Sometimes, even safe spaces aren’t safe

The web as Wild West only protects the privileged

After I posted yesterday’s piece about Terri Tickle, someone who was in the community with me private messaged me with more information I didn’t know:

You know there was also an actual pedophile stalker in the group, right?

I was already freaked out by discovering our harasser was a middle-aged assistant principal in a New York high school, and that he was the protagonist from the movie Tickled. This information, however, was on a whole other level.

He wasn’t HUGELY vocal but instead attempted to befriend boys in the group and was later revealed to be a mid 30s pedo who got convicted!

I had no idea.

For most of my life, I’d considered my teenage self’s online hangouts to be pretty safe. There was the occasional fight, and the occasional asshole, but nothing anywhere near this level. If I think back, I had pride in this: the decentralized internet newsgroups were better. We weren’t like the online spaces you often hear about today.

Except we were.

We often hear about how the web should be redecentralized, and how everything was better when nobody controlled online discourse. In a lot of ways, that’s true: when nobody is the arbiter of acceptable speech, only the law dictates what can and can’t be said.

In my previous piece, I included a post from Terri Tickle that can easily be construed as solicitation. He eventually got a $5,000 fine and what amounts to probation for a tangentially-related crime. The police didn’t know how to police this kind of abuse, and Usenet wasn’t set up for real self-policing. It took literally decades for statutes to catch up.

There’s certainly a place for a kind of libertarian discussion space where everyone owns their own communications and there is no central authority. But, honestly, there is also a place for more controlled spaces, too. As I wrote last week, communities will differentiate themselves by which norms they choose to enforce, and whether they allow abuse to take place. Neutral communications, by enforcing deterministic equality, undermine the moral equality of protecting vulnerable voices.

Any time you add an ultimate arbiter for acceptable speech, you run the risk of censorship. The solution, perhaps, is for there not to be a single place to publish, but lots of competing platforms and communities with their own norms and ideals. Not quite one website per person, but a complex ecosystem of communities with different stakeholders and value systems.

As we’ve learned from social media over the last decade, it isn’t acceptable to have zero recourse for abuse. Communication without governance is, almost counterintuitively, oppressive. There has to be some way to handle ideological violence, bullying, and assault — otherwise they become discriminatory refuges for the privileged. Social networks provide value through their communities, and maintain the health of those communities by creating and enforcing social norms. The owners of those communities are the police and the government, theoretically creating better places for our digital identities to live.

There’s no reason why communities have to be owned by corporations. A million ownership and governance models are possible. Instead, the point is that centralization in itself isn’t wrong or evil. In fact, it can be liberating, just as living in a democracy can be more liberating than anarchy.

The devil is in which rules are set and enforced, how, and by whom. Just as in real life, freedom from government — and therefore from the rule of law — isn’t freedom at all. There’s safety in numbers.