- "Hey @Twitter remember when I reported the guy who was making threats towards me after my appearance on @FoxNews and you guys sent back a bs response about how you didn't find it that serious. Well guess what it's the guy who has been sending #bombs to high profile politicians!!!!"
https://twitter.com/rochelleritchie/status/1055867631461416962
Not a rhetorical question. On the one hand, I expect police and FBI would be swamped by constant bullshit. I expect that every online forum would experience some extreme chilling effects from the overreaction of every moderator towards the prospect of violence. But I also expect civility would increase markedly. And I wonder if the ephemeral aspect of online discourse that used to excuse its baser behavior is falling by the wayside, and I wonder what that recalibration is going to look like.
While I do not think he was right when Marshall McLuhan claimed, "The medium is the message", there may be something to unpack there. 911, fax machines, and phone operators have dealt with bomb threats, sales calls, and the like, since the phone was invented. We don't hear about this stuff very much anymore, because our systems have evolved adaptations to abuse. The rise in Assholes of the Internet is not unique to the medium... there have always been assholes. They have stood on a soap box on the corner, used a megaphone, spammed fax machines with bullshit, sent spam emails, doxxed their fellow gamer.... remove the medium, and it is quickly apparent that all these things are similar in more ways than they differ. The internet is no different. It's just young, and largely developed by techno-libertarian inbreds who do not get out in the real world enough. MySpace would only be a sophomore in high school. (2004) Facebook (the anyone-can-join version) isn't even a teenager. (2006) As people react to the utter deluge of shit that pours over us every day from our social feeds, the tools will have to change. Logically, I expect there will be a Great Shrinkening, in which people demand and get tools from their social networks, that allow them to reduce the amount of incoming stuff to "relevant to me, and my 20 mile radius", plus "interesting" international news. Yes... I'm betting the interface to the internet that people will be using in the 5-7 year future, will look a WHOLE LOT like the old-fashioned home town newspaper: Primarily content about the communities you engage with physically (and some digital ones), with a smattering of global/national news that covers topics of specific interest. A smart newspaper. After all, that model worked for centuries. It iterated. Revised. Experienced competition. Built sales and distribution models. Adapted to changing technology numerous times. And it still survives (kinda) today. The TOOLS for the internet are immature, and written by the immature. They will grow, mature, and change, and I expect we will have glorified digital custom "newspapers" that we curate with our own rich filters and tools, and auto-adapt to our geo-location, as we move about our daily lives. And then? The assholes will have their megaphone taken away. And will be neutered again. Like the Michigan Militia - who faded into irrelevance once the journalists stopped writing about them, and people realized they were a bunch of fucking muppets, with no skills, ethos, plan, or vision - assholes of the internet will fade out once we stop paying attention to them. But it ain't fun using these shitty tools, while the tech bros do their growing up in public, while destroying public discourse.
You should probably read Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying. He draws the parallel between the modern Internet and the yellow journalism broadsheets of the 1870s and points out that what killed yellow journalism was a subscription model. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that our greatest innovators on the Internet are those with an ad-based revenue structure. Here it is, 2018, and 86% of Google's revenue still comes from ads.
RSS/Atom solved the problem of getting the information you want to see well enough, and in a way that makes it trivial to make your own filters. They just didn't solve the problem of coaxing you into sticking around and looking at ads long after you've read everything you needed to read, for that you need to surround your users with people who are wrong on the Internet.
Ryan Holiday made the point in Conspiracy that the Gawker case was one of the final nails in the coffin of the seemingly never-ending era of awful sensationalist journalism. It was always awful, but it took a while for society / journalism to realize that and act accordingly (i.e. more civil). Of course, bomb threats are different from raunchy upskirts, but I wonder (also non-rhetorically) what our world would look like if there were actual consequences to spewing hatred from behind the cover that is the Internet. I doubt it would be much worse.But I also expect civility would increase markedly.
We would hire a lot more cybersecurity. Simple as that. I think the Homeland Security department for America added a new department or something for that specifically this year. Just think of it like... we have more Facebook police. Picture nerds that attack attackers with Martians. /s Add to the fact that governments want to layer the virtual world with the real one and you will get something like what China is going to do with social points. Cybersecurity would just keep track. That's all.
"I expect police and FBI would be swamped by constant bullshit." Exactly this. If we take online threats seriously all the time, not only what you said will definitely happen, there will also be a lot of paranoid users and trolls. But if this happens, the cyber crime law will also become one of the most important laws that will exist.
Well, that too, of course! But really, if we take online threats seriously, the FBI hotline will be busy all the time. And they better have a great tech team to detect IP addresses and all that because these days, it's so easy to mask your IP and troll someone online.
Getting a conviction for a "True Threat" can be pretty difficult. Most the threats people make on social media aren't going to stand up in court under the just shit talking exception. What constitutes a "True Threat" is a wicked rabbit hole filled with misinformation and internet lawyers. I follow a few different 1st amendment lawyers twitters and blogs. Most the time when people ask if this or that is a true threat the analysis is "no, it's probably just shit talk," much less often the answer is "maybe," a really tiny number of times the answer is "probably, I'd feel comfortable testing it." It's not all that different from slander, libel and defamation in that it can be tricky to get a conviction or decision.