More privacy, more security.

Our technology, laws, and norms tend to pit security and privacy, safety and free speech against each other, to our own peril.

Originally published on July 20, 2017.

Over the past weeks, I traveled to Stanford to talk about disinformation and Google to talk about online harassment. I’ve read about the arrest of some of my colleagues in Turkey, how to stop children from cyberbullying when our own elected leaders are doing it, a company threatening to publish photoshopped nudes of female reporters if they didn’t favorably cover their products, and then the actual publishing of nudes of the new and first female Dr. Who. (For my own sanity, I’m leaving sexualized and gendered harassment aside for now.) Then, the Pew Research Center released a study on online harassment, and all of these data points started to stick to a frame, particularly to the following three points:

1. First, the Pew study found that 89% of Americans “say the ability to post anonymously enables people to be cruel or harass one another.” Privacy is what any of us expects when we share information about ourselves online and off; not all things are for all audiences at all times. Anonymity, understood as perhaps the ultimate form of privacy, is what allows people in repressive regimes to do their work. Trans and drag communities that use chosen names or pseudonyms, another form of anonymity, do so to protect themselves, their physical safety, and / or their histories. But the study also finds that only 54% of those harassed online said it “involved a stranger or someone whose real identity they didn’t know,” demonstrating that perhaps we are wrong in perception of anonymity. Realnames.onlinecalls this a false shortcut, and points to evidence here and here that real name policies fail. Less anonymity — less privacy — doesn’t make us more secure. The more access anybody — the police, the media, legions of trolls — has to your data, obviously the less secure you are. We must increase our privacy to increasing security, says Parker Higgins of the FOIA the Dead Project.

2. Next, the study — assuming a gender binary — finds that 56% of men prefer to be able to speak their minds freely while 63% of women prefer to feel welcome and safe. This uninspiring safety / free speech opposition perhaps results from the extractive business model of the tech tools we use and/or an outdated interpretation of free speech. In the first, big tech encourages us to speak as much as possible, selling our labor — the content we create — to the highest bidder. They literally benefit from online harassment — what incentive do they have to stop it? Secondly, while arguably we protect speech over safety — with very few exceptions — our current provisions are not applied broadly enough. Our paradigm of speech has changed dramatically in terms of reach and amplification. Today, anyone can say anything in what is a global forum. Further, there’s no limit to speakers; anyone who builds or buys a legion of bots can repeatedly deliver their message, effectively drowning out my one voice. Looking at this as zero sum — safety OR free speech — is lazy. Americans are creative, innovative problem solvers. Silicon Valley prides itself on disrupting, and has the bucks to back it. I’m sure we can imagine methods for allowing for both in a single tool or for *choice* about which an internet user prefers on a given day.
   

3. Finally, and most chillingly, Pew found that 47% of ‘bystanders’ changed their behavior in some way that ultimately hindered their own speech after witnessing harassment online. That behavior ranges from getting off of the platform altogether to not posting content to changing profile information or settings.

Self-censorship isn’t new for many of the internet’s users. Campaigns to quiet speech and speakers in repressive regimes are well documented; the Turkish example follows in the footsteps of China, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain, to name only a few. Yet, the US is nothing like these — it’s a democracy that highly reveres free speech. Moreover, many tech titans and speech advocates believe they’re holding up the “open and free internet” mantle. But from the sounds of the study, maybe the internet — and our speech online — isn’t as free as we’d like to think it is.

Any free speech lover, and honestly, any tech company, ought to be concerned about harassment online for this point alone. A free exchange of ideas can’t exist if people can’t share information. And not sharing reduces bottom lines. Last month, I started to tweet something snide about Ed Snowden congratulating himself on always being right, but was afraid angry Snowden-lovers would show up on my doorstep.

If you’re concerned about saying things online, reach out to us at Brightlines.