Tag Archive for: social media

MONTHLY BLOG 156, Tracking Social Media: It’s High Time for Effective Regulation

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If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2023)


Yes, there are a range of good reasons for authorial anonymity. These are fully acknowledged in my MONTHLY BLOG/155 (November 2023).1

Yet … humans are tricky creatures. That trickiness, of course, helps to explain why authors so often seek anonymity in the first place. They may need to be protected in order to speak out against ruthless or corrupt employers.

Nonetheless, humans can also use secrecy, not just to protect themselves from harm, but also to harm others. Anonymous authors can lie, as well as speak truth to power. Indeed, some authors, writing anonymously, discover that the normal social restraints are subtly loosened. They find within themselves hitherto unsuspected levels of venom and hostility.

The result is that anonymous foul-speaking, trouble-stirring trolls have become a contemporary social curse, especially on social media. Trolling onslaughts can include cases of cyber-bullying; threats to the recipients and their families; stalking; and sexual harassment. All such behaviours are crimes. Yet they are masked by secrecy – and quasi-justified by claims of ‘free speech’.

Lawyers will, of course, point out that – these days – human rights are all embedded in frameworks of law. Free speech is an invaluable thing. No question. But it is not utterly untrammelled. There are laws world-wide which attempt to control written defamation (libel) and its spoken equivalent (slander).2 In effect, the legal framework tries to balances the right to freedom of speech with the right to protection from defamation, harassment, bullying and other criminal abuses.

However, today, the plurality of publication outlets, via the explosion of social media, has made those laws very hard to enforce. So what follows?

Historical practice is relevant here. When print publications began to multiply across sixteenth-century Europe, a de facto case law emerged. It became accepted that publishers are legally responsible for materials that appear under their imprimatur. Hence they tried to avoid publishing works that could be construed as defamatory, obscene, blasphemous, inciting criminal behaviour, breaching someone else’s copyright, or otherwise illegal.3   Quite a list!

As part of that responsibility, it has also become established that published works should show the name of the publisher, plus the location and date of the publication.4 Thus, while authors can remain anonymous (or can write under a pseudonym), their print publishers are ‘on the record’.

Similarly, a printed newspaper has the right to protect its sources. Some information is derived from sources who do not want to be named. But the newspaper owners and their editorial teams take legal responsibility for whatever is published. (Hence they generally double check their sources wherever possible). It means that ideas and arguments – and statements about individuals and causes – are not just bandied around in a legal void.5

When it comes to the internet, however, the explosion of social media – and the ease with which everyone has access – has dramatically changed the playing-field. The evolving legal framework was trying to balance an individual’s right to free speech with the parallel right to reasonable protection. There is also a collective social interest at stake. It is highly important that people have reliable access to the stock of knowledge and are not being misled by ‘fake news’ or ‘fake information’.

Research shows that using social media regularly can have both positive and negative effects on individuals.6 One adverse impact is a sense of personal impunity through anonymity. That has the effect of weakening normal social- and self-controls. People – and groups – indulge in over-the-top hatreds and invective. And so a dangerous ‘hate culture’ is born.

Furthermore, an unregulated social media ‘free-for-all’ is dangerous not only for the venom and/or errors of expressed opinions but also for the extreme velocity with which everything is circulated – unchecked.  So people are at risk of being fed on a daily diet of false-information and fake facts, which seem to be beyond checking and correction. Put at its most extreme, the entire corpus of careful and verified knowledge, which has been patiently accumulated and tested by humans over successive generations, may be at risk.

What is to be done? There must be an internationally agreed legal framework for regulating the internet (and for the ‘dark web’), just as there are legal frameworks for print culture. Easy to say! Hard to achieve! But the bedrock must be that web-publishers take responsibility not for every detail but for the broad reliability and non-criminality of the material which they broadcast. And each social transmission should include (ideally) the name of the sending account; (invariably) the name of the transmission agency (equivalent to the print publisher); and (invariably) the date/time of transmission.

Individual contributors, meanwhile, should be encouraged to take full ownership of their own views. In normal circumstances, they should fly under their own colours, with full name and identification.

But, as already agreed, at times there are good reasons for remaining anonymous. In such circumstances, someone else must step up and take responsibility. Every communication must have a known publisher, who can be tracked and held accountable.

To repeat: humans are tricky creatures. They have so many good qualities – and the reverse. What they have learned, painfully and slowly, is that their societies operate successfully only within frameworks of laws and regulation. Sure, there are disputes all the way about how such frameworks are operated in practice. No system will be perfect.  But that’s not the point.

Crucially, the big and ultra-serious point is that, without properly enforced regulation, today’s social media will strangle the life and knowledge out of all day-to-day human associations. The question is therefore not whether social media need a proper framework of regulation – but, rather, how the deed is to be done. There’s no call for censorship. But there is an urgent need for regulation.

Unsurprisingly, today there is much debate on this hot topic.7 There are many helpful suggestions out there. So it’s now time for a big public debate – followed by decisive action! Collectively, humanity is today facing many testing problems. It’s time to apply our collective ingenuity and creativity to resolve them. We must have transparency within social media systems, at specified levels and in specified ways. We must curb the circulation of fakery, misinformation, hatreds, and criminality.

Humanity is born ingenious. And it must use that ingenuity to keep the best of our inventions and to curb the excesses. It’s a global battle that we need to win. After all, if we fail, then we have nothing to lose but our brains.

ENDNOTES:

1 PJC, ‘The Anonymous Author: Seeking Justified Privacy or Avoiding Responsible Transparency?’ BLOG/ 155 (Nov. 2023) on www.penelopejcorfield.com/monthly-blogs.

2 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation (viewed 28 Nov. 2023).

3 For the UK, see e.g. J. Kirsch, Kirsch’s Handbook of Publishing Law: For Authors, Publishers, Editors and Agents (Acrobat Books, 1995).

4 G. Cole, ‘The Historical Development of the Title Page’, Journal of Library History, Vol.6, no 4 (1971), pp. 303-16.

5 In England, the current legal situation is governed by the 2013 Defamation Act, supplemented by the common law.

6 Pew Research Centre (USA), ‘The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online’ (29 March 2017), in https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/03/29/the-future-of-free-speech-trolls-anonymity-and-fake-news-online (viewed 29 Nov. 2023).

7 See thoughtful discussions, from a variety of perspectives, in J. Naughton, ‘Has the Internet Become a Failed State?’, The Observer, 27 Nov. 2016; A. Macrina and T. Cooper, Anonymity: Library Futures (Chicago, 2019); D. Ghosh, ‘Are We Entering a New Era of Social Media Regulation?’ Harvard Business Review (Jan. 2021): https://hbr.org/2021/01/are-we-entering-a-new-era-of-social-media-regulation (viewed 29 Nov. 2023); J. Susskind, ‘We Can Regulate Social Media without Censorship – Here’s How’, Time Magazine, 22 July 2022); M. MacCarthy, ‘Transparency is Essential for Effective Social Media Regulation’, Brookings Institution Washington – Commentary (Nov. 2022): https://www.brookings.edu/article/transparency-is-essential-for-effective-social-media-regulation/ (viewed 29 Nov. 2023).

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MONTHLY BLOG 155, The anonymous author, seeking justified privacy or avoiding responsible transparency?

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If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2023)


Last month I meditated on the need for fair and intelligent framework regulation for all manner of human activities. We are an ingenious but tricky species. Our best qualities and finest inventions can be used for dire purposes; or can generate malign results in the long run, even if no-one has actually willed such an outcome. Hence the need for clear and intelligent regulation.1

Such thoughts also raise questions about the pros and cons of anonymous writing. It can today be such a scourge. For example, on social media, vituperative hate messages are often sent to families of murdered children. Parents are accused of negligence in leaving their child at risk – or charged with outright complicity in the death. All from anonymous writers who have fierce anger to express, and not even minimal concern for the recipients’ feelings.

Logically, of course, it may even be that – however rarely – such accusations are correct. Children are sometimes murdered by family members. But pointing a finger anonymously, in an outpouring of anger and blame, does not help to identify a malefactor. It makes innocent parents feel worse. And (at a guess) it is likely to make guilty ones even more determined to hide their guilt.

The only ones pleased by such anonymous accusations are presumably the accusers themselves. They can feel, self-righteously, that they have seen the truth; denounced the guilty; and purged themselves of their own distress and anger at the brutal death of a child. Hence, in a world of ever-extending mass literacy, all can have a voice and vent their innermost primal feelings.

But is such a justification good enough? Do not primal feelings also need to operate within a broad (if flexible) set of rules?

So let’s review the case for anonymity. Firstly, it can be an essential shield for the powerless, when seeking to take action against the powerful.2 Whistle-blowers in the workplace, who do not wish to lose their jobs, but who do wish to reveal wrong-doing, often use the cloak of anonymity. Indeed, some organisations today positively recommend having a known channel for such communications to be made secretly and safely; and there are companies that either offer to set up a secure internal hotline or to provide one themselves.3

Similarly, would-be rebellious citizens living under powerful tyrannies may choose to act anonymously against their oppressors. If rebels oppose publicly, they often end up dead or in prison. If they act covertly, they live to continue the fight another day.

Historically, too, there are well-documented cases of anonymous protest. Desperately poor agricultural labourers in early nineteenth-century Britain sent barely literate unsigned letters to local landowners and magistrates, voicing grievances and threatening violence unless remedial action was taken.4 Hence, while anonymous letters are often considered to be written with a ‘poison pen’5 – like anonymous messages on social media today – they can be used to issue challenges to apparently impregnable powers-that-be.

Throughout, however, it’s wise to remember the trickiness of humans. Not all anonymous accusations against powerful – or even tyrannical leaders – are automatically accurate. While anonymity may, be justifiable in specific circumstances, it cannot confer infallibility.

Then there’s a different set of reasons. A considerable number of modest authors want public attention to focus entirely upon their writings, not upon themselves.6 They may be shy, private people. Some too may be acutely anxious.7 They all want to communicate but they want their output to stand or fall upon its own merits.

Moreover, numerous women writers, in the early days of the novel, rightly did not want to be patronised or side-lined because of their sex. As a result, a number first published anonymously, as did Jane Austen – though she did admit to being ‘A Lady’. Others used male pseudonyms. In the mid-1840s, the three Brontë sisters famously first published as Acton [Anne], Currer [Charlotte] and Ellis [Emily] Bell. At least they kept their original initials in full. Marian or Maryanne Evans, who published as George Eliot, had other concerns in mind – saluting her unofficial partner George Lewes by using his first name. The options are endless. It suffices that the ‘pen-name’ is the alter ego, standing forth in the public eye.8

In all cases, anonymous or pseudonymous novelists preserve the capacity to go quietly about their lives – observing the follies and foibles of their fellow humans – without being pestered or pursued by readers. Remaining unknown also safeguards authors from public embarrassment in the event of failure.

Presumably some combination of these motivations inspired numerous male authors to follow the same route. Samuel Leghorne Clemens later flowered as the celebrated American author, Mark Twain. One Marie-Henri Beyle later turned himself into the magisterial French author, Stendhal.  The insightful British author, George Orwell, was named by his parents as Eric Arthur Blair – with a first name that he was particularly keen to discard, thinking it too ‘priggish’.

Today, moreover, the successful crime thrillers by the female Spanish author, Carmen Mola, turn out to be authored by not one man but by three, working together anonymously.9 So an element of fun and play may also lie behind the use of pseudonyms. And no doubt an element of private laughter may follow, when the public is successfully hoaxed.

Yet … what about the principle of transparency? What about ‘owning’ one’s actions? Taking responsibility? Standing up to be counted? Playing fair with the public? Preventing false attributions and fake identities? Thoughts on these further burning questions, which haunt the history of publishing and communication, will be the subject of my next BLOG/156 in December 2023.

ENDNOTES:

1 See PJC BLOG/154 ‘In Praise of (Judicious) Regulation’ (Oct. 2023).

2 K. Kenny, Whistleblowing: Toward a New Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 2019); J.R. Arnold, Whistleblowers, Leakers and their Networks: From Snowden to Samizdat (Lanham, Md, 2020); T. Bazzichelli (ed.), Whistleblowing for Change: Exposing Systems of Power and Injustice (Bielefeld, 2021).

3 See e.g. https://www.northwhistle.com or https://www.safecall.co.uk/en/why-safecall.

4 E.P. Thompson, ‘The Crime of Anonymity’, in E.P. Thompson and others, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York; 1975), pp. 255-308, with sampler of anonymous letters, pp. 309-41. [It’s good to acknowledge here the help in this research given to EPT by his old friend, the local historian E.E. Dodd].

5 E. Cockayne, Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters (Oxford, 2023).

6 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Works_published_anonymously (viewed 27 Oct. 2023).

7 For meditations on the psychology of anonymity, see E.M. Forster [Edward Morgan], Anonymity: An Enquiry (London, 1925); J. Schecter, Anonymity (London, 2011).

8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Works_published_under_a_pseudonym (viewed 27 Oct. 2023).

9 They are Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez, and Antonio Mercero, three Spanish script-writers: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Mola (viewed 27 Oct. 2023).

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MONTHLY BLOG 64, WHY IS IT TAKING SO LONG TO NORMALISE THE ROLE OF WOMEN AT THE TOP IN POLITICS?

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If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2016)

Women can certainly make it to the top of the political greasy pole. Indira Gandhi (India), Margaret Thatcher (UK), Angela Merkel (Germany) and Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar) are just four among several eminent examples, in very different political systems. Nonetheless, such women are still comparatively rare. Their political pre-eminence, past or present, is not ‘normal’ and taken for granted. But … why ever not? In liberal democracies it’s now a fairly long time since women got the vote and became able to stand for office. So what factors have slowed down the transition from electoral rights to political eminence?

Put like that, one fundamental answer replies that ‘these things take time’. Getting the vote is not the same as getting power. It was/is quicker and easier to change the franchise (and that took some doing) than it was/is to change the day-to-day practice of politics, which paves the way for individual participation and advancement. Over the long term, it can be argued that democracies have become relatively ‘feminised’ in the sense that issues concerning women are now routinely part of the agenda. Yet that is not the same as female participation.

Between them, women usually carry out a range of customary tasks within the household, such as childcare, dependent-adult care, home-provisioning, and housework. All of these are time-consuming and preoccupying chores, often round-the-clock. Hence, to accommodate the political participation of women, the timetables and practices of political life need to be adjusted, as does the habitual allocation of tasks within the household – and/or the delegation of some tasks to other bodies outside the household.

A very long history lies behind the assumption of an ingrained specialisation, originating in biology and sustained by cultural expectations. Women were and often still are expected to focus upon the domestic and the familial. Men take care of the ‘outside world’. A traditional phrase pronounced that: ‘Ladies have nothing to do with politics’. Such attitudes were early challenged by feminist writers. In 1834, the feisty Maria Edgeworth denounced that attitude as ‘namby-pamby’ and ‘little missy’, in her novel entitled Helen. The heroine of the story was admonished: ‘You can hardly expect, Helen, that you, as a rational being, can go through the world as it now is, without forming any opinion on points of public importance.’1

Nonetheless, great numbers of women traditionally did and do leave such things to ‘the men’. And in Edgeworth’s novel, disappointingly, her staunchly self-denying heroine does not rise to the challenge, whether by campaigning for the female franchise or for anything as halfway radical. It was very difficult, in that era, for women to propose proto-feminist views without being satirised or pilloried; and the convention against women speaking on public platforms was almost universally upheld, by women as well as by men.2

One of the central arguments against giving the vote to women was that they were ‘virtually’ represented by their menfolk. Civic activities by husbands were taken to articulate the views of the entire household. It was specialisation in practice. Man and wife were one. She had tasks at home; he spoke for both in the wider world. On such grounds, many Victorian conservatives opposed giving the vote to women, on the grounds that such a move would give married men two votes and thus be unfair to bachelors, who were left with just one. (Spinsters, meanwhile, were supposed to be ‘virtually’ represented by their fathers).

Such views depended upon an ideal-type of ‘the household’. However, in nineteenth-century Britain (as long before), there were plenty of women who either lived alone or who lived in female-headed households. And, of course, many married couples held divergent views – or followed the lead of the wife, not the husband. (Such men were unmanly and known as ‘hen-pecked’).

Yet the ideal type was precisely that, an ideal whose power did not depend upon individual case histories. Instead, it appeared founded upon biology, tradition, culture, and, for those with committed religious views, divine will. One term for this set of attitudes is ‘patriarchy’, although this concept is not a timeless verity which stands outside history, as some argue.3  Yet the concept and its supporting social structures certainly had enough continuing plausibility for the idea of specialist roles and separate spheres to become convincing for many, including for those women who campaigned against the female franchise.

Eventually, however, the anti-suffragists – constituting both men and women who opposed ending the traditional male monopoly – lost the argument.4  At a guess, most of the female vote-deniers did in time hold their noses and exercise their new electoral rights. But such attitudes showed that ‘women’ were not and are not a single social category, speaking with one voice. They may be divided by age, wealth, social class, religion, ethnicity, politics, gender orientation, marital status, maternity or childlessness, and/or their attitudes towards feminism and to men. However, the case for women’s rights does not depend upon any need for unity or homogeneity. They participate as citizens, no more or less, sharing the range of concord and disagreements that are found within any body politic.

Today, the old arguments of the anti-suffragists are being repeated and updated by a very similar mixture of venom and ridicule on the part of the anti-feminists (both male and female), who flourish with vigour, especially on social media. They express themselves sometimes ironically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes with violent misogyny.

Detail from Thomas Rowlandson’s partly affectionate, partly brutal satire of an all-woman Bluestocking Club (1815) as an unbridled cat-fight.

The mix of backlash, uncertainty, and a confused sense of upheaval, indicates how fundamental are these long-unfolding changes in the respective roles of men and women – but also how ultimately flexible are social organisations. There are some crucial biological constants, like the fact that it is women (though not all women) who give birth to children. Yet the social arrangements for child rearing are not immutable over time. Things are not set in stone – but they don’t get transformed overnight either.

So, given that, any changes designed to help women to participate fully in political life should be matched by changes to relationships and the distribution of tasks within the household. The two ‘spheres’ are not separate, but integrally linked. If one variable is to be adapted, then the others have to adapt too. And the same applies to all areas of public and private life.
2016-04 No2 Despard and Women's Freedom League

Battersea’s Charlotte Despard, leading a march of the Women’s Freedom League (1907), campaigning for the vote with her fellow sisters, in company with a representative of the next generation, in the form of a decorously dressed young boy in the front row.

Lastly, it’s important for women to press for structural changes to help women. History needs a helping hand. And female solidarity is a good antidote to anti-feminism. At the same time, however, it’s best not to be too dogmatic about the merits of all women, simply because they are women. I’m sure that there’s no female consensus on the respective political ratings of Indira Gandhi; Margaret Thatcher; Angela Merkel; and Aung San Suu Kyi. Onwards; not always upwards; but still, yes, onwards.

1 M. Edgeworth, Helen (1834; in 1890 edn), p. 260.

2 See P.J. Corfield, ‘Women and Public Speaking’, Monthly BLOG/47 (Nov. 2014).

3 For rival perspectives, see G. Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford, 1986); J. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Manchester 2006); and S. Goldberg, Male Dominance: The Inevitability of Patriarchy (1979).

4 B.H. Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain (2013); A.M. Benjamin, A History of the Anti-Suffrage Movement in the United States, from 1895 to 1920: Women against Equality (Lewiston, 1991).

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