Enlisting Useful Idiots: The Ties between Online Harassment and Disinformation Articles and Essays

Online harassment has been a blind spot for major platforms for many years. The problem became mainstream with Gamergate in 2014, the first public reckoning with intimidation of women in the online gaming community. This problem is still plaguing social media, with progress being made in fits and starts after publicized incidents of bullying or silencing of minority voices. 1 However, the problem has grown beyond these applications to new harms. Online harassment has created serious policy, technical, and structural vulnerabilities that have been exploited by malign actors and gone largely unnoticed–or unprioritized-by defenders. Trolling has become the vocabulary and testing ground of digital authoritarians. Understanding how online harassment works is integral to combatting State-based disinformation and efforts to undermine faith in both democracy and the internet.2 This Article describes the threat posed by online harassment and then outlines how lessons learned from combatting online harassment can be used to counter a wide range of disinformation actors. To do this, the Article will define “digital authoritarians” to show how disinformation and online harassment are connected. It will then use two examples of online harassment to demonstrate how the phenomenon has been a continual problem for online platforms, using post-Gamergate examples. These stories show how harassment has grown more complex-allowing malign actors to go beyond intimidating individuals to targeting entire communities via systemic platform vulnerabilities. The weaknesses are created by missing or underenforced content moderation policies. While many articles and essays discuss the harm of online harassment, few scholars and advocates discuss the influence of harassment on elections or democracy in general. This Article concludes with three concrete suggestions of how industry can counter harassment-based disinformation and the targeting of vulnerable persons and groups. First, companies should commit to a risk-based allocation of resources. This is especially important when it comes to addressing harassment and disinformation. Second, companies should also follow best practices in other industries by conducting human rights impact assessments. Harassment should be included in the topics surveyed. And third, companies should take a systemic, and not a piecemeal, approach to online harassment by looking at behaviors instead of actors and content. If these are accomplished, online harassment can be taken out of the digital authoritarians’ toolbox as a means to influence elections, undermine democracy, and eliminate political criticswhich means it is more critical than ever to take online harassment seriously.