The Glory of Delete

My delete key (Delete) has always been a friend; as a scalpel and as a club, as comfort and as vengeful therapy.  Delete went from friend to indispensable partner last fall. I run many Google Alerts and other search bots, and not only was more garbage showing up, but the rate at which it was repeated was mind numbing. Delete certainly saved my sanity.

Delete has also been a great help in improving my personal relationships. It wasn't bad enough my bot army was returning mountains of crud, but some of my conservative friends and colleagues felt it incumbent on them to overshare representations of their political ideology. Delete helped me sustain those relationships. Of course I am being hypocritical as I  am also likely guilty of the same thing in their eyes.

I hope everyone honors their Delete. Perhaps we need a day to show our appreciation of this unsung hero of free speech. National Delete Day, when we excise wonderful control over our own personal environments for just one day.

Most of all. I hope that all my friends, neighbors, colleagues,  readers, viewers, community and acquaintances use Delete on my emails, posts, videos and comments as I have used it on theirs. That is free speech too. I can respect that above all else.

The Free Speech Differential

For years I have followed, watched, read, wrote about, spoke about and discussed cyberhate in all its  manifestations; stalking,  trolling, doxxing, racism, anti-Semitism, spoofing, forging, marginalization, disinformation and just good old outright viciousness.

For all those years,  I have worked with the ADL in reaching out to industry players. Our efforts have not been censorship or promotion of a particular agenda, our objective has been to illuminate the depth and nature of the hate online so that the companies can establish their own, meaingful, platform relevant policies.

We have long supported the ability of almost anyone to have an online presence. That's the principle of free speech. However, when individual items, pages or players go over the line into incitement, targeting, marginalization, scapegoating and vicious bigotry, I would suggest it is time platforms give that material especially close consideration. Hate needs to be challenged.

Words lead to actions. I have long maintained this and deeply regret to have been proved correct time and time again.

The internet industry has long considered the issue of cyberhate and grappled with its implications and the damage it can and has caused. In most cases, and especially with the major companies, they have expended considerable resources to develop intricate and well-considered mechanisms and terms of service.

The events of Charlottesville have brought this issue  home to the industry in a very real way. Now,  many of the companies are interpreting and applying their long considered terms of service and we are all faced with what it means to respond to cyberhate on a large scale.

The internet industry responding to cyberhate is nothing new. It has been going on for years. Every major platform has been suspending accounts, removing posts and issuing content warnings for a long time. Now, when these suspensions happen to high profile hate websites, the question of whether or not companies should be making these decisions has come to the forefront.

The question is not should the companies be the arbiters of content thresholds, but who should be? The government?  The internet mob? Should there be no limitations at all? The companies are more familiar with this problem and its impact than anyone. Regardless of the ultimate answer, the companies are an integeal part of the solution.

No one can tell you what bumper sticker to put on your car or who to vote for or the kind of store you must shop in. Not all the issues are equal. Not all hate is equal, but if our ability and obligation to speak out against it becomes limited, the experience of Charlottesville may soon be coming to a town near you.

Born into the Age of Awful

Welcome to the Age of Awful. A time when almost no one is happy and those that say they are happy are angry most of the time. Liberals are miserable, conservatives are grouchy, libertarians are morose and fascists who are always adverse. The people who don't have an unreachable itch are irritated by the squirming from the folks trying to scratch. Compassion is running 10 points lower than the worst politicians approval rating. We could rule the world if we could orchestrate a displeasure based economy.

How did we get here? Easy, we ignored ourselves. We ignored each other. We accepted platitudes; don't rock the boat, silence is golden, do as I say and not as I do. We have been overly forgiving when someones words and actions didn't match. We have held our tongues when we should speak and it has made us false and miserable. If we had become false and happy, that might be OK. Phoney and happy is at least happy.

We have also forgotten how to listen to each other. Look at our childcan en - they don't talk or listen, they exchange. It is very different. It is an easy way to lose compassion, or maybe lose more compassion. We are drifting away from the social cues which have evolved over millennia and that loss is making us emotionally ignorant, bitter and our differences mutually abhorrent.

The good news is, we are very adaptable, Evolution is not just physical. Mental evolution is what has kept us alive long enough for the physical evolution to catch up.  We can survive this age of awful, if we choose to. Our children will, as children have before, become something new and wonderful. Awful is like manure, a smelly byproduct that will have help grow great things which can make the age of awful just history.

Curing the Internet. Will the Patient Survive?

There is no denying it, the internet has a hate problem. Call it an infection, a virus, a cancer or whatever. Our first reaction is to demand its cure, its removal. As much and as fast as possible. Give no quarter. Does that actually accomplish what we need? No. It removes an influence, a contributor, yes. Unfortunately those posts are only outward indicators of a larger problem which never went away in the first place. Despite tolerance, affirmative action and positive speech, hates proponents have kept it alive just below the surface.

The survival of hate has been going on for decades. Frustration and anger by users, law enforcement and communities is understandable, maybe even mandatory.  Extreme concern is certainty justified.

European governments,  emboldened by earlier success legislating content off Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and others, have taken a similar shoot-the-messenger approach to creating new legislation. The problem is Facebook, Twitter and other socialized media is not the same as the other companies they have legislated previously,  and even the internet is not the same as when they had previously enacted laws.

Various governments have steadfastly refused to acknowledge that what they're doing may not be effective at best, and may actually damage the usefulness of the internet,  at worst.

The companies are not without fault or responsibility here. They are like teenagers who spent too much time in the sun without sunblock and have now developed a melanoma on their arm which they have ignored a little too long.  The EU, rather than accepting the consultation of knowledgeable doctors, have opted directly for punitive amputation and is now openly suspicious of anyone with arms.

Make no mistake, liberty and personal cultural sovereignty are on the line. Choking free expression "for the public good" by controlling the transmission medium has little to do with the public good and everything to do with avoiding the problem. Avoiding the reality of hate by silencing the symptom and manifestations.

We are faced with the internationalization of local European internet laws. As well meaning as it may be, it translates to  internet content everywhere reflecting the most restrictive laws and attitudes in the world. How boring would the internet get. How useless would it become when religions, politics or new ideas deemed offensive in one country had to be removed everywhere on the internet or the platform where they appeared would suffer being fined into submission.

Would we still get innovative, daring start-up companies. Would there be creativity? Would users still be drawn to it? Would the internet survive?  Maybe, but maybe history has some clues how much could be lost.

Google "Hays Commission," come back afterwards and we'll talk.

Cyberwar Casualties

"The first casualty when war comes is truth." Does that mean we are already at war?

The Cyberwar seems to have officially started  with the death of  Ryan Halligan in 2003. Ryan was a suicide attributed to cyberbullying. Maybe not the first such event, but the first widely documented. Or maybe it was the 1970 Union Dime Bank embezzlement case. But from those modest beginnings the frequency, scope, depth and reach of the attacks has steadily accelerated. Cyber attacks, once only totally professional or grossly amateurish are now commonplace business practices. Cyberbullying  has matured into trolling, doxxing, flaming and spamming. An entire industry has emerged in ransomware, spamming, identity theft, personal image hijacking and their prevention. These are the small ongoing skirmishes.

The forms for the cyber war will take  have all been argued and hypothesized; Nation State espionage, industrial  sabotage, infrastructure destruction and malware galore.

I don't worry too much about the government and corporations. They have the resources to create the necessary defenses and contingency plans. I worry more about the real probable casualties, the average person.

What happens on the real zero day of the Cyber War. It is all too likely that the first attacks will be intended create panic, confusion and fear in the citizens of protagonist countries. This has the desired effect upturning the target country long before the attacks on infrastructure government or industry.

What would happen if tens of millions of Americans woke up to find their identities erased or their bank accounts empty.  What if the only money  they had available was what they had in their pockets the night before?  And what if there was no information anywhere to verify any of your paper ID or to prove what you owned, ever.

Yes, eventually contingency plans would be put in place, but how many people would starve,  turn to crime, be victims of crime or simply lose hope. Who would they blame? Who wiuld deserve the blame?

Any attack  in any war is to accomplish some or all of several objectives; cripple capabilities, undermine authority and demoralize victims. That is how terrorism works.

There are many countries where wiping out their electronic foundation would hardly make a difference, In the West, just the outrage from citizens would do untold damage without a shot being fired or a bomb going off.  This  is not lost on any government, malefacor or enemy. Except the governments will not be the first victims and they do not suffer or starve like flesh and blood citizens.

No Excuse for Ignorance

Fake news shouldn't matter. Fictitious reports, intentionally unattributed articles and rhetoric based prose are all relatively easy to spot. The peddlers of fake news are equally easy to spot, if the reader takes a minute. Certainly the agendas are identifiable. A few clicks with Google can clear up most questions. So why is fake news a problem?

Fake news is a problem because it is crafted to deceive, and it isn't all fake. It takes a moments lapse in judgement to begin believing that the world is flat or hollow or all the world's leaders are lizard aliens. But there are believers.  When fictitious truths are presented and repeatedly enforced, with slight variations (as tends to happen with truth) the challenge grows.

There are very few of us who have not passed along or posted something which turned out to be false, despite assurances to the contrary from our friends, neighbors or brothers-in-law. We have all certainly received fake news from friends, relatives and strangers, both innocently and maliciously.

There is no excuse for ignorance. It may be unfortunate and inconvenient to view everything as possibly false, but it is outright dangerous to accept everything you are told as true.

But it all gets terribly tricky doesn't it. There is a major difference between a story or article having a grain of truth and being true.  A coincidence does not make a conspiracy. If it did conspiracies would be a daily event. I doubt that very much. Anyone who tells you what to believe is trying manipulate you. The same for anyone not willing to hear what you have to say about what you believe.

Taking a few minutes to do a little research on news stories and ideas can benefit everyone. Informed opinions and ideas have long been the foundation of a stable society.

A Place for Hate

When the internet began, we went in with our eyes wide with amazement, and completely ignorant. We believed the internet would be glorious, inherently open to everyone and unerringly fair and democrat. We were wrong. Then we tried to believe that the good voices would drown out the bad. We were wrong again. Then we tried to convince ourselves that cyberhate was the price we paid for free speech. We sold ourselves short.

Now almost 25 years into the internet, we know that hate is not an equal partner in cyberspace. Hate does not share seats at the cyber-table with good causes, but takes seats without regard for other views.

Cyberhate flourished easily. It is cheap, requiring no thought, intellectual investment and spreads all by itself. It is weak,  needing no justification. It is cowardly, appearing anonymously or denied by the speaker. Its only purpose is to victimize. isolate, marginalize and dis-empower.

Dialogue, debate and disagreement seek exchange and middle ground. Cyberhate is not dialogue. Cyberhate is not disagreement. Disagreement is topic and fact based.  Fear mongering, name calling, defaming, slandering, misogyny or racism is cyberhate. Calling it anything else is just false and manipulative.

As we begin to realize the horrific foundation we have created for cyberspace, we have begun to push back against hate. As we try and make the e-world what we hoped it would be - a safe important place for all people, especially the young, the vulnerable and the different - haters are quick to claim this includes them too. I say, not so fast.

Haters have abused the latitude they have been granted on the internet. It is time for them to prove they deserve a place at the table of human discourse.  Haters must be willing to acknowledge inclusion, diversity, ethnicity, individual rights of others and contributing to the marketplace of ideas, instead of tearing it down, Time for hates to earn their seat at the table. Time for the internet industry to choose sides.