Meet Jeffrey Marty. He’s a 40 year old lawyer in Florida who uses Twitter to write hateful comments about (mainly) Hillary Clinton and Black Lives Matter activists. The reason he does so is instructive:
“I was totally ruined when I started this (his Twitter account)” he told Time magazine this summer. “My ex-wife and I had just separated. She decided to start a new, more exciting life without me” Shortly after his wife left him, his best friend killed himself. Now he has an illness that confines him to his house.
Marty gets a sense of confidence, validation and empowerment by using an anonymous account to spew hatred. “Let’s say I wrote a letter to the New York Times saying I didn’t like your article about Trump. They throw it in the shredder” he says. “On Twitter I have 1.5 million views of my tweets every 28 days”. Marty says he is addicted to the attention he receives for his tweets.
This Summer the actress Leslie Jones was the victim of a coordinated social media campaign unprecedented in its grotesque horror. Her appearance, her gender and her race were all written about in terms that would make you shudder.
When Leslie Jones went public with the nature and extent of her atrocious abuse, the story was covered in some detail by most media outlets.
Those who were behind the abuse were able to rejoice, and loudly so, in their “victory”. They had reduced Leslie Jones to tear;, their actions had become a major news story. They had muscled their way onto the news agenda using language, that in the real world, would only serve to get them arrested and charged.
On Monday, the Irish Times Courts Correspondent Mary Carolan wrote about how she received a letter from a reader called “Paddy” hoping that she would be “gang-raped from men from another country”. The letter also included a lewd, racist stereotype. This was in response to Carolan writing an opinion piece about multiculturalism in Ireland.
As with the Leslie Jones story, is there another argument here? That by drawing attention to an anonymous threat of criminal sexual violence this was “negatively rewarding” the sender of the message (with the attention he by no means deserves) and “amplifying” (widely sharing) his behaviour.
It would matter not a jot to our anonymous hero that Carolan crushed him with the power of her pen. But it opens up a divide about how we manage and deal with behaviour which, depressingly, has become commonplace.
Some years ago I had to interview some of these anonymous heroes who specialise in flinging hate and threats of violence against people. They were in the main: male, very depressed, very lonely, bitterly resentful, toxic, unemployed and unemployable inadequates who had only one thing going for them: getting an audience and a dysfunctional “reward” for their poisonous hatred.
Academic Whitney Phillips is a leading world expert on trolling and harassment. She has written about the “ethics of amplification”, saying: “Commenting perpetuates the disgusting narrative and associated imagery. The question being, what’s the ethical way not just for journalists and academics to respond, but for individuals as well?”
In her book, “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” she writes “the primary reason that so many people engage in outrageous, exploitative, aggressive and damaging behaviours on the internet is that outrageous, exploitative, aggressive and damaging behaviours on the internet get the most attention. Attention means amplification. Which means more eyeballs glued to a story - and to that person’s hatefulness and delusions”.
This is a live issue. We live in a world where a 14 year old posting a picture of her birthday party is met with the remark “Your acne is disgusting, you should kill yourself”. A world where a woman expressing an opinion (any opinion) has her 5 year old child being threatened with rape.
People were being horrifically abused and threatened with violence yesterday, it is happening in equal amounts today and will be happening again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
“People engage in atrocious behaviour because it’s worth their time and energy to do so” says Whitney Phillips. How then to not make it worth their time and energy? Withdraw the negative reward and cease the amplification?
There is a bind here. People are entitled to relate their experiences but by so doing, this can’t but amplify the story; even a retweet in order to condemn is paradoxically furthering the message in some sense.
In order not to incentives such behaviour, Phillips told Vice magazine: “the way this works is, there’s an immediate reaction and then a flurry of think pieces and news coverage. The ideal is we don’t create a space, a circumstance in which these behaviours are so effective for the people engaging in them. By not reporting on what’s happening, by not condemning what’s happening, you risk almost seeming complicit, like it’s not worth mentioning. It’s a fine line between explaining what happened to condemn something and incentivising further behaviours”.
It is in many ways the old “oxygen of publicity” argument.
But the problem is deeper than this. In 2009, a 17 year old shot dead 16 young people at a school in Germany. News footage of the incident made it look like it was the opening credits to an episode of Starsky and Hutch.
Interviewed on BBC’s Newsnight programme about how the horrific story was reported, the Forensic Psychiatrist, Dr Park Dietz, made the following points:
“I have repeatedly told the mass media that if you don’t want to propagate more mass murders, don’t start the story with sirens blaring, don’t have photos of the killer, do not make the killer some kind of anti-hero. Because every time we have intense saturation coverage of a mass murder we expect to see one or two more within weeks”.
Now, more than ever, the media economy privileges metrics.
But we have to remember Henry Jenkin’s dictum: if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.