Can You Escape the Internet?
By: Jen Doll
Tags: Online Abuse, Toxic, Social Media, Great Escape, Internet

Is there a way to “escape” the internet? You can go off the grid, which is as hard as it sounds, and even then someone may eventually find you and write a viral feature on you. You can quit for a period of time, but once you publish your story about it, you’re right back on the internet. Or you can take smaller measures to stem the tide, like taking apps off your phone or logging off when they start to cause you stress or anxiety. You can download social media blockers like Freedom and SelfControl and try your hardest to use them. “You want to be thoughtful about the way you use the internet and why you’re going online,” Noulas says. This is far more difficult in practice than it should be.

Signs point to us just having to learn to live with this thing. “There are people who minimally engage with the internet, and they’re quite content with their lives and function well on a daily basis; however, the likelihood of that continuing is slim given how much technology is increasingly expanding into every aspect of our life,” Noulas says. “Rather than escaping altogether, I would focus more on taking breaks from the internet/television/video games in a consistent manner.”

In response to the growing problem of online attacks, some services have emerged to help once you’ve been caught in the crosshairs. Online reputation management companies like BrandYourself assist in creating positive Google results to bury your history. (You can scan your online results for your score at the company’s website, which is as terrifying as downloading your credit score.) Privacy protection services like DeleteMe work to remove your personal information from online data brokers that collect and sell your information. There are people who will help you fight against harassment, “mitigate internet trollstorms,” and recover a sense of safety in the world. Liz Lee, founder of OnlineSOS, started the company after experiencing her own online harassment. At first it provided free mental health services; the company has since pivoted to “empowering people to take action in the face of online harassment,” with resource checklists that can help in a moment of crisis or during the aftermath.

I ask Lee if you can ever escape the internet. The answer: It depends. “What we’ve seen is that for people who rely on the internet for their professional reputation, to amplify their work, to disseminate their message, it’s impossible,” she says. “We’ve also had clients who may not need it for work, but they find their main community on the internet. Leaving those groups or being silenced or ostracized, that’s psychologically traumatic.” It’s not really a question of can you, but should you have to leave?

There’s also legislation, at least in the European Union. Via the right to be forgotten, a concept put into law in 2014 by a European Court of Justice ruling, individuals in EU countries, as well as Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, can request search engines to remove links containing personal information about them if said material is deemed “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive for the purposes of the data processing.” In February 2018, it was reported that Google had received 650,000 such requests to remove more than 2.43 million URLs since 2014. The company had removed about 43 percent of them.

According to a poll from the Benenson Strategy Group, nine in 10 U.S. voters would like the right to be forgotten. The problem is that, in America, the idea comes up against strongly held beliefs about the freedom to access information and the right to free expression. An internet that is constantly having things deleted is not a very valuable internet at all, some argue, and who has the right to rewrite history? There was a bill in the New York Senate, but now that Senator Tony Avella has pulled his sponsorship, it’s basically dead. And in any case, this kind of legislation doesn’t stop the problem from starting. The bottom line is, as Lee says, “No one deserves to be targeted and threatened online.”

The other problem is that we’re just not far enough along in our internet arc. “The last half of my book was really hard to write,” Sales says. “I didn’t really have any models for what the redemption narrative looked like. For that, I relied 100 percent on studying Monica Lewinsky. What happened to her had an incalculable impact on who she is today, but she has managed to incorporate that in a positive way into her identity. I think she’s one of the only people to figure that out. She’s had 20 years to do it.”

It’s a nice reminder: The future could be positive? Maybe it’s not escape we need, but change. Once everyone has experienced their 15 minutes of fame and its corresponding hell, the playing field could level, making us all a little bit more human, even online. Advocates are already working to make this space better for all of us; before more and more of us are affected, we should join them. “Similar to the #MeToo movement’s momentum, the more people who advocate for safe online interactions and for state and federal guidelines to be created, the better,” Noulas says.

“I think the internet is more toxic than ever,” Lorenz says. “There’s this mass surveillance state we live in; people record each other doing everything. We’re so far from a public reckoning, but I think we’re at least 30 years from it. I do think there will be some norms that develop where people won’t have such an appetite for this kind of thing… I do think things will get better. Or we’ll just live in a dystopia.”