You must read her discussion of the ‘Kool-Aid Point’. There are a lot of interesting insights there.
I wrote a light-hearted article about “haters” (the quotes matter) and something I called The Koolaid Point. It wasn’t about harassment, abuse, or threats against people but about the kind of brand “trolls” you find in, say, Apple discussion forums. My wildly non-scientific theory was this: the most vocal trolling and “hate” for a brand kicks in HARD once a critical mass of brand fans/users are thought to have “drunk the Koolaid”. In other words, the hate wasn’t so much about the product/brand but that other people were falling for it.
That certainly sounds familiar.
I now believe the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following”, “liking”, “favoriting”, retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid”. Apparently, that just can’t be allowed.
From the hater’s POV, you (the Koolaid server) do not “deserve” that attention. You are “stealing” an audience. From their angry, frustrated point of view, the idea that others listen to you is insanity. From their emotion-fueled view you don’t have readers you have cult followers. That just can’t be allowed.
Wow, that really sounds familiar. Don’t you all agree, my cult minions?
You must be stopped. And if they cannot stop you, they can at least ruin your quality of life. A standard goal, in troll culture, I soon learned, is to cause “personal ruin”. They aren’t all trolls, though. Some of those who seek to stop and/or ruin you are misguided/misinformed but well-intended. They actually believe in a cause, and they believe you (or rather the Koolaid you’re serving) threatens that cause.
But the Koolaid-Point-driven attacks are usually started by (speculating, educated guess here, not an actual psychologist, etc) sociopaths. They’re doing it out of pure malice, “for the lulz.” And those doing it for the lulz are masters at manipulating public perception. Master trolls can build an online army out of the well-intended, by appealing to The Cause (more on that later). The very best/worst trolls can even make the non-sociopaths believe “for the lulz” is itself a noble cause.
The sense of deja vu is becoming overwhelming.
So I don’t have the luxury of assuming “it’s just online. Not REAL. It’s not like these people would ever do anything in the real world .” And what you don’t hear much about is what most targeted women find the most frightening of all: the stalkerish energy, time, effort, focus on… YOU. The drive-by hate/threat comment, no matter how vile, is just that, a comment that took someone 2.5 seconds to think and execute. It might be annoying, offensive, maybe intimidating the first few times. But you get used to those, after all, it’s not like somebody put time and effort into it.
But Photoshopped images? Stories drawn from your own work? There’s a creepy and invasive horror knowing someone is pouring over your words, doing Google and Flickr image searches to find the perfect photo to manipulate. That someone is using their time and talent to write code even, about you. That’s not trolling, that’s obsession. That’s the point where you know it’s not really even about the Koolaid now…they’re obsessed with you.
AAAAARGH! Get out of my head, Kathy Sierra!
We need to stop propagating the troll-driven meme that “it’s all just trollin’ and boohoo mean words you should cry more” and start making the hard, fine-grained distinctions. The hater trolls use the ‘just trollin’ and ‘just mean words’ to minimize even the worst attacks and gaslight their targets. In hater troll framing, there’s no difference between a single tweet and a DDoS of your employer’s website. There’s no difference between a “you’re a histrionic charlatan” and “here’s a headless corpse and you are next and here’s your address.” It’s all just trollin’ and mean words and not real life.
It’s all ‘just trollin’ unless you, you know, actually deserved it. Then they’re all, “sure, things got a little out of hand, and threats of violence are never acceptable but, um, what did you expect?” Followed by, “Well actually, if it WERE actual HARASSMENT, then it’s for The Authorities.”
Fun Troll Logic:
IF no legal action happens THEN it wasn’t actually "real” harassmentYou’re probably more likely to win the lottery than to get any law enforcement agency in the United States to take action when you are harassed online, no matter how viscously and explicitly. Local agencies lack the resources, federal agencies won’t bother. (Unless you’re a huge important celebrity. But the rules are always different for them. But trolls are quite happy to attack people who lack the resources to do anything about it. Troll code totally supports punching DOWN.)
Read the whole thing. It’s a masterful summary of our current situation.
Unfortunately, it’s a little vague on what to do about it all.
I was just going to post this to the Lounge and was pleased to see that you’d gotten to it already, PZ. It’s much of the same stuff that has been going on in increasingly (startlingly) so many corners of the interwebs. But the way she distills it is interesting—the focus on attention rather than content.
I go back and forth between thinking that this critical mass of women who are speaking out about harassment means that we’re either making progress or backsliding. I don’t know.
Yes! We all agree!
More seriously, this is a really insightful way of looking at the apparent step-function increase in vituperation during the past several years. I’ve thought about it previously in terms of relationships*, but I like this explanation.
*That is, there’s a significant battle to get all-male groups to open to women, but once that’s done small numbers of women are tolerable to some portion of the male majority because virtually all of their in-group relationships have to be with men; when there are enough women in the group that this is no longer the case, guys who think they’re entitled to female attention go apeshit.
This is great analysis.
johnwoodford’s @#3 is also very interesting.
Majority Report radio took a caller who was ranting about gamergate and posted it to YouTube.
it’s pretty fucking enlightening to tab between the comment section of the MR video and read Kathy Sierra’s post.
Buddha never warned that enlightenment is really fucking depressing.
Somewhat relatedly, weev has now also outed himself as a white supremacist: http://gawker.com/ipad-hacker-and-troll-weev-is-now-a-straight-up-white-1641763761
Which, given his comments and opinions in the past, isn’t really all that surprising.
“Unfortunately, it’s a little vague on what to do about it all.”
–
if we knew what to do we would have done it by now.
I think “what to do about it” is exactly what we’ve been doing. Expose their behavior as what it is–sociopathic, and amoral.
I just posted on the same topic on Alethian Worldview (http://freethoughtblogs.com/alethianworldview/2014/10/08/more-than-just-harassment/. I think this goes beyond just harassment. I think we’re seeing guys essentially acting out rape fantasies, with real victims. The fact that it’s an online attack rather than a physical one makes it less severe in some ways, but more enduring and arguably just as damaging. Which, after all, is the rapist’s goal anyway. But that’s why the anti-harassment approach is ineffective.
In Kathy’s article
” Because in twisted troll logic, it makes sense. She must have done something pretty awful to deserve what, according to weev, “she had coming.” ”
Reality seems to indicate the opposite.
The greater the hatred, the less the reason.
http://markhumphrys.com/laws.html#no.2
All I know is that these chuckleheads thrive on anonymity. It seems to me that a good hacker could put his or her skills to good use by publicizing their activities–to employers, girlfriends/wives, parents, children. I mean, after all, if it’s harmless, they have nothing to worry about, right?
Remove the anonymity, and suddenly words have consequences again. I’m cruel enough that I’d enjoy watching that unfold.
jimbaerg @ 9 – I don’t think most people think the way that law does, unfortunately. Most humans believe in a “just world” despite the mountains of evidence that the world and the universe have nothing resembling “justice” innate to them. The common reaction to seeing anyone being vilified is not “wow this person can’t be as bad as all that” it’s “Wow this person must be a real piece of work.” Which is the crux of how troll logic spreads out to the wider world, as Sierra says in the piece.
That would be something to work on, I think. Any time someone is getting piled on by this kind of trolling, those of us who are neither sociopaths or trolls should immediately become suspicious of the motives and causes. Vocally and visibly suspicious. It becomes harder for troll logic to spread when a lot of people are going “Hang on, what exactly is this about?” before repeating it. Like checking Snopes on internet rumors. Not a cure, obviously, but a small step in the right direction.
@10
Yes, sunlight is needed. Everyone seems to cry for free speech, but under the cover of anonymity. Similarly, corporations want to buy elections, but don’t want us to know which senators they own.
But, I like Kool Aid.
An important point Kathy makes that I have also seen as a pattern: It’s not the first few women in the formerly all-male group that get the men all riled up. Most of them are cool with magnanimously tolerating a small minority of Others. It’s when the Others get to be a significant portion of the total membership or get a significant portion of the attention for good work that the hostility gets extreme. They can’t stand the thought that THEY might have to be the tolerated minority and they do everything they can to make sure there are enough of them that they’ll never be outnumbered by the Other.
It’s between 30 and 40% where the hostility breaks out. That is, when a formerly almost-all-male group gets to be 30 – 40% women they see the writing on the wall: Oh my god! THOSE PEOPLE are taking over! In a company/club/etc with 30-40% women smaller sub-groups will often have a female majority — which is infuriating to many men.
I expect that a major contributor the gamergate viciousness was the recent report that 51% of people who play computer games are women. They’re very deliberately trying to roll that back by driving as many women out as they can.
(This 30-40% line for changing behavior also applies in many other areas such as white flight from residential neighborhoods. Most people who are used to being in the majority will do a lot to maintain that majority.)
This was a wonderful essay by Kathy Sierra and I’m sad that I have to read it now and not back when the harassment against her first began. At the time it was easier to believe that her experience was an outlier rather than a harbinger. I’m so glad she returned long enough to write it. Here’s hoping she gets to continue to stick around.
This part really stood out to me.
I’m going to put my evolutionary psychology hat on for a moment and say that I suspect that a lot of the different cognitive types out there can have certain social roles in terms of the overall pattern that social interaction takes. I would find it unsurprising that people who are empathy deficient can effectively set a social tone that can then become the norm. There are probably clues in there that might enable some sort of rational response to be designed eventually.
For example I’ve noticed that I’m not the only person with Tourette’s that seems unfazed by academically approaching almost anything that others might find disturbing or horrifying*. This can be useful because the disturbing and horrifying should be studied and understood by someone. But like every other aspect of personality it can be harmful in excess or done at the wrong moment. So I have to be on guard for moments when I can explore something that might trigger someone else.
*For example in the FB post by Cavanaugh he seems grossed out by tentacle associated erotic art. I find the whole idea of such to be fascinating and by dragging the subject out into the open it becomes possible to see that if it’s not erotisizing rape, it’s not really hurting anyone.
That’s a great article, with deep insights. I just cringe at the use of “drinking the Kool Aid”. That stems from the Jonestown massacre and should really disappear from phrases we use.
Pulitzer-worthy, IMO. Amazing story, told amazingly well, with mind-blowing insights into a very serious problem affecting women and minorities.
Not sure what the solution is. Maybe we can make “weev-wannabe” a meme? Every time a slymer/troll shows up, say “Oh brother, another weev-wannabe”.
Hipster Hitler is a Gamergater and serial harasser. Surprise surprise.
Mostly good, but I really don’t like the hating on mental illness. Shitty behavior is generally caused by an inability to deal with anger. Here’s a good article describing why:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/04/anger_causes_violence_treat_it_rather_than_mental_illness_to_stop_mass_murder.html
@18, I also think the strategies of Kathy SIerra and Anita Sarkeesian (and several bloggers at FTB and Skepchick) of documenting and deconstructing the hate campaigns and campaigners is also of course an important part of a possible solution. And, as pointed out above, a steady stream of outings of the worst anonymous serial harassers might be helpful (I really don’t think trolls who repeatedly issue rape threats, etc deserve the protection of anonymity). Together with the concerted effort to document and analyze their behavior, this might help marginalize the harassers. I think at least there is the potential to help some of the well-intentioned but uninformed lower-level trolls understand that they are being used by horrible sociopaths, that there might be consequences, and persuade them to stop. And maybe when the sociopaths stop being able to command legions of rabid followers, they will eventually choose a different hobby. Maybe that’s how you “stop feeding the trolls”–cut off their supply of sycophants.
Jason Dick, while that Slate article is worth reading, I’m not sure that it applies. It makes the case that mentally ill people are not significantly more violent than the rest of the population, that violence is associated with poor anger management, and that schools should teach anger management techniques. That sounds worth trying, to reduce the number of murders and physical assaults. But what Kathy Sierra is writing about is harrassment which almost always stops short of actual physical violence. And, crucially, I’m not convinced that the perpetrators have lost control of their anger. On the contrary: some of them are very much in control of it, channelling it for their own enjoyment, while others – the classic PCL-R psychopaths, I suppose – are not even genuinely angry, and are just ruining people for the lulz.
Moggie, the problem is the stigma that when there’s a violence problem or a harassment problem, mental illness is at the root of it.
This is false. Demonstrably so. And it harms many people with a variety of mental illnesses.
No, I don’t see a meaningful distinction between violence and harassment. The only difference is the particular tactic used to harm others.
@Jason Dick
Yet people with minds of certain shapes do in fact have specific things that they have to watch for behaviorally. My own issues with rage and picking up on social sensitivity for example. I am capable of figuring out how to be properly moderate and appropriate in my behavior and the only thing I want out of society is a support structure to get to do that in the ways that work best for me.
Some things we call mental illness are going to end up looking a whole lot like how minds get shaped by biology and the environment for responding to particular environments. Casually appealing to a diagnostic label to explain the actions of individuals is wrong and should be condemned. Figuring out how to deal with someone who is mentally ill and is confirmed to be harming others because of their illness is more complicated, but the suffering still needs to end and society needs to create structures to work on this better.
But when we are talking about a large number of individuals taking actions we can be reasonably certain that there will be individuals that meet certain diagnostic labels in there. There is science showing how moral rules and behavior spread. It’s not complete, but we can’t pretend it’s not there. We should be careful about how we discuss the effects of individuals like like psychopaths in group behavior. Or people with things like Tourette’s like me. But we can’t ignore it anymore. We need to figure out how this stuff works really really bad.
nutella@14:
Interesting observation. I wonder if there’s any study been done on this phenomenon. I wouldn’t have any idea what terms to google….
Here is an example of the sort of thing I am talking about. I’ll use myself as an example, because I’m allowed to self-objectify for the benefit of others.
It’s well accepted that Tourette’s Syndrome is associated with intense anger and other behavioral issues that I think of as “problems of emotional excess”. In children with TS you hear of complaints involving inappropriate touching, sexual expression, and rage attacks. But as adults we seem to have the same crime statistics as the population at large and behavioral interventions based on CBT are effective. Despite the intensity issues we do learn to control ourselves as a group, if we have a social support network. Humans don’t tend to change their behavior if they are not given a reason to.
This paper has had my imagination fired up.
Rapid Presentation of Emotional Expressions Reveals New Emotional Impairments in Tourette’s Syndrome.
Now the paper is presented as showing that we have problems recognizing a range of emotions and that is true. I struggle with that. But what I also zero in on is the fact that there is an emotion that we seem to be just fine recognizing. We might even be better than average at recognizing it. Fear.
That is interesting and if it has any deeper significance is very important to know. It might not be a coincidence that an aggressive personality that has greater than average problems with boundaries is capable of recognizing fear better. There is a good and bad interpretation of that one. Recognition of fear is important in predatory behavior and dominance behavior, but also in recognizing distress and providing assistance to an ally. I have empathy and want to help people, I just don’t always know how to do it right, or when to do it. I get triggered to act defensively for others a little too often sometimes.
It’s possible that we recognize fear really well simply because we tend to experience it a lot through bullying. But it also might be an inherent part of our psychology and that is something we should know because this speaks of underlying general systems of cognition that will still exist in the population at large. I have to be honest, when I watch how fallacious reasoning is used by people one of the ways I use to figure things out is “follow the fear”. Because the fear is why people avoid what others are really saying, and what the world is really like.
For a while now I’ve been baffled by the whole concept of the “for the lulz” defence. It seems to play out like this: the accusation “You did bad thing X” is met with the response “I only did it for the lulz”. Which means: I did a bad thing because I found it funny. That… makes it worse, doesn’t it? Not better? “I only hurt you because I’m a sadist”- how is that supposed to be an improvement?
Crimson Clupeidae @ 25 and, by extension, nutella,
This reminds me of studies that have been done on the tipping point at which white flight starts to be observed, which is around 10–15% non-white resident composition among cities in different regions of the U.S. over multiple decades. Importantly (does it need to be said?), it occurs before changes in property values and crime rates. To put it another way, a neighborhood that is 85%–90% white just isn’t white enough for white folks. I’ve become discouraged in pointing this out to white people who say that racism is dead (because what other explanation is there for this phenomenon than racism?), because more often than not they just say that people like to live by people who’re like them, and somehow that’s not racism.
By extension, I imagine that there’s some proportion of males who leave co-ed spaces at some tipping point of not-male participants (I hereby dub this “male flight”). But if picking up and leaving isn’t an option—if guys don’t want to re-start a movement elsewhere—, I’d guess that the alternative is to stay and fight. Literally fight or flight. I suspect that, if actual white flight in neighborhoods weren’t permitted, we’d see the same thing—an increase in blatant hostility between residents. Because, somehow, assimilation just isn’t a viable option to them.
sawells @ 27: I think “for the lulz” is akin to saying, “Aw, it was just a joke”, which has the same problem you point out but which somehow persists as an excuse.
Incidentally, this is my favorite “for the lulz” image.
Quoting Deacon Duncan (8 October 2014 at 12:24 pm),
Interesting point. There’s certainly direct evidence for that in our communities – just this morning I saw this screenshot of a tweet circulating (the original was deleted). Content notice for rape culture, obviously, beyond the mocking of the idea of trigger warnings in the tweet itself.
As usual, the rule about someone with ‘Skep’ or ‘Skeptic’ in their pseudonym seems to hold (i.e. they are an asshole).
drst(#11)
I can’t even get most of my acquaintances to do that.
I do find the theory that the problem for trolls is a woman (for example) getting more attention than she “deserves” a compelling one. Fits pretty well with the available evidence, and with the general “problem” of women taking up space in the world. If you let them take up space, next thing you know, they’re going to want to exercise some control over that space.
nutella @14 and Crimson Clupeidae @25 and LicoriceAllsort @28,
Geena Davis described a report that showed how a minority of women is seen as a majority by the men around them. But I have not been able to figure out what report she referred to. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=197390707 If anyone knows, please share.
While searching for that information, I found an interesting article about how the speech of women and girls is perceived. http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/prejudice/women/ How much of this idea that women have too many listeners stems from what boys become used to in grade school? And has anyone followed up on Dale Spender’s research in the last thirty years?
That article also looks at a distinction between “formal public talk” and the more social, private kind of talk. How does the internet (in its various forms) fit into those distinctions, and does that have any connection to our expectations about who should be using it?
Actually I should rephrase some of this.
“good and bad interpretation” was an imprecise way of saying it. Positive and negative would be better because the goodness and badness is relative in important ways. Defending and ally because you sense their fear can be good, unless the ally really did something wrong like Harris getting defended by Dawkins for making sexist remarks. Acting dominant can be bad, unless the person is using it make a bully leave someone else alone.
For example it is good for Xanthë to point out that negative example because we want to shine a light on crap like that.
@ sawells, LicoriceAllsort
I think there is a fear-humor connection. Watching a lot of humor involves people talking about things that are things we fear on many levels so I think a lot of humor is designed to suppress fear. I think that “Aw, it was just a joke” is akin to gaslighting in that they want you to find it funny too so they don’t have people look at them badly. So the intention is to try to get everyone to agree that it’s a joke. Except for the person personally affected by the “joke” who can either pretend it’s funny too or get harassed for sticking up for themselves.
“I only did it for the lulz” seems more honest to me.
sawells
For many trolls, it’s pretty much something along the lines of “Nothing that happens on the internet is real, and obvs can’t hurt anyone, and since no one was hurt, how dare you call me a bad person?” Even though it obviously can hurt, and hurting people is often the point. It’s a weird cognitive dissonance thing that trolls use to try and pretend they aren’t actually bad people.
Yeah. Let’s stop blaming the victims of the Jonestown massacre.http://blog.oregonlive.com/myoregon/2010/12/drank_the_kool-aid_comments_ar.html
I don’t get the “it’s not real life” argument. Say I write for a living. These days, I could even write for a living without a single drop of ink being used — all of it would be on electronic media. My working hours would be spent online. The products of my labor and creativity are online. My public persona and reputation are online. In what way is threat to any of this not “real?”
And these days, a whole lot of us have significant time, emotion, reputation, and financial investment tied up in online activities, in even social networking activities. It seems ludicrous to say that destroying my ability to network and to share and to otherwise do business online is ephemeral, and only damage to some physical store front or studio or workspace matters.
If it isn’t real and noone was hurt, then why are they unhappy with the criticism they get? After all, it’s just words, and noone is hurting them are they?
LicoriceAllsort @28 & Scr… Archivist @33: Cheers for the link. And fuck me, but that’s depressing.
I never realized the subtle, practically invisible racism, of realtors steering white people to white neighborhoods and vice versa either, until just recently.
Crimson Clupeidae @39, you’re welcome. It is depressing. I tried to find the study that Scr… Archivist @33 referred to and couldn’t find it either, but I’d be interested in hearing more about that work. A couple of commenters on the NPR article asked about it, too.
To all, today The Guardian published an opinion piece by Jess Zimmerman about Kathy Sierra’s Koolaid Point: The truth about trolls and the men they worship.
and Adria Richards read Kathy Sierra’s story and was moved to talk for the first time about the organized harassment last year after PyCon. Storify, (h/t WHTM)