The Internet conditions people to expect hostility. It’s always there, in the voyeuristic fragments of a Twitter TWTR -1.05% argument or comments on a YouTube video. Aggression has become a permanent part of the Internet’s background noise. Whether we choose to acknowledge it, the Internet is always ready to show us other people being abused, yet few people are prepared to be drawn from the crowd and turned into a target. This week game designers Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz announced a new network meant to help people who’ve become targets of online attacks, offering counseling and practical information about how to protect one’s self from further abuse.
Called Crash Overdrive, the network has already helped a number of people lessen the impact of being targeted. A Wired story detailing the new site shares the example of Israel Galvez, a web developer who became a target after speaking up in defense of a friend targeted by the mob of videogame vigilantes who emerged under the nonsensical portmanteau “Gamergate.” After Craigslist ads portraying him as a sex offender and unordered pizzas mysteriously delivered to his house, someone called local police and said Galvez was depressed and had bomb making materials in his home, a form of assault in which pranksters use SWAT teams as proxy attackers to destroy property and physically harm another person.
On advice from Crash Overdrive, Galvez had called the police in advance, telling them that they might receive calls about him in the future as part of a harassment campaign. The police still arrived at his home after receiving the call, but because of the forewarning the exchange didn’t involve storming the apartment and was quickly resolved.
Get help here. Image via Crash Override site.
“When this started happening, it was like getting hit by a meteor,” Quinn told Wired’s Laura Hudson, describing her own experience as the subject of anonymous attacks, doxing, and prolonged Internet abuse after an ex-boyfriend wrote about their relationship. This blog post became the post hoc justification for anyone who wanted to attack another person under the opaque banner of Gamergate. “The life I had before this is over. So it’s about trying to figure out how to move forward, how to make sense of it. So many people have been through this and not known what to do and felt helpless”
There have been many attempts to provide similar services for targets of online attacks over the years. The International Game Developers Association posted a lengthy Online Harassment Resource in November. In 2010, the White House began convening an Annual Bullying Summit and launched its own website,StopBullying.gov, as an information resource and channel to connect with help for people being attacked online. The Cyberbullying Research Center is one of the oldest online resources, which has offered a comprehensive list of legal information, research, and links to community resources since 2005. It also has expanded to include support for adult victims of cyberbullying.
In some ways, the profusion of resources to help victims of online attacks reaffirm how unprepared and inadequate our ways of understanding them really are. It’s still too easy to get lost in the layers of meaning between Internet abstraction, the infantilizing language of schoolyard psychology, and recognition of the genuinely malicious, adult attempts at damaging other lives. Even within an individual harassment campaign, it’s difficult to identify what the response should be to acts as disparate as mass pizzas orders, portraying someone as a child molester on Craigslist, or having a SWAT team sent to someone’s house.
Support structures like Crash Overdrive are essential and welcome, yet they point to an enduring confusion about the Internet as a place whose computer abstraction scrubs users of moral or material responsibility for their behavior. The Internet sometimes seems to liberate people from the social and political hostilities they find in schools and on the streets, but these antagonisms eventually matriculate online, and claim for themselves the same intensifying power as those seeking shelter from them
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