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When civil discourse fails
Last week, a well-watched trial ended with charges being dismissed, a cliff-hanger ending to what was considered a potential turning point in free speech on the wild west of the Internet.
Gregory Elliott was charged with criminal harassment for an online war of words turned ugly. The backstory is convoluted. Elliott was reacting to three women who were reacting to a video game created solely to carry out the fantasies of physically harming a wellknown feminist in the online world.
Anita Sarkeesian certainly has cause to press charges for criminal harassment. The blogger has received rape and death threats, had her personal contact information and home address published online, and saw the creation of Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian, a game for which the aim is evident in the title.
The alleged victims in the Elliott trial had criticized the game’s creator and were, in turn, criticized by Elliott, who followed their activities online even after they blocked him.
Of course, I’m using criticized loosely. Comments made online can, and often do, degrade in quality from intellectual discourse to exchanging words most of us would be ashamed to utter in public. But investigators simply did not see anything in Elliott’s actions or the words he used which could be perceived as a threat of harm— the threshold for criminal harassment.
While Elliott’s comments and behaviour were not deemed to be criminal harassment, the trial brought a conversation to the fore, yet again, about the way women are treated online, from passive misogyny to aggressive and violent behaviour aimed at women with high online profiles who dare to object.
Why do these online personas feel the need to sink to such levels? And why on earth is there such vitriol aimed at women who speak their minds online—especially when their comments are made in forums not deemed inherently female?
But more of a mystery is why we’re nail-biting about free speech.
It will be a long time before the Internet, in all its capacity to capture the data of our collective humanity, from the most brilliant ideas to the basest of detritus, can ever truly be censored. True criminal acts online can be—and are—punished. We’ve seen it happen: producing and sharing child pornography, making death threats, counselling a person to suicide.
There are, of course, always going to be the bits of grey area. Nasty comments, deluges of messages, things said that are meant only to hurt— over and over.
The well-meaning law brought to Nova Scotia to prevent cyberbullying after the death of Rehtaeh Parsons was struck down for being too general, threatening free speech more than it protected victims.
But in the end, we’ll just have to learn to live with some of these things, because there will always be that vitriol, always be those emboldened by their cyber camouflage. They’re not going anywhere. But neither is free speech. At least, not online.
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