In her book The Hour of the Star, Brazillian writer Clarice Lispector said that all of us ask ourselves “Am I monster, or is this what means to be human?” Writing in 1977, she was decades away from widespread use of the internet; the question, however, seems to be increasingly applicable to it. We live in furious times. This is fairly obvious with even a most passing glance to recent events: Trump’s election, Brexit, and the shattering of traditional social democratic parties across Europe, replaced by more radical ones. All of these events are linked through a common feeling of anger and frustration with the current system. And although this unrest is manifesting everywhere (television, campaigns and even daily conversation), nowhere does this anger seem as clear as it does online.
Politics used to be thought of as something only boring intellectuals cared about. Now the picture has changed: it is the subject of thousands of internet forums, threads and social media pages. Uninterested parents, dispirited young people, and others that would have just looked away now not only engage with politics, but actively participate in it, angry with what they perceive as an establishment out of touch with their needs. On the internet, power and notoriety comes to those who know how to channel this frustration, whether they be journalists challenging the government’s response to Grenfell or the leftist outlets whose heavily partisan writing dominated Facebook in the run-up to the June general election.
But while this ramping up of online discussion has been good—after all, mass engagement in politics is essential for a proper democracy to function—it has come with an ugly side. Online anger is not created equal: some of it justified, with comment spaces serving as a means for catharsis over issues such as austerity or the financial crash. Yet the internet has empowered other voices, too. Sexist, homophobic and racist hatred are flung against opponents, sometimes in rancid hate speech that would shake even people who have fought it for years, and sometimes in insidious, “dog whistle” attacks which appeal to racist tropes while maintaining an air of plausible deniability. A recent shocking video of Diane Abbott describing what she endures only shows us the surface of what is hiding online.
While not all of this abuse occurs in political debates—sometimes, the assaults are over seemingly benign subjects like movies and video games—it is all political in nature: designed to silence and intimidate. Often times, this abuse is motivated by a mix of personal frustration and a desire for destruction—right-wing commenters, for instance, who feel like they are losing power to minorities and want to see those who would challenge them reduced to nothing. Increasingly, these attacks not only include slurs but sustained bullying campaigns against specific people.
Anybody who spends much time online knows about these types of monsters. They live in the land of below the line comments, and we avoid them in the way people in fairy tales avoid the enchanted woods. These stories were meant to be a warning about the evil that would fall on us should we wander too far from safety; similarly, the internet has stories about trolls lurking about, waiting to shred you to pieces if you go on certain websites. “Don’t read the comments” has become a rallying cry for those wishing to avoid the often hostile debates that can spring up below articles; within discussion sites like 4chan and Reddit, certain boards are known for their poisonous atmosphere. The real evil is the same as in the fairy tales: people, and their capacity for harm.
The impact of this is easy to see. Spend much time on Twitter, or various politics forums, and you will see people celebrating the fact they have provoked a “meltdown” in one or other prominent commentator—usually taking the form of a series of angry posts, followed by some time offline. Sometimes, this is followed by a later post about struggles with mental illness.
We know internet use can worsen mental illness. A survey carried out by the New Statesman shows that 35 per cent of people have reported that online arguments have impacts on their mental health, with 12.6 per cent saying it has made them depressed, and 24 per cent saying it has made them anxious.
It’s easy to guess that political debate online is probably one of the areas where more intense clashes come from. In certain spheres of the internet, environments have emerged where “being political” means expecting some degree of abuse, and then inflicting it on others, until the lines of who hurt who first disappear completely and there is only petty resentment and mutual mistrust. It is not uncommon for the decision to be made that someone’s politics are evil in their totality if they fail to meet certain standards—and that they are capable only of deception, rather than changing their mind—a process which can render them fair prey for constant abuse, sometimes over a period of years. Am I a monster, Lispector might have asked, or is this what it means to be online?
So this week’s announcement that the Crown Prosecution Service will set out to take online abuse more seriously is a welcome and important one. The new plans are for longer sentences for those convicted for hate speech online, as well as detailed definitions for different forms of it, such as the one of a racial, religious and homophobic nature, hoping to them be able to increase convictions.
However, there is nothing any initiative can do when it comes to an insidious form of online abuse—the sort of dog whistle that says “when Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.” While far-right groups are the worst offenders when it comes to this type of abuse, it’s not hard to find leftists using racist tropes to slander their opponents (particularly anti-semitic ones), liberals using sexism to speak over women—and a general tolerance of all of this when it comes from your allies.
It is also difficult to see how the CPS regulations will be able to change the overall mood of political discourse. Increasingly, conversations about politics are focussed not on finding allies—an essential part of political action in practice—but destroying your opponents. The general aggression toward each other comes alongside with a belief that anyone with different opinions is coming from a place of bad faith and is definitely evil, has been evil all along, and deserves to be fought with the angriest weapons at hand. Watch the Labour Party’s internal discourse in the past couple of years—where people who agreed on a majority of things fought each other like bitter enemies—and it is easy to see how throwing accusations of wider conspiracies around in an ugly display of paranoia and fury can become normal.
Of course, politics has always been a very nasty business. It’s what turned so many people off of it in the first place. We would do well not to forget that the internet didn’t create issues we see online; it simply gave old bigotry a new form. That’s why old institutions, like the CPS, must take hate speech online seriously. Likewise, nobody has the right to tell frustrated people not to express their rage. To do so is to worry about tone over substance; there is a vital distinction between protest and abuse. But if anger is a useful conductor for change, it needs to be used in a constructive way, not simply to harm others, especially not the weakest, and if the internet is going to fulfill its potential as a democratic tool, it will have to change into something more human. Otherwise we will all be stuck inside with the monsters.
Now read Abi Wilkinson on why abuse happens on all sides on the political debate.
