are used to silence critics. At the same time, systems that “keep what is said on Twitter in Twitter” could also lead to abuse, given the ease with which a user who has been expelled from the service to set up a new identity in seconds.

There is no quick fix to this problem, but setting up a mechanism that allows people who have been insulted or threatened to report it in a simple, effective way is a necessary first step. Only systems of this kind, along with an ethics code for users will facilitate consensus about unacceptable behavior on line. The legal system will come into play when needed, and if necessary, the service—Twitter in this case—must be able to provide proof for the courts.

There is a widely held view that trolling is as old as the internet itself and to some extent goes with the territory. But for a growing majority of people, breaking the rules not only encourages more abuse, but verbal violence breeds more violence.

Laying down a whole new set of laws for the internet makes no sense: there are already enough out there. The point is to strengthen the norms that we already use and agree on in society, and for them to be applied to the internet. At the end of the day, all that is required is some common sense, one that most of the time, is far from the most common.