Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Category: Diary (Page 85 of 300)

Things that happen to me, or things I do

Is parental snooping the alternative to censorship?

9 August 2013 / / 0 Comments

How should a parents keep tabs on their kids?

On the technology site GigaOM, Matthew Ingram has posted two of a series of three articles about his “experiences of snooping on my kids and their online behaviour over a period of years.” He installed a ‘keylogger’ on his daughter’s computer everything she typed was e-mailed to him. When he confessed this to friends, they were shocked.
Is such parental behaviour justified? Children have fewer civil rights than adults (they cannot get married or vote) and its unreasonable to expect that they enjoy the same level of privacy as an adult – Parents should be aware of their medical conditions, for example. However, the transition from childhood, to the place where you take responsibility for yourself, is long and grey (see a previous post where I recommended aligning the age of religion with the age of consent).
When teenagers are concerned, NSA-style eavesdropping feels creepy. I think having secrets is part of what makes us a rounded and mature human being, and accepting that there are things that you do not know about your child is part of the parental process of ‘letting go’. However, much of their discourse takes place in public and semi-public social media spaces. It is less creepy to register an account and ‘follow’ a tween’s online discussions. I think that even doing so under an alias would be acceptable. What better illustration of the pitfalls in online discourse can there be, than discovering that the kid with the cat avatar you’ve been discussing Zac Efron with, was actually Your Mum?! Continue reading

The Darker Side of 'Selfies'

8 August 2013 / / 4 Comments

A little while back, the Independent ran a feature on ‘the selfie’, that genre of modern self-portrait taken with a smart phone.  Hilary and Chelsea Clinton had published a selfie, which signalled the form’s crossover from youth culture to the mainstream.
When we discuss social media, the usual insight is that it allows people (whether they are public figures like Hilary Clinton or Rhianna, or just ordinary members of the public) to communicate without having to go through the established media corporations.  But I think the great significance of social media is that the traditional media outlets have completely co-opted it into their coverage.  The mainstream media’s tracking of Edward Snowden’s escape from Hong Kong to Russia was powered by Twitter.  Sports reporters quote Tweets from players and managers to gain insights into their state of mind or the state of their transfer deal.
And selfies are now routinely used by the newspapers to illustrate tragic young deaths.  Whether it is a car accident, a drug overdose, a gang murder, or a bullying related suicide, the photo editors turn to the victim’s Facebook page or Twitter stream to harvest images.  The latest example of this is Hannah Smith, who committed suicide last week.  I noted a couple of years ago how they were used to report the overdose of Issy Jones-Rielly.  And the reporting on the joint-suicide of Charleigh Disbrey and Mert Karaoglan in June was heavy with ‘selfies’. Continue reading

A few quick notes on the Twitter arrest

7 August 2013 / / 0 Comments

The Guardian reports:

Man arrested over Twitter threats to female MP and campaigner.
Police investigating threats to Stella Creasy and Caroline Criado-Perez say 32-year-old is being held in Bristol.

Some quick notes:

  1. Let us affirm that sending direct threats of violence to people is against the law.  Arresting and charging such people is not an affront to free expression.
  2. In fact, the threats are themselves an act of censorship.  They instill fear in the recipient, who may withdraw from the discourse.
  3. This arrest is in keeping with the Director of Public Prosecutions recent guidelines on dealing with social media messages.  The guidelines recommend that direct threats and harassment should be proecuted ‘robustly’.  Expect this chap in Bristol to be charged.
  4. Note that the police managed to track down this chap using existing powers and technical abilities.
  5. It is interesting that the man arrested is 32 years old.  All the other arrests and convictions were of much younger men.  Reece Messer (who trolled Tom Daley) was only 17.

Quoted in the Washington Post

5 August 2013 / / 0 Comments

I’m delighted to have spoken to the Washington Post for an article about the Twitter abuse furore:

“The worry is that the abuse button will be abused,” said Robert Sharp, a spokesman for English PEN, a literary group that promotes freedom of expression. “It puts the power of censorship into the hands of those who would be offended, which is fine when it’s a rape threat. But the same technology will be used by Christians to censor atheists, used by atheists to censor Christians, and so on.”

Credit where its due: Tom Phillips’ article on theTwitter abuse button was fresh in my mind when I spoke to the WaPo journalist.  And there’s a huge body of work out there on the issue of ‘offence’ as a trigger for censorship.  My turn of phrase “those who would be offended” is not natural speech, but its the sort of thing that springs to mind when you’ve been marinated in these kinds of arguments.

How we wake up to the misogyny in our midst

4 August 2013 / / 0 Comments

https://twitter.com/caitlinmoran/status/363714981025419264
This post by sexologist Jill McDeviitt is quite astonishing. It chronicles her rage at being sent an entirely inappropriate e-mail by a man she had never met, and his subsequent approach to her parents when she threatened to publish the e-mail on her blog.
It is yet another story of how men send women inappropriate, disgusting and/or downright illegal messages over the Internet – an issue that we have been discussing all week.
The part of McDevitt’s post that I found particularly revelatory is when she describes how her parents behaved, when the man contacted them (he was the husband of someone who worked with Jill’s step-mother):

I’m left to marvel not just at your individual misogyny, but also the infantilizing sexism that exists in the back corners and in the cobwebs of the brains of everyone involved.
…
Receiving a repugnant email from you, a strange man, is bad enough. But what makes this case so compelling is how you were able to entangle my normally feminist and self-aware family, illuminating just how deep tolerance of predatory men goes in our society.

Continue reading

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