Facebook, It’s Time To Identify Your Users
By: Sarah J. Baker
Tags: Facebook, Women, Gendered Violence, Feminism, Social Media

There has been much in the news lately about Facebook; the level of control they have over information, the ethics of their data collection, and the level of violence and abuse its users direct at others, particularly women.

When social media took over the internet and turned it from a transactional tool to a relational one the cultural shift was huge. We went from independently seeking out the endless information resources the web offered, to creating our own information sources and sharing them (and ourselves) with anyone, anywhere on the globe.

The stage was thus set for the rise of the internet troll, and no-one feels this more keenly than women.

Troll

/trɒl,trəʊl/

noun

A schmuck who antagonizes others online with inflammatory, irrelevant, and often offensive comments.

Zoe Quinn, the developer at the centre of the Gamergate incident, puts it more bluntly;

“… the definition has been warped to apply to everything from someone just being a jackass for laughs — starting an argument with an insincere, asinine, or ridiculous statement to see who will take the bait — to outright hate speech and serious threats.”

Mark Zuckerberg, and fellow social media giants, want us to believe that their creations are not guilty of male bias, gender discrimination, or generalised hate. They take down pages from time to time in an effort to show that social media platforms are not platforms for hate speech. They slap a flag on a post to highlight the fact that it might be misleading. They dole out bans of varying lengths when an individual transgresses (but only based on random applications of their own community standards). In reality, short of threatening physical violence, men can call women any number of appalling names and make vulgar references and when such comments are reported they are not considered against community standards. But, say something mildly offensive, such as “men suck” and it’s three days in Facebook jail… I kid you not. I wrote about it here.

With all their talk of making social media inclusive, so that all — regardless of colour, gender, or creed — can take advantage of the relationship supporting, career developing, buying, selling, sharing, and knowledge building social platforms offer — what are the cyber-gods who control what is evidently completely out of control actually doing to make users accountable? To make people safer? And, specifically to make women and girls safer?

The answer: Nothing. Absolutely nothing… nothing with any impact at least.

Delete a comment. Impose a few days of gagging. Such actions give the offender a little slap while spawning endless memes about the hilarity (and pride felt) of offending the Facebook police. Sometimes an account will be closed. But the user just opens up another in a different name. In the end, the onus is always placed on the victims of trolling… modify your behaviour, ignore trolls, don’t post pictures of yourself, grow a thicker skin, use social media less. Or, just don’t use social media at all.

Hate speech and serious threats

A landmark report by Plan International was published just recently. The survey covered 14,074 young women between the ages of 15 and 25 across 31 countries. The findings were not surprising. If you’re a woman you probably already knew that social media is a quagmire of misogyny and hate. If you’re also BIPOC (black, indigenous, person of colour), you’d know it even more. And if you’re a gender-diverse BIPOC woman, well, you enter the world of social media at greater risk than any other group.

On average girls and women between 15 and 25 were found to experience online abuse at a rate of 58%. One in five significantly reduced their use of social media, and one in ten modified their behaviour to avoid abuse. In countries like Australia and the US, the rates of abuse were above that average. And that’s just women in a narrow age group. Women and girls are reporting online harassment across all ages, and much of it sexualised.

Another survey focused on the abuse of women in media who, like female politicians and activists, are the target of particularly vicious online attacks. It found that 73% of women in this cohort experienced violent and sexualised messaging, harassment and abuse. But for 20% of respondents that abuse spilt offline too with many documented cases of female journalists being stalked, raped, and even murdered.

Our right to feel safe online precedes anyone else’s percieved right to anonymity

Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has himself stated that “the web is not working for women and girls.” All around the world we see campaigns to address this; education programs (more about dealing with it than stopping it), places where you can report the abuse (but to what end?), example setting by groups such as I Am Here, and global contracts to commit governments and corporations to make the Web safer. But in all these discussions on strategies to mitigate the hate we see online — including calls for government regulation — there is one thing I am not seeing to any degree that is commensurate with the problem, and that is the expectation that social media platforms demand their users identify themselves.

The case for identifying users of social media

While there have been plenty of times a person has used their own identifiable account to harass and threaten women online, the vast majority of abuse comes from troll accounts set up for the specific purpose of abusing with anonymity and thus avoiding accountability. The most powerful step that could be taken to address this is the requirement of identification when opening a social media account. Of the many social media platforms out there this approach is most needed of Facebook which, with 2.6 billion “active” users, is undoubtedly the primary method of social communication around the globe.

Of course, as I put forward this idea I can almost hear the bellowing of “my rights, my rights!” from white, male, rights-obsessed Americans and their lighter-on-the-rights but equally outraged counterparts in Australia and the western world. And yes, it needs to be named up for what it is, it is a white male problem.

Research and surveys profiling trolls consistently uncover the conservative white male. They’re pro-gun, anti-feminist, and patriotic. If they live in the US they practically worship Trump, and not just because he literally looks like a giant troll doll. He exemplifies all that is the loud, entitled, racist, misogynist white male they aspire to be.

Polls indicate that 77% of Americans think anonymity contributes to the level of trolling online. And it really isn’t a difficult connection to make. An ironically anonymous respondent in a Pew Research study put it succinctly with this;

“Trolls now know that their methods are effective and carry only minimal chance of social stigma and essentially no other punishment.”

Naturally, the men engaging in trolling are those very same men who feel every effort to make the world a more inclusive place involves the censoring of free speech and their right to use it violently. However, our right to feel safe online should precede anyone else's right to perceived anonymity demanded without justifiable reasons.

There are of course circumstances under which an assumed name and/or would be justifiable; authors and creators who operate under pseudonyms, existing victims of abuse who have been forced to assume different identities to avoid more of the same, and public figures who are already limited in the amount of privacy afforded them.

However, annonymity is too often sought for nefarious reasons and the easy access to it that social media offers emboldens a user to behave in ways that could have serious consequences if their real identity were known. Thus the objective when seeking to formally identify a user, regardless of the displayed name, must be the ability to link every account with a real and identifiable individual.

The stateless social media experiment has run long enough. People are tired of the global power wielded by a tiny handful of social media moguls and are starting to demand regulation. A recent poll in Australia showed that two-thirds of Australians think it’s time the government stepped in and started regulating Facebook. Germany and the European Union are also taking steps in this regard.

There is no avoiding the fact that social media has become an entrenched part of society. It is a means of communication which, like the telephone before it, has crossed beyond the line of luxury and into the realm of necessity. It can no longer stand as a private entity free to do as it pleases. In today's cyber-morass of hate-filled social media, there needs to be at least one major platform that genuinely creates a level playing field that allows humanity to commune in safety. It makes sense that Facebook be the platform to take this big step into accountability.

But within all this sits a paradox. When Tim Berners Lee created it he envisaged the World Wide Web as a tool for free and unimpeded human interactions; a free and open space for information sharing and community building. He and poet/activist John Perry Barlow saw the web as independent of tyrannical government control. In 1996 the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was published. And it was all good, in theory. In reality, there is much about the internet that is now the proverbial monster created with good intentions. The tyranny of governments has simply been replaced with the less tangible tyranny of social media corporations. And, by Berners Lee’s own admission, the web, despite all of his good intentions, is failing us — and it is especially failing women.

Can Facebook — free of any single system of governance but it’s own — continue free of real government control? Can we, its humble users, have free and unfettered interactions in cyberspace while also remaining safe?

For me, the answer is no.

As a woman, there is really only one thing I expect my government to demand of Facebook; that it begins holding its users accountable for their behaviour by requiring them to provide identification.

As a woman, I am tired of the abuse, the rape threats, the dick pics, the private messages saying “I know where you live”.

As a mother, I am tired of my daughter experiencing the same.

I am tired of the lip service. I’m tired of the paranoid desire for anonymity being more important than our mental, emotional, and physical safety. I am tired of the continued demand that women modify their behaviour or simply get off the internet, instead of men being forced to modify their behaviour by being denied their current entitlement to harm with impunity.

It’s time that Facebook identified it’s users. But, the implications of this are huge for a platform that sells reach to advertisers with its claim of 2.6 billion active users despite the reality that hundreds of millions of them are fake. And so, knowing Zuckerberg will never opt to formally identify users without intervention, it’s time our government intervene.

As for those who possess the paranoia to object to this perceived invasion of privacy, it’s time they grow a thicker skin and toddle off to Parler. They’re probably there already.