Take for example the group Anonymous, which has incited a barrage of criticism in the media over its political incorrectness. This "subculture" of participants provides a platform for users to post commentary without the need for a user name, which in some contexts can lead to bigotry and a perpetuation of negative stereotypes. As this hilarious scare-mongering from Fox News reveals, it has also been linked to hacking Myspace accounts:
Another website that causes some controversy with anonymous online users is Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED), a satiric open wiki that parodies serious wikis such as Wikipedia. Here users only need to use a pseudonym or an 'avatar' profile to be able to post pages on everything and anything, with censorship not a concern. As a result, the site has immense shock value with some content on the site criticised for its blatant racist and misogynistic content, and through uncensored material being posted from other shock sites directly to this website (often sexually explicit). ED is also an internet subculture which mocks those unacquainted with the internet, seen through their slogan "In lulz we trust", while also helping to spread new internet memes and viral videos.
A similar site is 4chan, with 5.9 million people visiting the site every month. As Julian Dibbell of Wired.com says of the site, 4chan is "Filled with hundreds of thousands of brief, anonymous messages and crude graphics uploaded by the site's mostly male, mostly twentysomething users...4chan is a fountainhead of twisted, scatological, absurd, and sometimes brilliant low-brow humor".
Sites such as ED and 4chan provide an example of the practice of "trolling", whereby a user (often anonymous) posts intentionally inflammatory, off-topic messages into an online community (such as an online discussion forum or blog) with the sole purpose to provoke the other users into an emotional response, or simply to distract the discussion. This practice has gained attention recently in the Australian media in the case of "Queensland Facebook 'Troll'" Jessica Cook, who allegedly used a false identity to deface a Facebook tribute page.
These forums provide beg the question: when it comes to the internet and free speech, should everything be allowed to be posted to these sites in an ad hoc fashion without moderators or censorship, or should some level of restraint or legal consequences face those who set out to intentionally offend on the internet? While it's all well and good to set out with a noble cause as an anonymous online crusader, expounding civil liberties and free speech and exposing injustice, what happens when the inverse is true, and a user's primary goal is to malign large sections of society just "for lulz"?
No comments:
Post a Comment