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As a follow-up to recent studies on sexism and harassment in STEM, researchers studied the Internet's reaction to the evidence those studies provided.

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Inside the soul-crushing world of content moderation, where low-wage laborers soak up the worst of humanity, and keep it off your Facebook feed.

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Hate Crimes in Cyberspace Danielle Keats Citron

Most Internet users are familiar with trolling—aggressive, foul-mouthed posts designed to elicit angry responses in a site’s comments. Less familiar but far more serious is the way some use networked technologies to target real people, subjecting them, by name and address, to vicious, often terrifying, online abuse. In an in-depth investigation of a problem that is too often trivialized by lawmakers and the media, Danielle Keats Citron exposes the startling extent of personal cyber-attacks and proposes practical, lawful ways to prevent and punish online harassment. A refutation of those who claim that these attacks are legal, or at least impossible to stop, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace reveals the serious emotional, professional, and financial harms incurred by victims. Persistent online attacks disproportionately target women and frequently include detailed fantasies of rape as well as reputation-ruining lies and sexually explicit photographs. And if dealing with a single attacker’s “revenge porn” were not enough, harassing posts that make their way onto social media sites often feed on one another, turning lone instigators into cyber-mobs. Hate Crimes in Cyberspace rejects the view of the Internet as an anarchic Wild West, where those who venture online must be thick-skinned enough to endure all manner of verbal assault in the name of free speech protection, no matter how distasteful or abusive. Cyber-harassment is a matter of civil rights law, Citron contends, and legal precedents as well as social norms of decency and civility must be leveraged to stop it.

HARDCOVER $29.95 • £22.95 • €27.00

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A number of conservative bloggers allege they have been targeted through the use of harassment tactics such as SWAT-ting (fooling 911 operators into sending emergency teams to their homes), in retaliation for posts they have written, and now Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., has stepped into the matter. He has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to investigate the SWAT-ting cases to see if federal laws have been violated. “I am writing with concern regarding recent reports that several members of the community of online political commentators have been targeted with harassing and frightening actions. Any potentially…

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In the nearly 25 years that EFF has been defending digital rights, our belief in the promise of the Internet has only grown stronger. The digital world frees users from many limits on communication and creativity that exist in the offline world. But it is also an environment that reflects the problems in wider society and grants them new dimensions. Harassment is one of those problems.

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I can’t begin to express how proud I am of ReedPop and New York Comic Con. These signs are EVERYWHERE.

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Later I learned that the first threat had nothing to do with what I actually made or said in my books, blog posts, articles, and conference presentations. The real problem — as my first harasser described — was that others were beginning to pay attention to me. He wrote as if mere exposure to my work was harming his world. But here’s the key: it turned out he wasn’t outraged about my work. His rage was because, in his mind, my work didn’t deserve the attention. Spoiler alert: “deserve” and “attention” are at the heart. A year later, I wrote a light-hearted article about “haters” (the quotes matter) and something I called The Koolaid Point. It wasn’t about harassment, abuse, or threats against people but about the kind of brand “trolls” you find in, say, Apple discussion forums. My wildly non-scientific theory was this: the most vocal trolling and “hate” for a brand kicks in HARD once a critical mass of brand fans/users are thought to have “drunk the Koolaid”. In other words, the hate wasn’t so much about the product/brand but that other people were falling for it. I was delighted, a few weeks’ later, to see my little “Koolaid Point” in Wired’s Jargon Watch column. The me of 2005 had no idea what was coming. Less than two years later, I’d learn that my festive take on harmless brand trolling also applied to people. And it wasn’t festive. Or harmless. Especially for women.

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Being a part of a counter-cultural community like alt lit, atheism or gaming does not give you a pass on misogyny.

Powerful article, spelling out something that obviously needs spelling out, at least for some men. Men who define themselves primarily against other men are by no means immune from being awful to women - and in fact (as the grim examples in this piece show) will find different ways to police women, in the apparent knowledge that maintaining the identity of the in-group will usually prove more important than ensuring the safety of people within it.

(And this is also, obviously, true of men - and let’s face it, I am one of these men - who enjoy feeling on some level more virtuous/humane/smart etc than alt-bros, tech-bros, dawk-bros etc. Negative self-definition is probably inevitable, even useful and healthy to some degree, but in itself it doesn’t make you a better person to the people around you.)

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Next Generation Spacesuit like Second Skin

Scientists from MIT have designed a next-generation spacesuit that acts practically as a second skin, and could revolutionize the way future astronauts travel into space. (Photo : Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT)

Astronauts are used to climbing into conventional bulky, gas-pressurized spacesuits, but this new design could allow them to travel in style. Soon they may don a lightweight, skintight and stretchy garment lined with tiny, muscle-like coils. Essentially the new suit acts like a giant piece of shrink-wrap, in which the coils contract and tighten when plugged into a power supply, thereby creating a “second skin.”

"With conventional spacesuits, you’re essentially in a balloon of gas that’s providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere [of pressure,] to keep you alive in the vacuum of space," lead researcher Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, said in astatement.

"We want to achieve that same pressurization, but through mechanical counterpressure - applying the pressure directly to the skin, thus avoiding the gas pressure altogether. We combine passive elastics with active materials. … Ultimately, the big advantage is mobility, and a very lightweight suit for planetary exploration."

Newman, who has worked for the past decade on a design for the next-generation spacesuit, describes the new garment in detail in the journal IEEE/ASME: Transactions on Mechatronics.

The MIT BioSuit’s coils, which are a main feature of the outfit, are made from a shape-memory alloy (SMA). At a certain temperature, the material can “remember” and spring back to its engineered shape after being bent or misshapen.

Skintight suits are not a novel idea, but in the past scientists have always struggled with the question: how do you get in and out of a suit that is so tight? That’s where the SMAs come in, allowing the suit to contract only when heated, and subsequently stretched back to a looser shape when cooled.

Though the lightweight suit may not seem at first like it can withstand the harsh environment that is outer space, Newman and his colleagues are sure that the BioSuit would not only give astronauts much more freedom during planetary exploration, but it would also fully support these space explorers.

Newman and his team are not only working on how to keep the suit tight for long periods of time, but also believe their design could be applied to other attires, such as athletic wear or military uniforms.

"An integrated suit is exciting to think about to enhance human performance," Newman added. "We’re trying to keep our astronauts alive, safe, and mobile, but these designs are not just for use in space."

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If women are the cookies of the Internet, then, they’re cookies that men never feel like they can’t have. Even the tersest of responses on OKCupid is still giving an aggressive user exactly what he wants: interaction. Men’s enjoyment of women—of their bodies, their words, and even their distress—is often so thorough and so adaptable that posting their messages or threatening to call out their behavior online has little to no effect. In the absence of meaningful consequences for misogynistic behavior, many men can afford to be cavalier and carefree about their online personas.

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Just want to say this to have said it

I just wrote something like this in an email to friends who told me the latest (I’m off twitter), which is apparently that Ed Champion made a suicidal gesture and is in Bellevue (not confirmed.)

I have a hard time even talking about how terrible the week that he published that rant was for me. A lot of people have tried to tell me that the net effect was positive for my book, but it put me in a position of talking about that rant instead of talking about the book. I hate that. I hate that that happened. I’ll never get that week or month or set of opportunities back; he poisoned them all. The worst part is that as cartoonishly evil and misogynistic and mentally ill as he is, there are still people who are like “well, it was a book review.” “Critics are allowed to call someone a bad writer.” Or worse, that it was a “subtweet war” or a “literary feud.” It was none of those things. It was an attack on women, meant to make us feel threatened and fundamentally unsafe in the online and physical spaces we inhabit. It is so bonkers that we even have to point that out or defend that point of view still, now, in 2014.

I felt fear doing events around publication. Not stage fright, fear for my physical safety. Instead of planning celebrations I was arranging with bookstores and my publisher for adequate security at events. I felt worried that the location of my apartment had been revealed in so many profiles. It’s not like I experienced physical trauma or was tortured but I felt under attack. This wasn’t something that “happened on the internet” or something that could have been avoided by “just unplugging.” Talking to readers, doing events, and promoting books online is my job.

I still haven’t sorted out what kind of damage was done. 

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15 Of The Most Empowering Things Emma Watson Has Ever Said

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Goodbye, Ello: Privacy, Safety, and Why Ello Makes Me More Vulnerable to My Abusers and Harassers

I originally wrote this as my goodbye post on Ello, a new social network that has taken my queer/POC/performer/activist circles by storm due to Facebook’s crackdown on names. Feel free to share.

I know many of you joined Ello due to Facebook’s real name policy, which has shown to be a great risk to performers, trans people, and others who do not reveal their legal name for security or personal identity reasons. And everyone’s super fond of Ello now because they promise not to sell your information to advertisers.

However, there are specific elements of Ello’s privacy settings, deliberately designed, that make Ello actually way more unsafe than Facebook, Twitter, or other social media outlets and CMSes. And in our rush to embrace a Facebook replacement we need to be aware of what we are at risk for when using Ello.

Ello deliberately does not have any sort of personal privacy settings, and it does not have any sort of features to block or report individuals, nor any way to consent to being followed.

According to Ello’s @wtf section on privacy:

Ello is a platform built for posting and sharing public content. You should assume that anything you post on Ello other than private messages will be accessed by others. Search engines will be able to see the content you post. Content you post may be copied, shared, or re-posted on Ello and on other parts of the internet in ways that you and we cannot control.

Their feature list does have an upcoming entry about reporting inappropriate content, but nothing about inappropriate people. And yes, so far it’s invite-only, but invites are flowing so fast that it’s actually breaking Ello servers. And once you are in the system, everyone’s accounts are at your disposal.

Whether they want you to find out or not.

I do not have my legal name on Facebook, or most other sites, mostly because I have had trouble with relatives finding me and spreading rumours. (Also I don’t want to be too easily found by the Malaysian government and be charged with sedition.) However, privacy filters and blocking settings on most other social media help me mitigate the most of this.

Even so, having my legal name on Facebook (or even other sites like Twitter or Tumblr), is less of a problem for me than having no option to filter my content or block/report specific people.

Because the people I most want to avoid know my aliases. They are friends with people I know on Ello. They might already be on Ello (I’d be surprised if they weren’t) and are totally open to following me, reading me, tagging me, commenting on my posts. Hell, they can even find me through our mutual friends - any mutual activity pops up on their Friends feed.

And, by the way Ello is currently set up, there is nothing I can do about it.

I already have had specific posts of mine on social media - even carefully filtered or private material - spun into false accusations that affect my personal and professional reputation. I have no illusions about any of my content being totally private; I’m already a pretty open book. But at least on other places I can do something about it.

On Facebook, Twitter (if made private), and LinkedIn, I can approve or deny friends and followers.  On Ello anyone can follow me, with or without my consent, and I have no way of knowing whether I am a Friend or Noise.

On Facebook and Flickr I can set differing privacy levels - making posts only viewable to certain groups of people, excluding specific people entirely, or making some posts visible to only me. (On Twitter I can make my entire timeline private.) On Ello, if you can get on Ello itself, you can read anything. (And according to Ello’s “privacy” statement, so could the world.)

On almost all other social media avenues, and even on blogs and CMSes, I can block specific people, or report their profiles for abuse, or find some way of identifying them (such as an IP address) so I can bring the matter up with a different authority. On Ello I cannot do any of that, leaving me vulnerable.

There’s probably more, if I gave it more thought. But what I’ve found disturbs me enough already to compel me to leave Ello.

I don’t mind companies selling to me. They never really get my details right anyway. But marketing doesn’t usually try to ruin my career, or spread personal rumours about me, or harass me about my race or gender or sexuality.

People do.  People in my specific social circles, many of whom have jumped onto Ello as their next Facebook replacement. People for whom it’s trivial to use social engineering, or even just paying attention, to find me and make trouble for me.

It’s already happened anyway, and that’s with careful security measures. Here? What security?

Many of my abusers, stalkers, harassers, and general trouble makers come from similar social and professional circles to me. Some of them get protection due to their status. Others get protection because no matter how much I speak up about them, no one else is willing or interested in doing anything about it. (Or sometimes they try and they become the new target for abuse.)

Now that many of these specific social circles are signing up for Ello, I have become way more wide open for their harm. And, between the stats about abusers generally being people that you know or know of, and the fact that anybody can read you and add you on Ello without you being able to do much about it, this becomes a huge and more immediate safety risk.

Way more than having my legal name published online. It’s already out there anyway.

I will leave this post up here, but unless something drastically changes with Ello’s privacy policies, I am not likely to return. Especially not as a Facebook replacement, since I get pretty personal on there.

So Ello, I know it’s only been 2 days, but this is Goodbye.

[[I would like to thank Lynn Cyrin, whose comment on consent in social networks on Twitter made me really think about this. I would also like to give a shoutout to Doug, who is/was a Facebook friend of another friend, who had brought up privacy concerns but got immediately shouted down by everyone else because “hey, they don’t sell our data to companies!!”

Feel free to share, tag me or don’t tag me or make me anonymous or say you said it, doesn’t matter.]]

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Emma Sulkowicz, who will not put her mattress down until her alleged rapist is expelled, is its new public face.

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Editor's Note: A few weeks ago our message board and general inbox were bombarded with demands we address something called the "GamerGate Scandal", posts written with the urgency and rage one would associate with, say, discovering that Chipotle burritos are made entirely from the meat of human babies. It's apparently a big deal in some circles, so we followed the links and read the piles of data presented, and had to stop and take a deep breath just to grasp it all. "Gentlemen," we said amid the stunned silence, "do you realize that if what they're saying is true, then this is still the most pointless fucking bullshit anyone has ever forced us to read?" The "scandal" turned out to be an excuse for an Internet harassment campaign against a random indie game developer who, like many such targets, was a female and a feminist.

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Darrien Hunt shooting demonstrates the hostility underlying cosplayer harassment

A young black guy named Darrien Hunt was shot and killed by cops in Utah last week because he was carrying a prop sword.

Several commentators have pointed out that there was a convention there that week and the clothes Hunt was wearing appear to be a cosplay outfit.

Y'all, I've been hyper-aware of young black men getting shot by white law enforcement since Trayvon Martin, but this in particular gets to me. It feels personal. You know I care about cosplayers and their safety, but let me re-emphasize why:

Aggression against cosplayers isn't really about the costumes they're wearing -- that's just an excuse. It's about a fundamental lack of respect for the person in the costume, whether it's because they're female or a POC or just overweight. It's a way of saying "It doesn't matter how you dress, you can never be a person."

And that's unacceptable.