Online communities and abuse

A few weekends ago we met a friend for coffee in Palo Alto. As the discussion wandered we ended up talking about some of the projects we’re involved in. Friend mentioned she was working with a group building a platform for community building. We started talking about how hard it is these days to run online groups and communities. One of the things I started discussing was what needed to be built into communities like this to prevent abuse and damage.


It’s a sad fact of online life that trolls exist and have been a part of online life since before Usenet. My perception is this is getting worse. It’s not that there wasn’t harassment in the past. There was. 20 years ago, I managed to annoy some random woman on a newsgroup back in ’96 or ’97. This resulted in months of harassing phone calls to me at home and work, my boss at home and work, the head of the rescue group I volunteered with. The police were involved, but there wasn’t much they could do. There’s still not much police do about online threats.

Now it seems worse. People are getting physically threatened. Women and activists are driven from their homes because someone online decided to attack / doxx / frighten them. We have online platforms that allow hate speech and threats and don’t provide sufficient tools for users to protect themselves. For all the good that comes from the Internet, there’s an awful lot of bad.

A big part of the issue is anonymity. Real anonymity online is hard, as evidenced by how quickly CNN tracked down the real life identity of a Reddit user. They did that in less than 24 hours, without the benefit of any private information. But partial anonymity is pretty easy. It’s trivial for anyone to register any number of twitter accounts, or reddit accounts. I recently heard the term “weaponized anonymity” and it accurately describes the situation. (I don’t agree with all of the opinions in that article, but I think the definition is useful.)
Before my harasser, I was pretty open online with where I worked and volunteered. I think I even had my physical location (at least city and state) on my webpage. Afterwards, I stripped as much info from the space I had control over. I thought about creating a new online identity, but decided that it was both a lot of work and wouldn’t be that effective. It’s near impossible to hide online now.

These are issues we have to address. Unfortunately, too many community platforms (twitter, I’m looking at you) don’t have controls in place to allow users to block harassment. At the volume of users some online communities have there is simply no way to put a human in the loop to deal with every complaint. There’s also a ‘x said, y said’ problem, where abusers claim they’re the victim when called on their behavior. The Mary Sue has an article on a recent example. In some cases, harassment goes back for years and the story is too complicated for an abuse desk worker to absorb in the short time they have to deal with an issue.

I certainly don’t have the answers. But I know that when we’re building online software we have to start prioritizing user safety and privacy. Too many online spaces don’t have walls or fences or locks. That’s a good thing because it lets people find communities. But it is a bad thing because there are folks out there who disrupt communities as a hobby. Anyone building community software needs to think how they and their software will handle it if one of their users is targeted.
These are discussions that need to happen. Those of us with experience in the online abuse space need to be involved and contribute where we can.

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January 2016: The Month in Email

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I joined nine other email experts for a Sparkpost webinar on 2016 predictions, which was a lot of fun (see my wrap up post here), and then I wrote a long post about security and authentication, which I think will be THE major topic in email this year both in policy and in practice (see my post about an exploit involving Trend Micro and another about hijacked Verizon addresses). Expect to hear more about this 2016 continues.
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Policy is hard

We’re back at work after a trip to M3AAWG. This conference was a little different for me than previous ones. I spent a lot of time just talking with people – about email, about abuse, about the industry, about the ecosystem. Sometimes when you’re in a position like mine, you get focused way too much on the trees.

Of course, it’s the focusing on the trees that makes me good for my clients. I follow what’s going on closely, so they don’t have to. I pay attention so I can distill things into useable chunks for them to implement. Sometimes, though, I need to remember to look around and appreciate the forest. That’s what I got to do last week. I got to talk with so many great people. I got to hear what they think about email. The different perspectives are invaluable. They serve to deepen my understanding of delivery, email and where the industry is going.

One of the things that really came into focus for me is how critical protecting messaging infrastructure is. I haven’t spoken very much here about the election and the consequences and the changes and challenges we’re facing. That doesn’t mean I’m not worried about them or I don’t have some significant reservations about the new administration. It just means I don’t know how to articulate it or even if there is a solution.
The conference gave me hope. Because there are people at a lot of places who are in a place to protect users and protect privacy and protect individuals. Many of those folks were at the conference. The collaboration is still there. The concern for how we can stop or minimize bad behavior and what the implications are. Some of the most difficult conversations around policy involve the question who will this affect. In big systems, simple policies that seem like a no-brainer… aren’t. We’re seeing the effects of this with some of the realities the new administration and the Republican leaders of congress are realizing. Health care is hard, and complex. Banning an entire religion may not be a great idea. Governing is not like running a business.
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