The Free Word Centre asked me to write about Internet Trolls.
It’s always a little disorientating to hear politicians debating pop culture and the Internet in parliament. The jargon-rich language of the twenty-first century does not yet seem to fit with the panelled acoustics and formalspeak of the Commons or the Lords.It does not help that many politicians have a weak grasp on the concepts that emerge from the new technologies, and even those who do understand them seem uncomfortable with the new idioms.
The recent discussion in the commons about Internet ‘trolling’ is the perfect example of this. MPs took time during the Second Reading of the Defamation Bill to complain at length about the phenomenon, despite libel and trolling being two different things (one is the harming of a reputation, the other is a form of disruption and harassment). For those of us who have campaigned to reform the libel law for the past three years, it was frustrating to have to listen to so much off-topic debate, when crucial amendments are still required. One could even label these tangential points about trolling as a form of trolling itself – a provocative distraction.
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Tag: Internet Philosophy (Page 8 of 39)
While I certainly stand behind the broad message of my Oxford Union speech, it is only right to acknowledge that the subject of debate – the impact of social media on social activism – is a little more nuanced and complicated than my bolshy assertions would have you believe. It’s worth acknowledging some of the arguments in favour of the motion, and expanding on some of the issues I was only able to cruise by in my eight minutes at the despatch box.
First, I wrote down a phrase from Mark Pfeifle, where he described social media as enabling “the soft power of democracy”. I thought this was a persuasive point. My speech focused on social activism in the UK and the USA, where there is a long tradition of social activism, and therefore ‘reinventing’ such activism is a very tough proposition. By contrast, those countries plagued by dictatorship have a stunted tradition of social action, so any tool that enables any kind of activism might be seen as a ‘reinvention’.
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Egypt, February 2011
On 31st May, I was delighted to be invited to the Oxford Union to debate the proposition This House Believes That Social Media has Successfully Reinvented Social Activism.
I chose to debate against the motion, and spoke last. Also speaking against the motion was Matt Warman, Consumer Technology Editor at The Daily Telegraph; Mark Kersten of the LSE; and Dr Christopher Carpenter from the University of Western Illinois. Speaking in favour was Senator David Vitter of Louisiana; Mark Pfeifle, National Security Advisor to President George W Bush; and Benjamin Cohen, the Channel 4 News Technology correspondent and founder of pinknews.co.uk. Ella Robertson of the Union opened the debate.
An iPhone recording of my speech is here, along with the transcript below. I shall write a follow up post with some nuanced thoughts on the debate, to balance the high flung rhetoric.
And for the record: Our side was successful. The motion was defeated!
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Over at the English PEN site, I have rehearsed the issue of social media censorship. Here’s an excerpt:
When such controversies flare, it is also important to remember that the social networks are corporations, intent on making money. This was made very clear to us all this week, when Facebook was listed on the NASDAQ. To justify its $100 billion valuation, the site needs new users, and it will get them from populous countries with technical infrastructure… like China, India and Pakistan. In order to secure access to these users, the company will have to co-operate (some might even say ‘collaborate’) with the governments of those countries. We should expect to see more censorship of the sort Pakistani users saw over the weekend, and also more sophisticated forms of control. People notice a nationwide social media blackout, but they are less likely to perceive a ‘throttling’ of internet access during periods of unrest or dissent. We are also likely to see an automated sieving of messages, where a site will appear to function normally, but certain keywords or phrases (for example, ‘Jasmine Revolution’, ‘Tiananmen Massacre’ or ‘Mohammed Cartoons’) will be filtered. Can we trust the large corporations to resist governments’ demands to filter? What if the sovereign wealth funds in authoritarian regimes buy up Facebook and Twitter shares?
You can read the whole thing on the PEN site. I have blogged previously about the problem of “Corporate Silos” and the need to diversify our social media use, though I am as useless as anyone at actually following through on this.
I’ve been laughing at this online web comedy series, asdfmovie by Thomas Ridgewell. Here’s episoide 5, which I sumbled upon because its one on the most top rated YouTube uploads today.
It feels like a distillation of comedy down to its purest elements. The punchline is all, illustrated in 2-dimensional simplicity. Its like tweeting on video. Very much of the internet age.