XPost: soc.culture.british, alt.politics.usa, alt.atheism   
   XPost: alt.politics.clinton   
   From: tweitz@berkeley.edu   
      
   We’ve come up with the menacing term “troll” for someone who   
   spreads hate and does other horrible things anonymously on the   
   Internet.   
      
   Internet trolls are unsettling not just because of the things   
   they say but for the mystery they represent: what kind of person   
   could be so vile? One afternoon this fall, the Swedish   
   journalist Robert Aschberg sat on a patio outside a drab   
   apartment building in a suburb of Stockholm, face to face with   
   an Internet troll, trying to answer this question. The troll   
   turned out to be a quiet, skinny man in his 30s, wearing a   
   hoodie and a dirty baseball cap—a sorry foil to Aschberg’s smart   
   suit jacket, gleaming bald head, and TV-trained baritone.   
   Aschberg’s research team had linked the man to a months-long   
   campaign of harassment against a teenage girl born with a   
   shrunken hand. After meeting her online, the troll tormented her   
   obsessively, leaving insulting comments about her hand on her   
   Instagram page, barraging her with Facebook messages, even   
   sending her taunts through the mail.   
      
   Aschberg had come to the man’s home with a television crew to   
   confront him, but now he denied everything. “Have you regretted   
   what you’ve done?” Aschberg asked, handing the man a page of   
   Facebook messages the victim had received from an account linked   
   to him. The man shook his head. “I haven’t written anything,” he   
   said. “I didn’t have a profile then. It was hacked.”   
      
   This was the first time Aschberg had encountered an outright   
   denial since he had started exposing Internet trolls on his   
   television show Trolljägarna (Troll Hunter). Usually he just   
   shoots them his signature glare—honed over decades as a   
   muckraking TV journalist and famous for its ability to bore   
   right through sex creeps, stalkers, and corrupt politicians—and   
   they spill their guts. But the glare had met its match. After 10   
   minutes of fruitless back and forth on the patio, Aschberg ended   
   the interview. “Some advice from someone who’s been around for a   
   while,” he said wearily. “Lay low on the Internet with this sort   
   of stuff.” The man still shook his head: “But I haven’t done any   
   of that.”   
      
   “He’s a pathological liar,” Aschberg grumbled in the car   
   afterward. But he wasn’t particularly concerned. The goal of   
   Troll Hunter is not to rid the Internet of every troll. “The   
   agenda is to raise hell about all the hate on the Net,” he says.   
   “To start a discussion.”   
      
   Back at the Troll Hunter office, a whiteboard organized   
   Aschberg’s agenda. Dossiers on other trolls were tacked up in   
   two rows: a pair of teens who anonymously slander their high   
   school classmates on Instagram, a politician who runs a racist   
   website, a male law student who stole the identity of a young   
   woman to entice another man into an online relationship. In a   
   sign of the issue’s resonance in Sweden, a pithy neologism has   
   been coined to encompass all these forms of online nastiness:   
   näthat (“Net hate”). Troll Hunter, which has become a minor hit   
   for its brash tackling of näthat, is currently filming its   
   second season.   
      
   It is generally no longer acceptable in public life to hurl   
   slurs at women or minorities, to rally around the idea that some   
   humans are inherently worth less than others, or to terrorize   
   vulnerable people. But old-school hate is having a sort of   
   renaissance online, and in the countries thought to be furthest   
   beyond it. The anonymity provided by the Internet fosters   
   communities where people can feed on each other’s hate without   
   consequence. They can easily form into mobs and terrify victims.   
   Individual trolls can hide behind dozens of screen names to   
   multiply their effect. And attempts to curb online hate must   
   always contend with the long-standing ideals that imagine the   
   Internet’s main purpose as offering unfettered space for free   
   speech and marginalized ideas. The struggle against hate online   
   is so urgent and difficult that the law professor Danielle   
   Citron, in her new book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, calls the   
   Internet “the next battleground for civil rights.”   
      
   That Sweden has so much hate to combat is surprising. It’s   
   developed a reputation not only as a bastion of liberalism and   
   feminism but as a sort of digital utopia, where Nordic geeks   
   while away long winter nights sharing movies and music over   
   impossibly fast broadband connections. Sweden boasts a 95   
   percent Internet penetration rate, the fourth-highest in the   
   world, according to the International Telecommunication Union.   
   Its thriving tech industry has produced iconic brands like   
   Spotify and Minecraft. A political movement born in Sweden, the   
   Pirate Party, is based on the idea that the Internet is a force   
   for peace and prosperity. But Sweden’s Internet also has a   
   disturbing underbelly. It burst into view with the so-called   
   “Instagram riot” of 2012, when hundreds of angry teenagers   
   descended on a Gothenburg high school, calling for the head of a   
   girl who spread sexual slander about fellow students on   
   Instagram. The more banal everyday harassment faced by women on   
   the Internet was documented in a much-discussed 2013 TV special   
   called Men Who Net Hate Women, a play on the Swedish title of   
   the first book of Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster Millennium trilogy.   
      
   Internet hatred is a problem anywhere a significant part of life   
   is lived online. But the problem is sharpened by Sweden’s   
   cultural and legal commitment to free expression, according to   
   Mårten Schultz, a law professor at Stockholm University and a   
   regular guest on Troll Hunter, where he discusses the legal   
   issues surrounding each case. Swedes tend to approach näthat as   
   the unpleasant but unavoidable side effect of having the liberty   
   to say what you wish. Proposed legislation to combat online   
   harassment is met with strong resistance from free speech and   
   Internet rights activists.   
      
   What’s more, Sweden’s liberal freedom-of-information laws offer   
   easy access to personal information about nearly anyone,   
   including people’s personal identity numbers, their addresses,   
   even their taxable income. That can make online harassment   
   uniquely invasive. “The government publicly disseminates a lot   
   of information you wouldn’t be able to get outside of   
   Scandinavia,” Schultz says. “We have quite weak protection of   
   privacy in Sweden.”   
      
   The same information ecosystem that aids trolls also makes it   
   easier to expose them.   
      
   Yet the rich information ecosystem that empowers Internet trolls   
   also makes Sweden a perfect stalking ground for those who want   
   to expose them. In addition to Aschberg, a group of volunteer   
   researchers called Researchgruppen, or Research Group,has   
   pioneered a form of activist journalism based on following the   
   crumbs of data anonymous Internet trolls leave behind and   
   unmasking them. In its largest troll hunt, Research Group   
   scraped the comments section of the right-wing online   
   publication Avpixlat and obtained a huge database of its   
   comments and user information. Starting with this data, members   
   meticulously identified many of Avpixlat’s most prolific   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)