‘What Happens Next?’: Does Digital Vigilantism Work?

Dr Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world and asks the experts, what will happen if we don't change, and what can we do to create a better future? I'm Dr Susan Carland. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Ginger Gorman: Those kind of threats on that Nazi hate website plus the fact that people could easily find out where I live was just terrifying.

Dr Mark Howard: One of the key things around vigilantism is that it kind of overrides or side steps procedural justice.

Dr Josh Roose: We've gone to an extent where someone who is considered to be promoting extremism or some sort of divisive rhetoric or even not so divisive in some cases, are identified, their jobs are identified and they may well lose those jobs.

Dr Susan Carland: In 2010, journalist and author Ginger Gorman was working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Queensland, covering a topic that's close to her heart, human rights. Here's Ginger.

Ginger Gorman: So I did this series of stories that were broadcasted on air, and they were published on the internet and they were essentially about the human rights of that community of gay people and LGBTIQ+ people in that community. One of these stories was about two men who told me they were gay dads who'd had a child via surrogacy in Russia, Mark Newton and Peter Truong. By all accounts, they were a lovely family. I did this story. I spent a lot of time with their little boy. I came back to Canberra where I'm originally from and I was on maternity leave with my second baby and those two men were arrested and charged in the United States as members of an international paedophile gang.

Kerry O’Brien: Tonight's story is shocking and extremely difficult to comprehend, but stay the course because ultimately it's about the remarkable efforts by investigators around the world to crack a highly secret code and strike a serious blow against the exploitation of the very young, very young.

Ginger Gorman: And it turned out that this little boy had been horrendously abused from the time he was two weeks old. As a mother myself, that was just so, so hard to cope with because I'd spent quite a lot of time with that little boy. And then as a result of that, conservatives in the United States got hold of that story. A very high profile journalist and blogger wrote all these posts about me. So he saw me as morally culpable somehow for the crimes against this little boy. And so I just became the subject of an online hate campaign and it was international.

Dr Susan Carland: It wasn't long before the threatening online behaviour became something far more sinister.

Ginger Gorman: First of all, I'm not techy. So I didn't realise my account was geo-located. So you could see where my house was on Twitter, on Google, on a map. And so we got a death threat, this tweet saying, “Your life is over”. And then at the same time, my then-husband – we've since separated, but he found a photo of our family on a Nazi hate website and I'm from a family of Holocaust survivors. So those kind of threats on that Nazi hate website plus the fact that people could easily find out where I live was just terrifying. And I just remember late at night lying in bed and hearing my little babies asleep and breathing in the next room and just thinking, did I just put my kids' lives at risk because of my job as a journalist? So that's where it started.

Dr Susan Carland: What a horrendous story. So what happened after that? What did you do?

Ginger Gorman: The thing that happened was really no one could tell me the level of the threat. So I know you yourself, Susan, have been subject to a lot of online hatred. And the thing is you don't know is this person that's threatening to kill me in the next suburb with a gun? Are they actually coming or is this just an empty threat?

And so at that time I remember ringing my boss and asking for help. And he wanted me to call the employee assistance programme. And I just remember thinking, no, you F-wit, I don't need a psychologist. I need to know, is someone going to kill my children? And the police were very much the same. They told me to “Stay off the internet, love”, which is what people tell cyber hate targets.

And so that not knowing was terrifying and I suppose that's where I really started to ask questions about cyber hate targets and how they cope. And I was asking myself, what's the level of the threat here? And in a way, that's what I wanted to find out.

Dr Mark Howard: I'm Mark Howard. I am a research fellow in the Philosophy Department at Monash University. And my specialisation is in the ethics of emerging technologies, especially automated technologies and the use of information and communication technologies to do with political and alternative forms of political representation.

Probably most of us are familiar with the notion of vigilantism. It's got a long history beyond, oh, I guess its recent iteration as digital vigilantism. And most simply, it's a response to a perceived civil or moral transgression, a crime or an injustice, and the idea is that the target of the action is usually thought to be somehow escaping justice.

And one of the key things around vigilantism is that kind of overrides or side steps procedural justice, so our typical systems of justice that we have in our social institutions. And it's sort of extralegal, so it's this idea that it goes beyond the laws that we have. And importantly, the latter point of being extralegal sort of implies that vigilantism usually moves in the same direction as the law, but it sort of exceeds its scope or severity. And just quickly, a couple other important points around vigilantism for ethical analysis is, it makes this assumption that worthy ends can justify using transgressive means, and also this idea that someone who commits a wrongful act necessarily needs to be punished, so this idea of retributive justice.

Dr Susan Carland: In some ways, digital vigilantism isn't so different from the wanted posters from the old west. Law enforcement has long depended on the public to assist in identifying and locating criminals, says Monash University criminologist Dr Lennon Chang.

Dr Lennon Chang: Well, digital vigilantism is actually not a new thing. We see vigilantes in the past years, and we see a lot of police and public and private collaboration in crime investigations.

In our everyday life, we see the so-called neighbourhood watch. In your community, you have some very active and enthusiastic people who try to post a lot of things on Facebook, telling you that, “Oh, well, there was someone suspicious in the park. So be careful, watch out. And if anyone can provide any information, that would be perfect.” So this is the way we see how individuals or netizens can help in crime prevention. So I would say it's actually a new thing. It's what we see in our everyday life, it's just the internet has amplified this kind of behaviour and makes people more aware, or more eager, or more interested in participating in this kind of behaviour.

Dr Susan Carland: I actually wondered if ‘Crime Stoppers’ – do you remember that TV show? I wondered if ‘Crime Stoppers’ was perhaps an early analogue version of digital vigilantism in which the police utilised and encouraged asking people to provide information and give these sources for their investigations. Would you see those as connected?

Dr Lennon Chang: Exactly, that's what I'm going to say! In my research, I called internet vigilantism the “Wanted 2.0”, or 3.0, if you’d like to say. The difference between that and internet vigilantism is that the internet has provided a better channel.

So in the old days for the wanted, it was more one-direction information feeding. If I know some information, I'll pass it to the police and the police will keep the record. But now it's more like every information has been publicised online, and people will be able to provide further information based on the information that has already been provided.

I always use this as an example to my students. Like if someone posts your photo on Facebook, Susan, students from Monash will say, “Oh, that's my lecturer in Monash.” And then people from Monash will keep – based on the information, provide more information like, “She has been an anchor of What Happens Next?.”

So this is the accumulation of information that wouldn't have been able to be realised in the past wanted system.

Dr Susan Carland: Solving a crime is one thing. Problems arise when an internet vigilante's idea of injustice differs from society's idea of it. Here's Mark Howard. So is it when people feel that the law is not keeping up with what needs to be done in terms of justice and people feel we've got to take it into our own hands?

Dr Mark Howard: Yeah, so certainly historically it's been this idea that, although the agents of vigilantism might support the existing social order and the existing social institutions, they don't think it's doing enough to uphold certain standards. So they'll normally act out to try and enforce a form of punishment that they don't see being delivered by social institutions, or calling out practices that they think our social justice systems are missing, that they think should be included in sort of punitive forms and response.

Dr Susan Carland: Have there ever been times where you think vigilantism has digital vigilantism or otherwise has actually done some good?

Dr Mark Howard: There's sort of two parts of this. So, one of the important things to think about is how this notion of digital vigilantism moves beyond the historical notion of vigilantism. So, the most obvious thing about the practice of digital vigilantism, or DV, is that it involves online direct actions. And what that does is, it brings with it the risks and benefits of information and communication technologies generally.

The digital form multiplies opportunities to monitor and intervene in the lives of others. It can amplify visibility, it can make actions more enduring, and importantly, it can also transcend particular contexts. So we get this cutting across cultural, social, and political boundaries that we may not have seen with vigilantism in, I guess, its original form, or its analogue form.

And that makes it important that we consider how we're building the notions of offence and how we're building these ideas of injustice and social justice.

Dr Susan Carland: Dr Josh Roose, a senior research fellow at Deakin University, says our ideas of what causes offence are rooted in our societal standards.

Dr Josh Roose: It's a really interesting question about standards in a democracy and, I suppose, what we consider to be acceptable when it comes to political space. For a long time, politicians' families were off – you couldn't talk about anyone's family but now it's just part of mainstream political debate, and the private actions of politicians.

But now we've gone to an extent where someone who is considered to be promoting extremism or some sort of divisive rhetoric, or even not-so-divisive in some cases, are identified, their jobs are identified, and they may well lose those jobs. And so that has implications for their potential further radicalisation, a consolidation of group identity, in those groups, a sense of having been marginalised and targeted. And in some ways, it can have a counterproductive effect, because it can actually bring these groups more closely together in a binary sort of us-versus-them mentality. And to some extent that may increase their susceptibility to engage in violent acts.

Dr Susan Carland: I guess I wanted to ask you on that, how effective is this kind of work? If it shuts people down and they lose their job, does it stop people from sticking their heads above the parapet maybe saying hate-filled or horrible things, or, as you said, can it actually increase their radicalisation and perhaps make them more extreme in their views because they feel punished by a society that doesn't understand them?

Dr Josh Roose: Yeah, it's a question about societal boundaries and again, who's doing the policing. And so there's this big debate drawn primarily from the US about freedom of speech. That's not guaranteed within our constitution, to the best of my knowledge. And to that extent, we have, I suppose, a society built on this notion of respectful dialogue. And yes, you can state some quite extreme ideas, and people need to be respectful of your capacity to say them. But the moment, I suppose, it crosses that line into the promotion of violence in particular – so that violence can be twofold. It can be the promotion of physical violence against a group, a minority or some sort of group that… even the majority. So it can also be verbal violence, and so this attacking of people on the basis of their gender and on the basis of their sexuality, on the basis of their race, or religion, or any other protected category.

Dr Susan Carland: And once things reach boiling point, that violence can escape the internet and enter the real world, as in the case of the Christchurch New Zealand mosque shootings. Here's Ginger Gorman, who went on to write the book Troll Hunting about her experiences and subsequent investigation into this phenomenon.

Ginger Gorman: And we know that real life harm comes to a lot of cyber hate targets, so it isn't a fairy land. It's not an idea that never eventuates. We know, I mean there's lots of case studies in my book where real life harm does come to people. The Christchurch killer, he was a terrorist troll. So we know that it's not a virtual fairy land that harm doesn't eventuate, but it doesn't always eventuate. So yeah, it is confusing. It's a really confusing situation.

But I suppose for my part, I still didn't really realise how dangerous some of these guys were. I still had that idea that a lot of us have, that these are anonymous morons in their mum's basement, and that they're never actually going to really harm anyone.

The thing that really made me want to investigate this is that once the threat to me personally started to die down a bit, I was looking internationally and I was seeing particularly women in the public eye – people like yourself, but other journalists, other female politicians – they were copping this extreme cyber hate all the time, death threats, rape threats. My friend Tracey Spicer at one point was too afraid to go home when she became a cyber hate target. So I started to wonder, who are these guys? And why would you send someone that you don't know a death threat? What is actually motivating you? And who are you?

I spent many years embedded with these trolls. So white supremacist young men who were working together in international syndicates to harm people. And what I can tell you is that those kids, because they're usually young men in their mid-twenties up to about 35, they come from the most hugely damaged backgrounds.

So they come from violent, neglectful, awful childhoods, and they are essentially raised by the internet: Reddit, Endchan, 4Chan, and they are alone. And they imbibe all of this radicalisation. So they imbibe white supremacy, misogyny, ableism, and on and on and on. Like one of the kids, I remember him telling me he had this violent alcoholic mother and he went to stay with the dad for a while. And his dad was a pilot, a commercial pilot, and just left him in the house with no food for 10 days.

So those kids end up as violent internet trolls. These are our children, these are in our communities. How can we stop that from happening rather than trying to force them to lose their job at a major supermarket or something when they're in their mid-twenties and they've gone out to harm someone like me? It’s like, why did we let that happen? How could we create a community where those kids weren't suffering in that way, and didn't feel so violent and angry that they had to get the world back?

Dr Susan Carland: Digital vigilantism isn't going anywhere. So what can we do to ensure it's used ethically? Are there alternative paths to justice? And what should you do if you're caught in the crossfire? Join us next week to find out.

Thanks to all our guests today, Ginger Gorman, Dr Lennon Chang, Dr Mark Howard and Dr Josh Roose. For more information about their research and work, visit the link in our show notes. Thank you also to the Monash University Performing Art Centres David Li Sound Gallery, where a portion of this season was recorded.

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