Nobody's Victim by Carrie Goldberg & Jeannine Amber

Author:Carrie Goldberg & Jeannine Amber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

The internet can be a nasty place. First Lady Melania Trump agrees. In March 2018, Melania met with tech company heads to launch her much-touted anti-cyberbullying initiative. Melania was short on specifics, but reading from prepared statements, she expressed her concern about making the internet a nicer place. The irony was lost on no one. Days before Melania’s speech, the New York Times published a detailed list of hundreds of people and entities her husband had attacked online since announcing his run for the White House, including athletes, rival politicians, members of his own party, a retired marine general, and scores of working journalists, all of whom he identified by name.

In a USA Today opinion piece about Melania Trump’s be-nice-on-the-internet initiative, political strategist and Trump critic Cheri Jacobus noted wryly that the president himself “had attacked and lied about people like me and then unleashed his army of Twitter trolls to depict me as raped, beheaded, dismembered, shot, stabbed, starved in a concentration camp, or grossly disfiguring my face because I am a Trump critic.”

Troll armies are impossible to prosecute. Not only are the members anonymous; individually their actions don’t necessarily meet the threshold of a crime. Cyberstalking, for instance, requires that the offender engage in a course of conduct, or series of acts, that would cause a person to feel as though they or their family were in danger. An individual troll making a threat does not constitute a “course of conduct.” But a thousand trolls making threats feels like a singular terror.

In an interview with The Atlantic, University of Maryland’s School of Law professor Danielle Citron likened a troll attack to being assaulted by a swarm of angry bees. “You have a thousand bee stings,” said Citron, author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. “Each sting is painful. But it’s perceived as one awful, throbbing mass.” Protected by anonymity, inspired by their leaders, and excited by the fervor of the mob, armies of trolls roam the internet, igniting one storm of terror after another.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.