Online Mob Harassment Is Bad
You should not do it. You should not applaud when others are doing it. Also, here I'll repeat social justice talking points.
CW: suicide.
This is part one of a series. Part two will be called “torturing babies is bad,” and part three will be called “school shootings are bad.” The series will demonstrate my virtue, by showing I’m willing to call out things that others are not.
Over the weekend, lots of people requested that Jesse Singal kill himself. Why? Well, you can read the story here—I don’t really think Singal was in the wrong, but that’s up to interpretation. In short, Singal said something on Twitter that people found objectionable. So . . . the rational and proportional response of perhaps hundreds of people, including some high-profile journalists, was to suggest that Singal commit suicide.
Fortunately, Singal was fine. There are a lot of people—Singal included—who are pretty resilient—who don’t really mind when hundreds of random people on the internet tell them to kill themselves. But it’s very troubling that mainstream journalists are willing to suggest people should kill themselves—and are cheered on by thousands of people. As Singal notes:
Maybe the next time you tell someone to kill themself and joke about it over and over again as an online crowd forms to cheer you on, you roll snake eyes and it happens to be someone who is in crisis. What happens to you and your career when the most newsworthy thing about their suicide is that it immediately followed you telling them to do it?
Singal is right. You shouldn’t harass people on the internet in part because we know there are cases where, as a byproduct of online harassment, people have actually committed or attempted suicide. One person attempted suicide after an online harassment campaign because various people on the internet thought that her online art was offensive. She’s one of many. While suicides rarely have a single, unambiguous cause, it’s very plausible that many people would still be alive today if they weren’t subjected to a campaign of vicious online bullying. And even aside from those who have committed or attempted suicide, there are many more whose lives have been made much worse by online harassment.
I know how unpleasant it is to be the subject of lots of people calling you names online—claiming you’re a racist, sexist, transphobic, pedophile. It’s not fun when people on the internet spread lies about you including, for example, doctoring your message history to make you look bad. When you have people who hate you so much that they’re willing to lie and defame you—to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks—it’s not fun. But I’m much less fazed by this than most people.
I’ve never been told to kill myself seriously. I think maybe, when people on Twitter were getting mad at me for my comparisons between meat-eating and bestiality, some people told me to commit suicide, but it’s hard to remember. I remember there were some antisemitic comments, which was fun! I can now say I have experienced antisemitism! But it’s generally not people like me who are the ones harmed by these online harassment campaigns. I’m an abrasive contrarian who has a blog where I say lots of offensive things.
Instead, it’s people who are vulnerable that are the victims of this. People who are not doing well mentally, people who struggle with mental illness, people who care about the opinions of the people insulting them. It’s the 14-year-old girl with body dysmorphia who is the most harmed by lots of people making fun of the way she looks, rather than the abrasive contrarian with a blog.
And when you, through your actions, send a signal that it’s okay to tell your political opponents to kill themselves, then your political opponents learn the lesson. What things are done by each side of the culture war affects what will be done by the opposite side. If an influential public figure makes it clear that they think it’s okay to bully people—as long as the people are sufficiently bad—then their followers won’t just direct their hate towards the people who the public figure thinks is bad. Instead, they’ll direct it at vulnerable people—people who draw apparently offensive online art.
By having a culture that tolerates harassment, belittling, suicide-baiting, and assholery—wrapped up in a thin veneer of irony—people who are vulnerable are kept out of the public square. You’ll get more abrasive dudes who can fight fire with fire and don’t mind being insulted and fewer emotionally vulnerable people whose day is actually ruined when a million people on the internet call them names if it’s seen as totally fine to be an asshole to people just because you think they support harmful policies. When the public square is filled with people suggesting that others kill themselves, the people that come to dominate it are . . . the people who are willing to tell others to kill themselves, and to be just as nasty to others as you could imagine anyone being. Shockingly enough, this doesn’t select for virtue—being an asshole on the internet correlates with being an asshole off the internet.
It doesn’t matter how much you dislike Singal. Contributing to a culture of people being maximally vicious on the internet is a good way to get only abrasive, disagreeable contrarians seriously contributing to internet political thought. The world would be a much better place if we tried to empathize with the people that we disagreed with, rather than treating them as sub-human monsters who should be expunged from the face of the earth.
In addition, as Little Mammoth points out, if you wish genuine harm to internet strangers, you are not some silly internet joker. Something has gone deeply wrong if you are so angry that you feel the need to wish harm on other people over the internet. And if you are not angry, then it’s even worse—you’re willing to suggest people harm themselves for internet clout, rather than any righteous moral cause. But if you do find yourself growing so angry at strangers over the internet, then you should take a stroll outside. Take time off Twitter. If being on the internet makes you want strangers to die, something has gone deeply wrong.
In addition, when you’re nasty to people, you’re much less likely to change their minds. I have never had my mind changed by someone who wanted me to die—and I imagine others are the same. Belittling is not an effective way to convince people. So if your goal is to convince people—rather than get social credit from a website that’s set up to give you a dopamine hit when other people like your assholery—then you should avoid being mean to people.
I haven’t always been perfect at this. That’s actually quite an understatement. I’ve described people as “philosophically illiterate morons,” devoid of functioning brains, “notorious twats,” “vultures,” and more. I’ve suggested that those who believe in argumentation ethics are mentally deficient. Now, I don’t think there’s never a place for being a little bit mean in writing—sometimes, it can add spice to an essay and make it more fun; the world would be impoverished if Hitchens, for example, had never taken a swing at people in his writing. But I’ve definitely gone overboard. So, I’m sorry about that. I’ll try to be nicer to people—even those who say outrageously wrong things—in my essays.
I love your honesty about the way you haven't lived up to your ideals. Thanks for caring about the way people are treated, and spending the time to write this post.
Calls for civility are always timely. Thanks for writing.