How Creators Are Facing Hateful Comments Head-On; The New York Times, July 11, 2024

Melina Delkic, The New York Times ; How Creators Are Facing Hateful Comments Head-On

"Experts in online behavior also say that the best approach is usually to ignore nasty comments, as hard as that may be.

“I think it’s helpful for people to keep in mind that hateful comments they see are typically posted by people who are the most extreme users,” said William Brady, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, whose research team studied online outrage by looking at 13 million tweets. He added that the instinct to “punish” someone can backfire.

“Giving a toxic user any engagement (view, like, share, comment) ironically can make their content more visible,” he wrote in an email. “For example, when people retweet toxic content in order to comment on it, they are actually increasing the visibility of the content they intend to criticize. But if it is ignored, algorithms are unlikely to pick them up and artificially spread them further.”"

85% of people worry about online disinformation, global survey finds; The Guardian, November 7, 2023

 Jon Henley, The Guardian; 85% of people worry about online disinformation, global survey finds

"More than 85% of people are worried about the impact of online disinformation and 87% believe it has already harmed their country’s politics, according to a global survey, as the United Nations announced a plan to tackle the phenomenon.

Audrey Azoulay, director general of the UN’s culture body, Unesco, told reporters on Monday that false information and hate speech online – accelerated and amplified by social media platforms – posed “major risks to social cohesion, peace and stability”.

Regulation was urgently needed “to protect access to information … while at the same time protecting freedom of expression and human rights”, Azoulay said as she presented a “governance blueprint” for governments, regulators and platforms."

Banning Leslie Jones’s trolls won’t change a thing — hate is still the norm online; Washington Post, 7/20/16

Mikki Kendall, Washington Post; Banning Leslie Jones’s trolls won’t change a thing — hate is still the norm online:

"This is not just a matter of speech, despite the persistent notion that online harassment is easy to escape because in theory you can close the tab or turn off the computer. Online harassment spilled offline years ago. Harassers may imitate a deceased parent, contact employers in an attempt get a target fired or track someone down and drive them from their home. The last is often accomplished via SWATting, a tactic where a harasser files phony reports alleging a hostage situation or something similar so that police will in theory send the SWAT team into their target’s home.

Can we really claim that the trolls are outside the norm when the norm dismisses their behavior or even supports it on flimsy free speech grounds? After all, the people behind those keyboards sending hateful messages and imagery can vote. They can work on political campaigns; they can run for election. Ignoring bigots in our midst and failing to take them seriously can have a negative impact on everyone.

People like Yiannopoulos and his supporters are the symptom, but the real disease is the way that bigotry is being normalized as something harmless. It’s not. Some of the world’s darkest moments have happened because hate of “the other” spread like wildfire and stripped people of empathy, reason or basic human decency."

He told me he’d “cut out my kids’ tongues”: The experience with online harassment I can’t forget; Salon.com, 3/13/16

Darlena Cunha, Salon.com; He told me he’d “cut out my kids’ tongues”: The experience with online harassment I can’t forget:

"According to the Pew Research Center, 26 percent of young women on the Internet have been stalked, and 23 percent have been physically threatened. Of all people who have experienced online harassment (40 percent of all Internet users), 26 percent did not know the real identity of the perpetrator. While there are currently cyberstalking laws, they are hard to enforce, and victims must know their harasser’s identity to take him to court. And in 2010, those laws didn’t yet exist at all. The police told me there was nothing they could do. With no other recourse, I started checking on my children two or three times a night, waiting for an attack that never happened."