At PAX East 2014, I gave a talk with Depression Quest designer Zoe Quinn about discourse on the Internet. I gave an updated, reworked version of my TEDx talk (for example, I no longer had to worry about explaining every detail about a video game before using one as an example), and recently remembered all of the text is on my laptop.
Since not everyone has time for an hourlong panel, I decided to publish the text and slides from my talk: “Why the Internet Jerks Aren’t Going to Win, And You Can Help.” Hope you enjoy it! I don’t have any other talks scheduled for the immediate future, but I’ve enjoyed my opportunities in the last year or so. Hopefully that won’t be my last time up on stage.
Hi, everyone! Thanks for coming. We only have an hour, and we’re going to try and use it as effectively as possible. We’re gathered here today to discuss a thing called the Internet. More specifically, we’re here to discuss how we act on the Internet. I’m joined today by Depression Quest designer Zoe Quinn. I’m about to launch into a roughly 20-minute talk, which will then be followed by Zoe’s own presentation for about another 20 minutes. After that, we’ll open the floor to questions.
As of today, I have nearly 53,000 followers on Twitter. It’s not Jeff Gerstmann numbers but it’s nothing to sneeze at. For the past three years, I’ve been the news editor at Giant Bomb, a game website where there’s just as much focus on the people talking about the games as there is on the games. Because we’re front and center, people have pretty strong feelings about each of us. Those feelings aren’t, uh, always positive. I’m going to share a few examples of what I mean by this, and I should be explicit in telling you that there is some deeply troubling language ahead.
I don’t show this to shock you or to make everyone suddenly feel bad for me. I have a super cool job I love very much. I show this to make you understand some of what I see every day.
And it’s not just me. I’m just the one that gets to come up on stage and talk about it.
Everyone doesn’t have to like me, I accept that. And I’m in a position different than most, being a visible public figure that often finds himself talking about subjects that incite passionate debate.
Most are not public figures. Most of you aren’t. If I complain about the way I’m being harassed, there are thousands of people ready to pet my ego and let me know it’s okay. Everyone else is supposed to put up with it or ultimately give up on trying to have a public conversation at all.
That sucks.
What I showed you isn’t passionate debate, it’s bullying. It’s enough to make a person want to stop doing this entirely. It’s enough to make a person wonder why any of this is worth the time and effort. But I also know this is not 99% of any audience. It is a small but very, very vocal 1%.
This may not represent most of the audience, and it probably doesn’t represent the people in this audience today, but it certainly can feel that way on a bad day. We need to talk about this because we need to make sure people know it’s happening. I’m equipped to deal with this because, unfortunately, it’s part of my job, even if dealing with jerks can’t go on my resume.
If this is the kind of response I’m getting, you can imagine why others would stay quiet. Who wants to put up with harassment? People often tell me they choose to not speak up on these topics because of responses like this. It’s too much. It would ruin their day. I can’t blame them.
School didn’t teach me how to handle thousands of people screaming at you at once. There’s no manual for conducting yourself on the Internet.
I’m not saying we need to make every comments section a wonderful place. That’s not viable. But avoiding comments sections and places like it reflect how we’ve given control of Internet discourse to a certain kind of person. I don’t think we have to accept that. I think you can help.
A PEW poll from last September found that 25% of responders confessed to having posted an anonymous comment. 49% said they have used their real name at some point. 47% said they, instead, used a screen name.
The nature of anonymity is interesting, too. Removing anonymity is not a clear cut solution to the problem. We are more likely to share ideas and thoughts through private channels than we do in real-life. Psychologist John Suler coined this phenomenon the “online disinhibition effect.”
"This disinhibition can work in two seemingly opposing directions. Sometimes people share very personal things about themselves. They reveal secret emotions, fears, wishes. They show unusual acts of kindness and generosity, sometimes going out of their way to help others. We may call this benign disinhibition.
However, the disinhibition is not always so salutary. We witness rude language, harsh criticisms, anger, hatred, even threats. We may call this toxic disinhibition.”
So people should have the option to comment anonymously. It allows us to share ideas without having them permanently attached to our name. Ideas develop, grow, and change. That’s the beauty of conversation, and what’s lovely about being anonymous. When I write an article, my first draft isn’t the one that’s published. When a game is being developed, the first prototype isn’t what you play. Others ideas are the same way, and anonymity lets us experiment with ideas.
But it can also be abused, and it means we can’t hold people accountable for abusing it.
I love that 4chan exists, even if it’s not for me. As we de-anonymize the Internet, there should be places for people to behave without having having to look over shoulder. The Internet started as a dirty, carefree place, and we still need some grime. I should be careful how many times I say it, too. Sometimes it feels a bit like Candyman. If you say 4chan three times into a mirror, well…
It’s not really about anonymity, though. It’s about responsibility. Remember Flappy Bird? In short, the creator of the game announced he was removing the game from the App Store. People were pissed, and took to Twitter to specifically yell awful things at him. This isn’t one or two nasty messages, which is what I have to deal with. We’re talking thousands and thousands all at once.
This is what what social psychologists call a “diffusion of responsibility.”
"A person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present. The phenomenon tends to occur in groups of people above a certain critical size and when responsibility is not explicitly assigned. It rarely occurs when the person is alone and diffusion increases with groups of three or more."
This happens all the time, and it’s hardly exclusive to games. Pretty much everything I’m talking about today isn’t a game culture problem. It’s an Internet culture problem, and it’s why lifting the veil of anonymity isn’t a one-stop solution. People act like this with their names. But people don’t feel especially responsible for their words on Twitter or elsewhere. So they speak…very freely.
On my blog, I posted a conversation I had with one person who Twitter-yelled at the Flappy Bird creator. 140 characters isn’t a great way to have a nuanced exchange of ideas. He didn’t like the way I’d characterized his statement on Twitter, which I’ll briefly paraphrase as telling the creator to “go kill himself.” He wanted an opportunity to defend his actions, and I asked him if I could publish the exchange. He agreed, and then spent thousands of words justifying why he told someone to kill themselves and it was okay. Here are a few selections from that conversation:
"Well, I don’t view it as entirely violent. Maybe he could use potassium cyanide and a bottle of Ambien. It was just a suggestion to end his own life so that the earth might be spared his insufferable and stubborn existence."
"If someone is so weak of will, so volatile of temperament, so easily influenced by the slightest whisper that they take their own life because of something I typed in one second on the other side of the earth, then perhaps they’re doing all of us a favor by eliminating their obviously flawed genes from the pool.”
Here is the most important—and most revealing—line of the exchange:
"Why do I choose to remind them in such an abrasive way? I feel powerless and I take my frustrations out on others.”
This goes on for a long time—thousands of words. Eventually, I hadn’t gotten back to him for a few days, and another email popped up in my inbox. The last thing I expected was an apology:
"My tweet was overly harsh, and could have made a fragile ego like Nguyen’s crack apart. Fortunately, and to be quite honest, I doubt it had any effect on him at all and was lost in the din of comments he received that day. But it could have. I’ve left behind my more destructive habits in real life, and perhaps it’s time to leave them on the internet as well. The line between them is becoming blurred whether I like it or not, and it’s past time I respected that.”
Look, I’m not gonna say that asking every person to explain their actions results in a come-to-Internet-jesus moment. But there is a lesson that applies to every single one of us: there is someone on the other side of that computer, tablet, or phone. They might not read your comment, but they might. They might not take your comment seriously, but they might. That small chance is reason enough to tread lightly. Speak your opinion, but speak thoughtfully.
Much of this talk has, so far, focused on other bad apples. But it’s important to remember that we’re all prone to making these mistakes, and it’s not just about the people shouting hate speech. They’re easy targets. What I’m trying to say is that I’m guilty of being a jerk, too.
There’s this service called AdBlock. AdBlock is used by millions and millions around the world to circumvent advertising on the Internet. Some people use it for legitimate security concerns, some people use it because they don’t think the ad model works anymore. A few months back, AdBlock was raising money to buy ads to promote its services. For right now, let’s ignore the irony of an ad blocking service raising money to buy ads. But as someone deeply concerned with finding ways to make money creating Internet content, AdBlock debates get me fired up.
Here’s where I messed up. A Twitter user asked me this:
You might think someone giving a talk like this would provided a rational, reasoned response. You would be very wrong! Instead, this person (me!) would decide to get flippant on his first cup of coffee and declare the people that he needs to support him should—and I quote—”die in a fire.”
I don’t recommend telling 53,000 fans to die in a fire, by the way. The comment upset people, and they had every right to be. I painted people with a broad brush, and used hyperbole to make myself feel better. I’d done the very thing that I’m here on this stage to condemn. I’m a hypocrite.
One of my favorite Twitter accounts is called @AvoidComments. Its tagline: “This will tweet periodic reminders to not read the comments sections for, well, pretty much anything, ever.”
He has a point.
But I try to think this way most of the time.
Yeah, I do. I’m not comfortable giving up on the greatest, most accessible communication tools ever made. I’m not saying everything’s going to be clean and we’re all going to agree, but to simply give up on parts of the Internet because it’s currently bad seems like the wrong attitude.
I want my ideas questioned, my preconceived notions challenged. None of this will happen if we decide to sneak into our private corners of the Internet and only talk to people who agree with us.
Here’s a good example from just last week. Artist Elizabeth Simins and The Colbert Report writer Rob Dubbin expressed they were uncomfortable with the nazi-like imagery found in Vlambeer’s Luftrausers. The two of them thoughtfully explained their position on Twitter:
This is called criticism. It’s well-articulated criticism. I’m not jewish, so even though I don’t have much of a problem with the imagery in Luftrausers, I respect Simins and Dubbin are coming at this from a very different life perspective. I hear they scientists call this phenomenon “empathy.”
They don’t ask for Vlambeer to change the way Luftrausers looks, only raising the question about whether its aesthetic could be seen as leveraging nazi imagery in a way that’s been glossed over because the game is so damn fun to play. (Which it is.) it’s especially important to be critical of that which we love. That’s often the hardest because we are typically blind to it.
Vlambeer didn’t have to respond to this, but they did:
"We do have to accept that our game could make some people uncomfortable. We’re extremely sad about that, and we sincerely apologise for that discomfort. The fact is that no interpretation of a game is ‘wrong’. When you create something, you leave certain implications of what you’re making. If we accept there’s no wrong interpretation of a work, we also have to accept that some of those interpretations could not be along the lines of what we’re trying to create."
Ismail then spent several hundred words explaining why Luftrausers is the way it is. It is unlikely Luftrausers will undergo any major aesthetic change as a result of what Simins and Dubbin said, but the conclusion of this exchange brings a better understanding of what Vlambeer intended by creating Luftrausers. No one has to agree with either side, but our understanding of Luftrausers’ place in game culture was deepened. No one told one another to screw off. Everyone won.
This isn’t normal, but how do we encourage more of this? That’s the really tough question.
There was a study last August where a thousand participants read a blog post. This post was fake. It had to do with particles having health benefits or something. This post had fictional comments. Half of the participants read comments that calmly discussed pros and con. Half of the participants read “rude” comments with epithets, swear words, and other forms of nastiness.
“If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you’re an idiot”
The results were surprising. Those that read the “civil” comments came out of the story with an opinion very similar to the one they held after reading the story. Those that read the “rude” comments, however, reported a much more polarized opinion about the effects of the particles. This means what we read below articles and videos are directly influencing our interpretation of the source material itself.
This is an article about “science.” It gets much messier much faster when we’re talking about Hideo Kojima’s decision to hide a bomb inside a woman’s private parts during Ground Zeroes.
Some websites have turned to Facebook, figuring removing the veil of anonymity would force people to better consider their remarks. The Escapist, BuzzFeed, ESPN are a few such places. But it mostly just bums you out to see people acting inappropriately while now holding their child.
The longrunning publication Popular Science decided to turn off comments entirely.
YouTube is turning to robotic automation. Certain words can be blocked, while posts by content creators and established personalities will have a bigger voice, and move higher up on the page.
We may be able to take lessons from how games themselves are handling similar problems.
In League of Legends, developer Riot Games has been running all kinds of crazy experiments. For example, all player chat used to be on by default. The result was that more than 80% of the chatting was characterized as “extremely negative.” Only 8.7% was considered positive. When the chat became opt-in, negative chat decreased by 32.7% and positive chat went up by 34.5%.
Basically, by removing the chat and making it a one-step process to engage, there was less negativity. There might be something to learn there about the comment sections on websites.
Perhaps even crazier, and slightly creepier, is what happened when they played with colors. Riot dubbed this the “optimus experiment.” Riot hasn’t shared much of that study, but they did share one fact. A red message about negative behavior during the game’s loading screen prompted a larger decrease in negative player behavior than the same message when it was white. A message encouraging positive behavior saw an observable change in behavior when the message was in blue, but saw no change when the message was white.
When I encounter what I’ve been talking about today, it’s usually about games. I take games seriously—way too seriously—but it’s still a medium largely about abstraction. It’s not my family.
On July 3, 2012, I received a phone call from my brother, a phone call I had apparently missed more than 20 times before I finally walked back to my desk and noticed it.
As it turns out, my father had died of a sudden heart attack at 56-years-old. My father had, has, and will be my biggest supporter, even if he often had no idea what I did for a living. When he passed, I was only a few short weeks from getting married. He just missed it.
I waited 24 hours before sharing this news on Twitter. Much of my life is on the Internet, and the idea of not sharing this big news seemed strange. So I did, and then I turned off my phone.
When I turned it back on, some of the messages were unsettling. I wasn’t prepared to tweet a picture of a bonfire, and have someone ask if we were burning my father’s body. I wasn’t prepared for someone to tell me they were glad my father passed away, since it meant I wasn’t an active part of my job for a few weeks.
My father’s passing was the first time I was forced to face the realities of death outside of a horror movie, while also realizing how quickly some people will use an opportunity to hurt you.
At the same time, the Giant Bomb community started a thread with well wishes about my work and anonymous comments about my father, a person none of them had ever met. There were hundreds of messages. I kept that thread bookmarked on my phone during the first week of my father’s passing, and would often head into the bathroom, page through the thread, not really reading anything, and cry. It was a showing of genuine compassion by a group of people who only knew me from what I put out there. When I needed them, these people had my back.
99% of the Internet has been nothing but nice to me. It’s so, so easy to focus on that 1%.
But whenever someone gets under my skin, I reach into my bag. Tucked into a pocket are a series of letters, private thoughts from people who have reached out over the years.
Why do those letters mean something to me? Those people reached out and connected. It’s important to remind yourself of the good in the world, of the surprising kindness of strangers.
Twitter can be a negative place. Comments can be a negative place. But there’s hope. We can use these tools to connect.
In the games industry, women used the #1reasonwhy hashtag to explain “one reason why” more women aren’t making video games. It was a powerful adoption of a tool usually assigned to the corners of TV commercials. But here, it was an outlet, a lifeline, a way for someone feeling marginalized to read thousands of messages: you are not alone.
How can you help? Speak up. I don’t mean you should shout down others, but speak up. Most of us are the silent majority, the huge numbers of Internet users who are nice and reasonable. Think of the way most of us use Yelp. If we have a bad experience at a restaurant, we’ll probably write a negative review. If we have a good experience at a restaurant, chances are we won’t do anything at all. That’s how we treat everything, and it’s something we can change.
If you appreciate what someone had to say, tell them. If you liked someone’s game, tell them.
We may not be able to eliminate the toxicity, but we can increase the amount of positivity.
We can’t control what others do. We can only control what we do. It’s very easy to sit on the sidelines, laugh at how the Internet has become a cesspool of discourse, and throw up your hands. What can one person do? One person can’t hold back a hurricane, but everything starts with a single person. We can make it socially unacceptable to treat others without respect on the Internet. We can reach out when someone is being bullied just for saying something new. The next time I want to tell someone to die in a fire just because they disagree with me, I won’t.
We can’t stop everything terrible on the Internet and we’re never going to agree on everything, but is the alternative giving up a conversation with a stranger, with someone I’ll never meet, with someone who surprises me? I won’t concede something so powerful to such a vocal minority.
The Internet is a tool that can connect us and tear us apart. It’s also a reflection of us. Right now, the reflection is pretty ugly.
Together, we can turn the Internet into a more positive place. Together, we can give people the strength to speak up. Together, we can make the Internet a safe place to share radical ideas.
Speak. Up. Because if you won’t, who will?
Thank you.