Topic: Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls - A World-Wide Wake-Up Call

[kat]

Due to issues with sourcing and written quality of the following report it wasn't originally going to be mentioned in this topic but for the number of outlets pushing this forward as a 'considered' (not their word) approach to controlling privacy and speech on the Internet (as it pertains to abuse on the Internet): "A Report by the UN Broadband Commission for the Digital Development Working Group on Broadband and Gender: Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls - A World-Wide Wake-Up Call". In a nutshell the central premise of the report is that "online violence" toward women and girls should stop (and by "extension", men and boys).

To do this the term "online violence" is often framed using language that conflates it with real-world (physical?) violence (in terms of 'actual harm' that may be done). In other words the Commission equate the phrase to a person "not just receiving death threats but the daily grind of being told 'you're a liar' or 'you suck'" with a women in an Emergency Room contused, rids broken, wrists fractured due to 'violence' perpetrated by another. Are the two truly the same?

What's worse is the reports obvious bias toward gender specific abuses in support of its general theme at the expense of the broader picture; women do indeed receive more gendered abuse, i.e. comments based solely around their being female; which contrasts with men being in receipt of the greater degree of abuse that's more broadly applied, i.e. boys/men are more likely to receive death threats, or just told they suck at something (stats on this vary depending on the questions asked, who's doing the asking/answering, which it's always worth considering).

If a solution to online abuse is to be sought it should not be done at the expense of one gender (sex) over the other, nor should it be done through suggestions of outright censorship of expression. Requesting service providers monitor and approve comments is unilaterally impractical due to the volume of traffic generated by current users, expand that outwards to include areas of the globe coming online and the numbers become impossibly large - this is all notwithstanding service providers already providing systems and tools users can use to report and block abuse. Government should only ever be involved when there's criminal intent, i.e. calls to incite/actionable violence etc. as law currently stands (and even this has its problems where free expression crosses 'religion' or other particularly rigid 'systems' of thought).

[EDIT]As of 6th October (date of writing this update) the CVAWG report has been pulled from the official ITU blog, replaced with a PDF stating its being revised. The report can however still be acquired in its current form from the link at the top of the article (note that even it may be updated once the report is changed). Additional sources added below.

Further Reading
Note: the following are not provided to prove a point one way or the other, rather they illustrate the complexity of the underlying issue, that males and females engage in different *types* of harassment as well as receive based on gender biases, circumstance and many, many other mitigating circumstance.

• Pew Research: Online Harassment ("... 73% have seen OH, 40% experienced it...")
• International Journal of Cyber Criminology: Battle of the sexes: An examination of male and female cyber bullying ("... females have been shown to be involved in cyber bullying just as much as males (if not more) ...")
• Gender and Alcohol Consumption: Patterns from the Multinational Genacis Project ("... the prevalence of high-frequency drinking was consistently greatest in the oldest age group, particularly among men ...")

UN Sources

• UN Women - Urgent action needed to combat online violence against women and girls, says new UN report
• ITU Blog - Cyber Violence against Women and Girls
• ITU - Urgent action needed to combat online violence against women & girls, says new UN report

[ratty redemption]

kat, where do you see all this going over the next 5-10 years? will online free speech be eradicated under the guise it's harming people?

personally i believe this is more rooted in silencing political or religious dissent. and cyber bullying prevention is an excuse for governments putting into place the infrastructure to only allow view points deemed acceptable. yes, i'm referring to 1984 here.

[kat]

There is no 5-10 years. It's already here (this topic is evidence of that).

Governments already block websites under the auspices of Copyright (List of Court Ordered Blocks). They also mandate access to certain 'political' or 'religious' sites be blocked in libraries, schools, universities and other public service establishments [1] [2]. Private business are also obliged to certain legal requirements to block access to certain types of content and destination (beyond what is illegal in an obvious sense), but beyond that blocks that they institute are more often the result of individual policy mandates - if you stay at a hotel chain for example you might not gain access to so-called 'right-wing' sites; there's no general legal mandate for that, they do for self-justified reasons. Having said that social media sites are more than willing to 'help' with respect to people being arrested for 'mean comments'.

Governments have also long wanted to change the Internet, or at least who can access it using the principle of 'trusted sites' and 'trusted users' [3]. But it's not just Government doing that, Apple has the "Touch ID" credential system, Google had a retina scan system for Glasses and so on. But that's nothing new (it's old hat actually), corporate users have used numerous types of bio-metrics to secure access to corporate networks and devices for decades.

What's relatively new in all this is the interconnectedness of it all and the fact that Government has access to it in various ways and for various reasons, laws and regulation to prevent 'harm' aren't need to initialise control, it's used to secure what's already in place.

Further Reading/Sources
https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/net_block_report.pdf
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-internet-and-pornography-prime-minister-calls-for-action
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23401076
https://www.fcc.gov/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act
http://www.copacommission.org/papers/rosenberg.pdf
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/NSTICstrategy_041511.pdf

[ratty redemption]

interesting, thanks kat. and i'll have a read of some of your sources when i have more time.

i did have a quick look at that blocked sites list, which appears to mainly be for copyright reasons yes? strangely several of the sites did appear in google search for me. so are they only blocked by certain isp's?

[kat]

Sites being on that list are 'blocked' at the ISP, its suppose to mean they can't ordinarily be accessed directly by persons typing in the URLs. The block won't have any bearing on search results appearances though unless Google et al de-list such sites.

[ratty redemption]

i think i understand. does this mean users can still visit those sites if they click on google search links? i didn't try any of them, as i didn't want to take any risks.

[kat]

You're presented with the page linked above when you do (if you're in the UK/EU).

[ratty redemption]

understood.

[kat]

ESA weighs in on the UN's "uninformed, misguided and unfortunate report".

"This is an uninformed, misguided and unfortunate report. If the overall issue was not so serious, it would be laughable that the U.N. is citing this work. It is willful ignorance to utilize such incredibly outlandish and outdated data,” said Michael D. Gallagher, president and CEO of ESA. “ESA strongly supports empowering women and minorities and creating an inclusive digital environment that welcomes all perspectives. However, the U.N. does this important issue a great disservice and undercuts its credibility by spreading ridiculous stereotypes and false opinions."

It's interesting to note that UKIE, TIGA, ISFE and other Industry representative groups don't appear to have made any comment on the UN's report, the ESA seem unique in this regard even though the reports concerns are not exclusively North American.

Note: Posts about this particular issue might have been better placed in Guns, games and real world aggression & violence were it not for the calls to use outright censorship as a solution to the problem presented.

[ratty redemption]

although i'm not a huge fan of the esa, it's good to hear them standing up against this gender biased nonsense.

[kat]

Minor update. The Broadband Commission has uploaded an interim 'highlights' report that drops some of the more incendiary arguments raised in the original whilst still (obviously relative to the context) emphasizes a gender bias; one or two points now tentatively acknowledge the problem of online abuse is a much broader issue.


Original Source

[ratty redemption]

maybe the people who support this latest proposed crackdown on the internet, could learn from the mistakes of a certain female "diversity officer" who has just been arrested in the uk, for inciting genocide against white men. in other words, these laws work both ways. it does not give one gender free reign to say and do what ever they like. while attempting to hide behind the law.

[kat]

When it comes to incidents like that, Government involvement is typically a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. And conversely unless it can be proved the individuals comments were a deliberate call to action (it's not clear what the person was actually cautioned over), then all their arrest/Cautioning does is martyr the person in the eyes of fellow believers, especially where the consequences of free expression can be used to boost an already well developed or staunch ideology.

Having said that though the indecent should never have got that far as Twitter already has a set of self-reporting tools in place that can be used to reprimand individuals for subjectively offensive content posted to the service, except it's rarely applied universally - being anonymous or public has no bearing on that (people post the most atrocious stuff on Twitter under their own names), so the UN's report calling for greater 'regulation' isn't the answer; ironically they can't call for 'better application' as that would force service providers to apply ToS violations equally.

Ho hum...

[ratty redemption]

you are correct kat, and i was being somewhat pedantic with my previous post.

the big picture here is of course censoring free speech affects everyone to some degree, not just people we disagree with. also to be honest, i doubt the young woman we are referring to was using the offensive hashtag in a literal way, more likely she thought she was lol trolling. which again shows why these laws shouldn't be as draconian as they are wanting them to be.

regarding twitter, apparently their tos has recently been updated, to include the option to report someone for simply disagreeing with the user's opinion. that's an insanely wide net to cast, in order to try and catch a relatively small number of fish.