 So, hi everybody. This has been a great weekend, hasn't it been, right? Yeah! I was just talking to Richard about how I feel like every year we build upon the work that we do in the previous year and this just, it just gets better, better and better. And there's just been so many wonderful people here this weekend, it's been so productive and I feel like the Wikipedia community like both online and in person is just getting increasingly diverse, it's really, really inspiring. So many of us have met here today, connected and we've shared all of the wonderful work that we're doing with each other and the local chapter and the organizers here have done such a tremendous job. I'm really, really grateful to them. And also, you know, the National Archives, you know, the relationships that they've built here with institutions like the National Archives, it's just really, really promising that going forward. And I think that also throughout this weekend there have been so many conversations here about the people working on things like the gender gap problem and also people sharing strategies for dealing with some of the inevitable bad behavior that one encounters when working on online spaces like Wikipedia. And you know, much of this is due to the fact that Wikipedia, it's not isolated from what Professor Citron has referred to as the online subcultures of misogyny. And what she will be talking to us today is unfortunately really familiar, I think, to a number of us, you know, sitting here. Danielle Citron is the Professor of Law at the University of Maryland, France's King Kerry School of Law. And she's done a tremendous amount of key work analyzing and writing about internet law, information privacy and civil rights. Her book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace was published by Harvard University Press in 2014 and it explores how the law can be used to combat these abuses. And rather than harness freedoms online, it can be used to support more openness, more inclusivity and more participation. Professor Citron calls her attention to how dismissive and trivializing attitudes about online harassment are similar to those that were said about sexual harassment in the workplace and domestic violence. And she calls on all of us to work on these problems as 21st century civil rights issues. We can make the culture of Wikipedia not one shaped by misogyny, but one shaped by equality. Please join me in welcoming Professor Danielle Citron. It's terrific to be here. I was saying to someone earlier on like I wanted everyone to move up, but no, this is just right. I can see everyone. So it's terrific to be here, especially given that your community is self-policing. And so much, I think, we always look to, at least everyone who's not a lawyer, looks to lawyers, folks in tech to say, law, you fix it, right? And lawyers always say like we want the CS or computer scientists, we want the technologists to fix a lot of our problems, right? We're all pointing at each other. But I think you are all engaged in the process of sort of sorting through what your norms are on your site. So I'm excited to be here to talk to you about my book, which focuses on the problem of online harassment and stalking. And what's really interesting is I started this project, I would say, about seven years ago, not the book, but just working on the issue when Kathy Sierra was first targeted online. And at the time when I was, and I'm sure everybody knows who Kathy Sierra is, right, like the technologist. No? Really? Okay. I love that. All right. So Kathy, she is a technologist who had a blog called Creating Passionate Users. And at the time, like in 2004 to 2007, I think it was in the top, like, 50 top blogs or most sort of traffic at the time. And she was kind of a trailblazer in her own right. She's written books on Java and had a code, I mean, completely uncontroversial. That is what she's writing about was how do we code and how can we make people happy, you know, in creating software? And she was targeted on her blog in the comments and also an email that was sent to her as well as group blogs. So rape and death threats, really graphic on her own blog and then in email sent to her. On group blogs, her face appeared in a doctored photograph and was shown as a noose beside her neck. And commenters wrote, the only thing Kathy Sierra is good for is her neck size. And in another photograph, she's very distinctive, like, beautiful blonde woman and you see her face and it's covered by, she looks like she's being suffocated by lingerie. Now at the time, she was supposed to give a talk. This all happened in a two week period, kind of this perfect storm of what she understood as anonymous abuse. She had no idea who was coming from. She canceled her talk at a tech conference in San Francisco and she blogged about it. She said, look, I'm terrified. I'm afraid to go to this conference. I've gone to the Colorado police where she lived in Boulder and shockingly they took her seriously, which is a struggle even now, right? And they said, don't leave your house. Don't do anything. And when the press wrote about her reaction and what was going on, a sort of second wave of abuse followed led by people like Weave and others at 4chan who said, stop whining, Kathy Sierra. And so they docked her, spread her social security number all over the internet, her home, all of her personal contact information, like a narrative that was fabricated about her life and career. And she just got offline and she really hasn't blogged since. And so sort of Kathy's sort of struggle and story. She's sort of one of the main three people I talk about in my book, but she's emblematic of so many people who experience online stalking. And at the time when I first started, so this is when I started talking about Kathy Sierra, we got me off my sort of script or whatever. The idea that we would bring law to bear against threats, privacy invasions like the spreading of social security numbers that can aid and abet identity theft, defamation. The idea that we would bring law to bear against it was, I was told I was gonna break the internet, right? The idea that we could regulate some of this behavior, which criminal tortuous and as I sort of contend, the civil rights violation was really heretical to suggest. And I was totally out of the mainstream. I was told like I wanna break the First Amendment. And what's interesting is seven years later, right? This is completely, not only is it not heretical to suggest that we should bring law to bear against the worst abuses, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my friends put up a post in January that says, they said, we agree. This is a digital rights problem. That is, the victims have a right to speak and express themselves. And this sort of like threats and privacy invasions and defamation are preventing them from expressing themselves. And that was kind of a moment for me. I have to say I was like, my goodness. Like I went from being an awful all idea that this abuse is unacceptable to being something that civil rights liberties, civil liberties organization were agreeing with and said, yes. This is a problem of both civil rights and civil liberties, right? So mainstream that we were on John Oliver. You know, this is so uncontroversial now, it's kind of amazing to talk about it. So what I thought I'd do is describe the phenomenon of exactly what I'm talking about, define it, sort of clarify it, who does it impact, it's harm. And then talk a bit about the law and then what law really can't do and a bit about what companies are now doing, right? Private entities and the kinds of choices they're making. And what does that mean for our system of free expression? Okay, so how do we define cyber harassment and stalking? And I have to say I read Wikipedia's description. And I know it's not necessarily prescriptive, but you're kind of your guidelines. And it was really sophisticated and I thought, this is terrific, right? So what is harassment and stalking? It is a repeated and persistent course of conduct that's targeted as a specific individual that is designed to and intended to and that causes substantial emotional distress and often the fear of physical harm. And more importantly, that definition tells us nothing, right? But it's how it's perpetrated and the kind of components of the abuse that are really, I think, important to understand. And it's often a perfect storm, right? Of sort of three key features. One, it's really attempts to terrorize people, right? So by threatening them with physical violence as Kathy Sierra experienced, by impersonating them online, suggesting that they're interested in sex and providing their sort of contact information. It involves reputation harming lies, like defamation. And then often the manipulation of search engines to ensure that the lies are prominent in a search of someone's name. It involves privacy invasion. So that privacy invasion may take the form of hacking into someone's computer to steal really sensitive information, including nude photos, right? And then the sharing or posting of them online. And we can think of, of course, Jennifer Lawrence as a prominent example. But the iCloud hack is not unusual, and it's not always celebrities. In fact, that's not, normally it's just the everyday person. But it's also the posting of people's nude photos in violation of their confidence and trust, like we see on revenge-born sites. And the last component is using technology to effectively shove people offline, whether it's a, you know, DDoS attack. Or otherwise, like engaging in manipulation of technologies, to, with brute force to silence people, right? So what I think, since I gave you a little sort of sense of what this abuse looks like, I'm going to give you, so I'm sure you guys know all about GamerGate. I know, right? To say that is kind of crazy to this group, right? Normally, like I talk at universities and people are like, I'll have two really shy gamers in the audience who are like, you know, like willing to admit that they know what it is. But so Anita Sarkeesian is a friend that is in my book. And I think we largely understand the abuse she faced. But I think it's important to know it didn't start this last summer, right? So in 2012, Anita announced that she was starting this Kickstarter campaign to have this video series on sexism and video games. And about a week after Anita announced the launch of this project, she started receiving emails and texts with graphic rape and death threats, bomb threats, right? And that same week as the cyber mob kind of descends on her, the game beat up Anita Sarkeesian appears online. So if you Google it right this second, you will find this game, right? Which is every, any key that you touch on your computer, and she's a distinctive woman, so you know it's Anita. Her face gets increasingly bloodied and sort of purplish, right? Now, whoever was doing this, like a set of people, they went after her livelihood, her Kickstarter campaign, right? So her Kickstarter received hundreds of false abuse complaints suggesting that her campaign was fraudulent, like her effort to raise money. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube received reports that her channels were, this is the irony, and I love this moment, hate speech, spam, and terrorism, right? Seriously, friends? Okay. And because she was very well known, they didn't shut down her profiles. We know what happened at Wikipedia, right, to her Wikipedia page, and the kind of monkey business of kind of trying to seed it with pornography and child porn, and it seems like Wikipedia's had to shut down the page, right? You know what, and this abuse went on for years. So I met Anita before all of this happened, and she called me and said, like, I don't even, I know you've been writing about this, but I have no idea what to do. And I initially urged her to go to law enforcement, and she said, what do I say? There are thousands of people coming after me. Like, I can't imagine they're wrapping their heads around getting a warrant for all of these posters, right? And we know that last summer it reached a fever pitch, right, after the attacks on Zoe Quinn, and a sort of one example beyond just the sort of avalanche of rape and death threats with her address and her parents address. It sort of escalated this time. The threats were, in her inbox, I'm going to rape you, bitch. I know exactly where you live, including her parents address and her home address. But also, she was set to give a talk at Utah State University, and the day she came, so she's already there to give the talk, the dean's office received anonymous phone calls that said, if Anita Sarkeesian speaks this evening, there will be a school shooting worse than Columbine and Newtown combined. Now, Anita was already there, so she was like, all right, I'll give this talk so long, right, as there's some police presence, and we're checking people for guns. But the response to her was, well, we have concealed carry laws, so we can't help you. We can't check people. And isn't that the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard, right? So if President Obama was coming to Utah State or the CEO of Pepsi, you really seriously think that's going to be the response, right? We can't check people to make sure that they have no guns, so she didn't speak. And so it was like directly impeding what she does for a living, right, to speak and talk, it's her work as a journalist and media critic. But of course, it's not just the high profile, whether it's Kathy Sierra or Anita Sarkeesian, right, really more, I think importantly, or more prevalently, it's the everyday person, right, the grad student, the nurse, the dentist, I can't tell you the countless people I talk to in research and writing my book. So I'll just tell you about one. So I think we can get a full understanding of what this abuse feels like from the perspective of the victim. Holly Jacobs had just graduated from BC and she was in grad school at FIU and she had a long-distance relationship with someone and they, as young people do, I feel like I'm 46 am I allowed to call a young person, right? You know, there are cameras everywhere and they shared intimate images with each other. It was a two-way street, it wasn't like one way. They shared images and videos with each other. She was surreptitiously taped during Sex 2 which she did not consent to. But much of it was consensual sharing but it was on the understanding of course that it was for their eyes only. So they break up and about six months later she starts getting emails from strangers and texts that say, I saw your ad, I'm interested in sex, like where can we meet? And at the time, so this is 2009 when it starts, Holly wasn't in the habit of Googling her name. Like it just wasn't something that we preached and talked to our kids about and discussed. And so what she found when she did Google her name was over 300 sites. Revenge porn sites, porn sites and like adult finder sites with her nude images, some videos and one video of her masturbating which you can only imagine the sort of sheer embarrassment and horror but with all of her contact information. So she had a part-time job, her work address, her work telephone number, her cell phone number, all of her contact information. And some of the posts because she was a grad student said, hot for teacher Holly and her former last name, she sleeps with students, right? Other posts were like fake ads that said she was interested in threesomes and anonymous sex. You know that is where it looked like there were solicitations from her. And her dean's office or dean of students received anonymous phone calls that said she was sleeping with her students. And her part-time employer, she did some consulting work. She got an email that said, if you don't send me more nude photos, that I will send these photos that I have of you nude photos to your employer because I know where you work. And so of course she didn't write back as I recommended because to feed the beast and give more photos is like extortion clearly of a crime going on here. And so of course the person lived up to the threat sent the nude photos to her employer, her part-time employer, right? So she left that job because it was clear from these postings where she worked, the address, she moved out of her apartment and into her parent's house. She changed her name. She had a very unique former last name and her dean of students said to her, look, if you are gonna teach students, the only way we're gonna let you teach students is you really have to change your name. These young undergrads can't be Googling their teacher. Can you imagine, right? To Claire like bankruptcy over your, as my friend Jonathan Zittrain would call it, like reputational bankruptcy, to sort of voice that on someone, right? Seems like an untenable choice, right? To say to her and she hadn't yet gotten her PhD. So these are people who are in control of her doctorate, right? So she did. And there's a wonderful sort of the end of my talk. I'll tell you what Holly's doing today, but she is an anti-harassment advocate. She's running this wonderful organization called the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative to raise awareness, change laws. They've been incredible. Like she's so brave. But when we first met, she could barely tell me her real name and would call me under different phones. She was afraid like she would get hacked. And then so going public was a huge step for her in 2014 and 13, but she did it and she's trying to change the way we understand this kind of online abuse. But if you can imagine, it's a hard thing to swallow, right? And victims, right? So the damage you can imagine, we can imagine what the damages of all of this abuse, right? Victims change their lives. So Anita did, she couchsurfed. Holly moved, she changed her name, right? We know that the professional costs are incredibly steep, right? So people lose their jobs or it's impossible to get one, right? Why? Because online searches are our CV, right? So we know that over 95% of employers tell us that they are searching people in order to figure out if they're gonna interview or hire people. And there are companies like, you know, that are working on sort of mining data online to identify candidates. So in some sense, you don't have a, you don't have control over this, right? And what, a Microsoft study found that over 80% of employers who are searching people, there's a negative result, right? And why does that make sense, right? From the employer's perspective, it makes eminent sense, right? Do you want a client saying to you, like, why would you hire that person? Did you see in a Google search like what this person did? And it's not that employers believe that individuals have posted their nude photos online by themselves. It's not that they believe that, you know, Holly's a prostitute or whatever, right? It's so much safer and cheaper and easier to hire someone, right? Who doesn't come with baggage, just that simple, right? And victims really struggle emotionally, right? It's so many told me like, it's hard not to wake up in the middle of the night and ghoul yourself because you think what next shoe is dropping, right? And it is silencing, right? So I mean, this is like a perfect community to talk about all the wonderful things the internet, you know, offers, all the knowledge creation and access to knowledge that it provides, right? But for victims of online abuse, they feel like the more that they engage online, the more provocation it is for their harassers, right? So they totally disappear. It's just safer and it's gonna provoke less abuse, right? So they lose the opportunity to do all of the things that we are all engaging in politically, socially, economically, all the wonderful things that all these network spaces offer, but they can't enjoy it, right? Now, so sometimes I'm often, this was in the beginning of my work, people would say like, Danielle, can you relax? Like, stop making a mountain out of a molehill. It's one or two bad cases. And the bottom line is I wish I could say it was just one or two bad cases, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics has sort of made clear in a number of studies that at least it was estimated in 2006. So you can imagine, this was a while ago, it's probably, it's clearly gotten worse, that over 850,000 people experienced stalking by network technologies every year. And the study defines stalking in the way that I initially remember my first initial definition. So it's not a loosey-goosey definition, it was a clear definition of this sort of study. And we know that, so Pew came out with a report last year that found this is especially so for women in their 20s, that at least 20% of women in their 20s will experience cyber gender harassment in the way that I've described it. So we know that the majority of victims of online abuse are women, but men experience it too. And the playbook for men and women are it's so strikingly the same every time I get another email or phone call, I'm like, it's as if I press rewind and play each time, the abuse is sexually threatening, and it's sexually humiliating. So for both men and women, it's not just any old threat, but it's sort of either threats of anal rape, impersonation suggesting for men that they're interested in rape, or anal rape, anonymous rape. And for women, it's rape threats, right? It's the same thing, it's sexually targeted threats. And it's not just any old lie or defamation, it's sexually humiliating lies. So individuals are accused of having sexually transmitted diseases, right? They have herpes or AIDS or they're so alleged. They are accused of being prostitutes and available for sex. And it's not just any old privacy invasion because golly, we know we can invade privacy in so many sundry ways, right? But it's often either the theft and hacking and sort of then posting of nude photos or if shared in confidence, the breach of that confidence and then the sharing online, often alongside personal information. So it's a bleak picture now, right? So I'm a law professor, you know, naturally I'm gonna incline towards what law can do and it can do something. It can't solve all of our problems, right? But it can do something, right? So what can it do? What can law do right now? And then what are some reforms that I think we should, don't worry, it's all good, right? You know, what are some reforms that I think we really need and are working on already, right? Okay, so what can law do right now? So so often victims are told just sue your harasser if, of course, if you can figure out who they are, there are civil claims that victims can bring against their harrassers and it's absolutely true. There are well-tailored torts like defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress in my wheelhouse, a privacy tort, public disclosure, a private fact. But really the problem is the practicality of it. It's so expensive to bring a lawsuit. And so I always think it's like sort of fabulous in theory but not in sort of practical fact, right? So it's so expensive to sue that the civil system and the kind of corrective justice it could provide for us is just often just unavailable. So what about criminal law, right? So let's take the, in about half of the state. So I'm gonna, you know, federal at the federal level which has constrained resources, there are really well-designed federal cyber-stocking threat extortion laws on the books. But the problem is, I think, as the FBI often tells victims, like look, this is not an issue of national security, it's not terrorism, it's not drugs, we're not involved. And they do have their own set of priorities. And so I think to overly rely on the federal, you know, the FBI and federal law enforcement is I think too tall a task. But that's, you know, the states have stepped in and long been the first movers when it comes to sex, stalking and harassment. California was the first in the nation to pass a law against stalking in 1990 and then within three years, everyone followed. That is all 50 states. So, you know, we traditionally look to the states. So in about half of the states have really well-designed or they have laws that would reach online abuse. So they have stalking laws, anti-harassment, criminal laws, threat laws, laws against solicitation and extortion. In 25 states we now have laws that criminalize invasions of sexual privacy when you go after the knowing privacy invader, like the knowing person who posts revenge porn on revenge porn sites, the initial poster. But the key problem is the enforcement of these laws, right? So when victims and so, and you talked about the, you know, in describing some of my work, the kind of trivializing that we do to online harassment, you know, a key problem is that when people go to law enforcement they're bedeviled by the same social attitudes that were many are bedeviled by, right? Which is turn your computer off, that's what they're told. Oh, boys will be boys. Like ignore it, it'll go away, right? And some of that sort of comes from, and I have talked to so many law enforcement officers so it's not to say that they are, you know, are uniquely have really poor attitudes. They're also just not used to the technology. Like it's not a beat crime, right? It's not offline assault where they say like, I'm good at this, right? This involves technology and often they just aren't familiar with the idea of getting a warrant for an online service provider to trace an IP address and then to so produce the warrant to the ISP to figure out if it's a static, you know, it's a static IP address, who is this person? They're like, whoa, we have no idea what we're doing. And they also are unfamiliar with the laws, right? So we need a whole lot of training. So it's work I'm doing with the attorney general of California, Kamala Harris, is training law enforcement. So on Wednesday I'm going out to LA to sort of announce the rollout of this exciting project that we have in training law enforcement. So we have some amazing law enforcers like on the beat, but it is really the beginning stages. It's really the first of its kind in California and we're hoping it's gonna catch fire across the country. The sort of training of law enforcement in the laws and the technologies and getting assistance maybe from the FBI in training officers, right? How to kind of approach and investigate these cases. But it's also true that in about half of the states they just do not have laws on the book that reach this kind of abuse, right? So you've got an aggravated harassment law in New York that only covers communications that are sent directly to victims. So case from New York, Guy posts, Ian Barber, posts his ex-girlfriend's nude photos on Twitter. He sends them to her employer and then to everyone in her inbox, so including all of her friends and sort of work contacts. And he's arrested for aggravated harassment, but rightly so the court dismisses the indictment against him. Why? Because he never directly sent the abusive communications to her and that makes sense. Just the way in which the legislators wrote that law, right? So we've got some work to do at the state level. We've got to update harassment and stalking laws that were written in the 90s that are, and some of them are like email harassment laws. Do we wanna have a moment and laugh or tech knowledge, you know, telephone harassment laws which always makes me giggle, right? We've gotta update those laws. They need to be technology neutral and it's work we can do. We just have to engage some of our state lawmakers among the many issues that they have to worry about. You know, I think we can engage them with this. You know, we've seen some progress in 25 states, so Holly Jacobs, the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and Professor Mary Anne Franks, a colleague of mine at Miami who has been basically working with state legislators across the country. We went from 18 months ago having one law in New Jersey that criminalized an invasion of sexual privacy and that was the law that was invoked to punish Tyler Clementi's harasser. Remember the roommate who tapes Tyler having sex with a man views it so surreptitiously watches him having sex with someone and shares it with friends. And he's then convicted of an invasion of sexual privacy. New Jersey, it had this law in the book since 2004. Now 26 states, within 18 months, 26 states have criminalized invasions of sexual privacy. So we're making some, I think, really important movement in the law. The kind of core argument in my book for way to understand the law is not only that, you know, look what we're seeing are torts and we're seeing crimes, but we should fundamentally understand the abuse as a civil rights violation, right? Why do I say that? You know, we always think of civil rights violations are of long thought of them, is when you interfere with people's substantial and tangible life opportunities and you do that because of their membership in a protected group, right? So think about Anita Sarkeesian. Like what did the cyber mob know about Anita, right? But that she was a woman who was writing about sexism in video games, truly. And for that, the wrath of rape threats, right? Privacy invasions, defamation, intimidation and attempts to basically stop her from doing her work, right? Ditas attacks aimed at feminist frequency. Her website shutting it down intermittently over the years, right? So, you know, Amanda has said it really eloquently in slate. She was writing a piece for Pacific Standard. She writes for Slate, but she had this piece about online harassment in which she said, you know, rape threats, right? What they say is to all women that they can't be at ease online. And I think that's exactly right, right? Online harassment is often designed to basically make people unemployable, right? And unable to express themselves, which is a fundamental liberty, right? And right. And we have some work to do with our civil rights laws, but I think once we wrap our head around what this is, right? The law can do only so much, right? We can only enforce it only, you know, a little bit, right? We can't have perfect and don't want frankly perfect enforcement. But what the law does is teach us, right? It's an educator and it can help teach us that it's the wrong thing to do, right? To help change both social attitudes and behavior, right? So how is any of this sort of legal solution consistent with the First Amendment, right? So I initially started by explaining like when I first started talking about online harassment, you know, I was told I was gonna break the internet. That is the internet as a form for public discourse, right? And I think an crucially important lesson I think we've all now with eight, nine years behind us, right, is that we know that the First Amendment as a doctrine, it doesn't operate in absolutes, right? There are certain categories of speech that we know, either receive no protection or less rigorous protection because they give us so little and they cause so much harm. And so much of online harassment is constituted by speech that has either no protection or very little protection. So what kind of speech am I talking about? True threats, the defamation of private individuals about purely private matters, crime facilitating speech like extortion and solicitation, and speech that enjoys less rigorous protection are laws that protect the privacy of communications, right? So we think of like wiretap laws and laws that intervene on behalf of privacy in our communications. We say they get less, they're not gonna be subject to strict scrutiny. Why? Because they foster private speech, right? If we don't think our communications are private, we're not gonna communicate, right? We're not gonna use our cell phones. We're not gonna share nude photos, right? If the assumption is that inherently there's the assumption of risk that they're public, right? It will chill speech, right? And that's why the Supreme Court has explained that we can uphold and we have less rigorous protection of speech when what we're doing is punishing knowing violations of privacy. Okay, so what about free speech values, right? There's so many reasons, wonderful reasons why we protect free speech, right? We protect expression and we think it's incredibly important why to help us figure out how to govern ourselves, right? Like how do we know the kind of society we wanna live in if we don't speak and I think for me more importantly is to listen, right? If we don't take in ideas, then we can't figure out the kind of world we wanna live in, right? But I think it's really important to realize, so what is a rape threat, right? A nude photo of someone posted without their consent and a defamatory like a lie, right? That contributes nothing to the set of ideas that we need to figure out the kind of world we live in. Even offensive ideas, right? It's not an idea that we're punishing, right? And it really importantly, it drives people from self-governance, so from self-expression. As a victim said to me, I cannot be a digital citizen when I'm under assault, right? And that's no surprise. So another reason why we protect free speech is that we think of the marketplace of ideas, right? That's like one of the most popular ways we describe the kind of truth seeking function of this kind of marketplace of discussions. And so we think of like if there's bad speech or offensive speech, we counter it with other speech. And that's precisely what we do and shouldn't do with hate speech, right? But we're not talking about annoying offensive degrading speech to groups, right? We're talking about like, what is there to say to a rape threat? Don't rape me. What counter speech is gonna help have a conversation, right? What is there to say to defamation? No, I don't have herpes, right? There isn't a convo... I mean, right? I mean, where's anyone gonna believe that? I guess you could say it, right? But is anyone gonna buy it? No, right? There isn't the kind of conversation and truth seeking function that just like it's almost broken at that point, right? And it is true of course that harassers have expressive interests. I'm not gonna say they don't. They're using ones and zeros ultimately, right? A lot of this is words and images. So they are engaging in speech themselves, right? But their whole reason for doing what they're doing is to silence other people, right? And if that's why, if that's what's motivating you, your attempts to silence and destroy people's careers and lives, I think we should be less frankly worried, right? About their speech and the law is less worried, right? So that's, I mean, but of course, law, we're limited in what law can do. We know there's plenty what the First Amendment lets us do, right? But that leaves a huge gap. So often we rely on all of us, right? We rely on private companies. They're not constrained by the First Amendment, right? Twitter and Google and Facebook. They're not constrained by their private actors. They can do what they want. And federal law provides immunity, right? The choices that they make as and this is the Communications Decency Act, which I always find very ironically titled, right? It's the law that explains that good Samaritans, good Samaritans, right, are online service providers. If they publish other people's speech, we're not gonna treat them as speakers or publishers, right? Why? And it's a great law. It's incredibly important how it's been interpreted, right? But it also means that private companies can help police norms on their own sites. That's the whole point of that law, right? Is to provide the immunity, as the title calls it, for good Samaritan blocking of offensive and removal of offensive speech. That's literally the title that these very conservative congressmen, senators and House of Representatives that's what they wrote in the statute, right? So we are seeing private companies sort of step into the act and ban online harassment, revenge porn, right? We've seen them do it. It's been sort of revolutionary in the last 18 months. We've seen sort of one by one, after the fappening and the iCloud hack, right? A.G. Harris had a convening with all these companies and I would say about a month later we had announcements from Reddit and Facebook that they were banning revenge porn. And Google and Bing, that was the summer's excitement, right? They announced that they will de-index nude photos of individuals who've explained to them that it's posted without their consent, right? And it was a struggle to get them there, right? Twitter has banned harass, this is a big move for Twitter, right? It has long in my conversations with them since its inception, it always said it's a speech platform. That is, we do not ban anything except for impersonations, spam, and of course copyright violations, right? Which you can all have a moment and not like either, right? Right, we're not known as a fan of DMC in this room, including myself. But that said, right? In the last six months, they have banned specifically what they call targeted harassment. They have banned revenge porn. They have banned threats. And not just credible threats that way in which law would strictly understand a true threat, but threats that are more amorphous that, so Anita Sarkeesian explained to me is incredibly encouraging, right? Because so much of the threats that she faces on Twitter, they're not, I'm going to kill you, but they are someone should kill you, right? They're designed to scare and terrors. But you're doing it with just enough wiggle room so that you're not violating the law. But enough to make clear that I'm doing this to really chase you offline, right? So we see these companies moving in, but at the same time they're doing this, part of my sort of discussions with them is that they've got to be clear about what their terms of service and community guidelines really mean, right? How are they defining harassment, stalking, threats, revenge porn, or privacy invasions, right? And beyond just defining these terms for our user base, what do we do about it, right? Explain to your users, honestly and clearly, what happens when, what are the repercussions, right? And are there, and this will be very familiar to you guys because I feel like you do this, or you're trying to do this really well as the sense of due process, right? Is that when there has been speech that's complained about, if you're going to remove it or you're going to ban someone, give them a chance to have something to say about it, right? You know, most companies just too bad, so sad, this is what's happened to you and there's really no conversation. And I think we've got to sort of adapt and move beyond that because there's so incredibly, our speech platforms are incredibly important for conversation. So our broader, I think, system of free expression, I hope, and I think they're listening is going to evolve to think about digital citizenship that they often invoke that term to justify their bands of harassment, stalking, threats, and privacy invasions. But my advice is, yes, digital citizenship is so important. It's not only rights, but responsibilities. But part of your responsibility as a host of digital citizens is to engage even the harassers in the conversation about why you're doing it to them and being really clear. So there is some sense of, we have some protections, right? For the people who are misusing platforms, like remember, shoving Anita offline was reporting her site as hate speech spam and terrorism, right? So when you're misusing abuse complaint systems, we gotta get at that too, right? So I feel like this is such a wonderful audience because Wikipedia, I always feel like, from this is what happens, law professors always look at Wikipedia, like you have so much process. You have this, really, I know you're laughing, but this is like some of my, I know you can laugh louder. But we really admire you, really, at least for your first principles, right? But you say we're gonna have a dispute system. We are gonna, I know you're like, what are you saying, lady, hold on. No, but we're gonna arbitrate that we're gonna have some fair process and engage in really hard conversations, right? So I think it's an exciting sort of group to talk to because you're at the front lines of trying to work out what that means due process and fairness and bringing procedural regularity and fairness to online speech. It doesn't mean you always get it right, so I'm not gonna criticize anything you're doing because I don't really know, right? And I have now many friends in the audience who are gonna say, like, oh, we wanna talk to you about this stuff, so I think that's great. But, right, but at least it's a really important model, I think, for others to follow. So I'm really excited for your questions. I like that I see folks going on the microphone, so I'm ready, thank you. You've been vandalizing the Wikipedia article about revenge porn a few weeks ago and rewrote it using one of your law journal articles or rewrote at least a substantial portion of it. But a lot of my other comments are going to be directed actually towards the audience, just in contrast to your speech. So I get about 20 emails a week from women Wikipedians who don't want to deal with any of the process on Wiki, because every arbitration committee case that has involved women in the last two years has involved all of them being banned. The entire oversight team made a blanket statement that they were unwilling to oversight two words that were gender pronouns that had never been privately disclosed or rather publicly disclosed. And in the group, one of our breakout sessions about gender, the word I heard more than harassment was Manchester. Which I may need a little clarification on that one. The audience school, I understand it. I'm with you all the way, tell Manchester. I'd be in trouble if I talked more about that. Oh really? Okay. Oh, but it would be a real one. He's teasing us. Oh, he's teasing us. Okay, so can I just say what I heard and then maybe we can create a question or conversation? So what I think I heard, and thank you so much for your comments and question, because you said really you were saying it more as a dialogue with the audience, which maybe I can kind of spark, is that I think I heard you saying that women editors, female editors were being banned as a result of disputes, am I wrong? Is that what I heard? Yeah, that's correct. Okay. That we're not put in place. Great. Thank you. I'm going to grab mailing lists. I seriously regularly receive 20 to 30 emails a week related to media related problems for women. Yeah. Who do not want to participate in any of our official processes because of what happens to them when they do. Yeah. And I'm just going to believe Manchester Okay. No, that's, that's fine. And what's really interesting is what I'm hearing and I just want to like look back in history, right? So it's true that like if we think about these sort of important turning points in the way that we change our attitudes, if we think about sort of women in the workplace in the 60s and 70s, like the workplace that my mom, right, a lot of our parents grew up in, you know, if a woman objected to sexual harassment in the workplace, the response was like, beat it. You know, you don't like it leave, right? And that kind of punishment is not, that's just the way in which we said to people, you don't like this culture, get out of here. And so I guess, and I'm not suggesting your community is doing anything consciously, right? I am. And that's okay if you are, but, and that's, but these are important discussions to have. Like I so value being here to hear you have these conversations because, you know, so often at least as a consumer of I love Wikipedia. So I'm just, I eat it up. Like I go, you know, I just observe. I don't edit, right? And I admire people who do, but do you know what I'm saying? Like I'm one of the people who admires fans using it. And, you know, the conversation about how there's so few female editors has always depressed me. So I think having this important conversation and you're saying, I wanna be part of the solution, right? I wanna make it easier and more welcoming for women to be part of this important endeavor is really wonderful. So thank you, right? You know, so that's sort of my response, I think. Yeah, Alex. Hi, thank you so much for your talk. I figured that on the subject of sort of norms and phasing people out of the community if they sort of respond to sexual harassment, this is, I really apologize. So hitch your conference bingo cards. This is a comment, not a question. The, so recently one of the particular cases that Kevin was talking about was an editor who had faced pretty extreme sexual harassment and was involved with the dispute on Wikipedia. Someone had modified nude images of someone else and put them up on a site with their name. And among other things, not saying this editor was otherwise blameless, but another thing, among other things, the arbitration committee banned them for seeking out the identity of the person who had placed those things up there because they didn't feel that they had any other alternative. And one of the sort of proposed decisions in this case basically said that the way that editors should respond to harassment was, an editor is harassed and attacked by others who generally perceives themselves to be harassed or attacked, whether on Wikipedia or off should not see that harassment as an excuse for fighting back or attacking those who are criticizing them. You know, explicitly or implicitly there and explicitly on other pages telling people that the way to respond to this is to lower your profile. And so it's really all I had to say, I think it's a shame. And I think that's the, you know, the devil in all of this is that it's so silencing, right? That it troubles me that if we were to say to people who've been targeted that they shouldn't at the very least be able to talk about the abuse that they're facing strikes me as the wrong move. But I often think of sort of self-help as inevitably troubling because the smashback by harassers is always worse. You know, like self-help or vigilante justice, right? It always comes with a, it's a gamble, right? So when victims and their supporters try to sort of talk back, and I'm not talking about Wikipedia, I'm just talking generally, you often see a cyber mob that then comes back so much harder at victims, right? So that it's just perilous. It's personally perilous for victims and their supporters. But I hope that in thinking forward about your kind of policies and sort of norm creation on your site that you, you know, think hard about how hard it is for people who have faced, you know, their own photos have appeared online or doctored photos and the, you know, all that kind of abuse is so silencing. So the very fact that you're able to, in some respects, defend yourself is huge, right? It's a huge leap forward in many ways, right? And that we ought to credit that and think hard about what that means and how we wanna process that. So I'm not gonna tell you how to think about it, right? But I think it's something you should think hard about. Yes. Oh no, so sorry. Yeah, okay, we'll take turns. Yeah. Hi, I'm Gamaliel and I have some things to say about Gamergate. Oh. Thank you. Wikipedia, I think, is completely unequipped to deal with harassment, especially this new paradigm of coordinated offsite harassment. Two problems, I'll make two points and then turn this over to a question, I promise. The first one is that we have this distributed volunteer method of policy enforcement. And so what I've seen is an effort to ramp up the harassment so hard that no one wants to get involved in the drama. People, I've had so many administrators tell me privately, I'm looking at this and I think you're doing okay, but I don't wanna get involved, I don't wanna get harassed, I don't wanna get doxxed, I don't want this to happen like it happened to you. And so they're keeping, they're working the refs is what I call it, keeping people away from the situation, keeping people who wanna enforce policy away from the situation so they can do what they want. And the second point is we have this paradigm of Wikipedia, we come out of this paradigm of rights and access. We worry about the rights and the access of the harassers, we need to offer them a path to rehabilitation, what about their right to edit? And all of a sudden we don't think about the people that are harassing off Wikipedia, what about their right to edit? And what about their right to access the encyclopedia? So we have that paradigm and we also had, even without that paradigm we have this problem of enforcing the rules that we do have. So my question is what can we do? What suggestions can you offer to us as a community that we can address these issues in a new way because we're not doing it at all correctly now? So that's a great question and comment. And I think your comment helps answer some of it. That is we've gotta prioritize and think really hard and hope what I'm conveying to all of us today is that the cost expression on the person who's targeted is something we have to work hard to protect, their expression. So I think prioritize in the person who's being targeted so that they don't slink away and you lose their voices. It's a real social cost. It's not just a cost to the individual, but it's a cost to all of us who could hear their voices. So I think if the balance is off and we're only thinking about the harassers access an ability to speak and write and so provide knowledge if you wanna call it that if they're posting nude photos or whatever it is and rape and death threats, I would, I think we can be more circumspect, right? I guess my call is for us to think really hard about what it is they're expressing and contributing, right? So if they're contributing very little and crucially driving people from partaking and engaging and I think you ought to think hard about whether you want them in your community. I mean, this is your community to self police, right? So I don't wanna tell you what to do, but I think it sounds like the balance is skewed and you've gotta bring the speech interest of the targeted person back into the picture, right? And it may help you recalibrate. It's not to say it's easy, right? So as your folks were telling you administrators, we're saying like, hey, we don't wanna get doxxed. I mean, honestly, I was doxxed. It's not fun on a gamergate thing platform. I was like, shoot, right? Like this is not a good time. A whole family lost their minds, but you know, imagine Anita Sarkeesian. So no one wants to be, right? No one wants to be targeted. The most true the blowback on anyone who intervenes is how dare you, right? The sort of mob is, no, it's amazing, right? It spirals way out of control. So I appreciate that no one wants skin in the game, right? So maybe there's a way in which, I don't know if it's possible, but to kind of insulate some of the decision makers, make them less transparent so that you can't, I don't know if that's a possibility, right? But ways in which you can help intervene so that the outside mob, I take a lot of this, is not what you're talking about, isn't destruction happening from within your community but outside of it. But maybe there are ways in which you can sort of change how you present to the public about who's doing some of this, blocking or fixing, you know, like when you're monkeying with Anita Sarkeesian site if we shut it down, right? So we can't go after the people making the decisions. That is the mob that's outside of Wikipedia. We're not going, you know, we're gonna protect your own, so to speak. I mean, maybe you gotta rethink some of those policies and transparency. Transparency is not an unalloyed good, right? I mean, Lawrence Lessig has sort of terrific work on this, but we know it's, we need to temper it, right, sometimes. So it may be self-preservation that you don't tell the public who's doing the sort of blocking, right? So that you can police your community and not put your own hides on the line, right? And I think we may have to rethink hard about ways in which we need to start thinking about the targets of harassment and putting them closer into the picture. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. This is a topic that I've been very close to recently because we've been working on a code of conduct policy for our technical spaces around Wikimedia things. So I hope you'll forgive me. I'm a computer scientist, and so I wanna like throw some jargon at you, but I'll define it because I think it's important for the question that I wanna ask. So with any rule that we put in place, like we like to talk about things is precision and recall. Recall is how much of the bad stuff are we getting with this? And then precision is how much of that stuff that we get is actually bad. And so like precision isn't very good. If we, for example, made a rule that was very easy for people who were harassed to report that harassment, but it also enabled people to use reporting harassment to harass other people. Exactly. And so what I wanna ask about is if you have some general advice or rules of thumb or maybe strategies that we can follow to keep precision really high so that we can shut down the arguments that people are gonna use this to harass me, they're gonna use the harassment policy to harass me. So I'm gonna use CS with you, right? So audit trials are a, to get at, we need some traceability and it sounds like I always thought of Wikipedia as like beautifully working with audit trials, right? And all sort of recall, right? To know who's doing what so that when the harassed person says, I'm being harassed and the harasser says, no, no, you're harassing me. Like this sort of like nonsense cycle which may or may not be true. Sometimes it's true, but let's assume it's not. Then you have some audit, there's some ability to have that recall and have precision because you have very complex and rich audit trials that tell you what's going on, right? So how do we know that code isn't buggy, right? We test it, we test it, we have audit trials and that's, I think you gotta bring that to this project is what I would do. And that's maybe you're already doing it and you want more, right? You're like, oh, we've been there, but that's not, why isn't that helping you? Why don't audit trials, right? And get you there. Yeah, so I mean, I think the thing that we struggle with is, I mean, there's a lot of rhetorical back and forth that we need to do in order to even put this thing in place. So even if the system will work, we need to convince people that they should sign on to it so we can even try it in the first place. And so the thing that we're struggling with now is yes, we're making like a place where you can safely report harassment and somebody will turn around and well, now somebody is going to in a very hidden place report that I'm harassing them and work against me and it's probably a boogeyman and definitely something that we can iterate on and improve, but getting past that threshold is the thing that we're really struggling with. Getting it so that we can try it so that we can iterate on it. Don't we do that? Like with software, we experiment, we throw it out there where it's open source, let's do it or open code. So let's experiment. So sorry. Yeah, okay. Hello, this is Small Bones here. I know Wikipedia's don't like to politicize things. I'm going to continue on Kevin's comment. Arbitration committee has been a major problem. There is an election. I believe it's in December. I believe there are four seats up and I would love to see four women. Sorry. Yeah. And I will also say if my memory serves correctly, if everybody in this room voted for all four women, there would be I think now five women. Yeah. I think I'll just leave it there unless you want me to ask a question. No, it sounds like a great call to action. Right? Thank you. Right. And you have to feel like so that, I mean, I think this is going to be obvious, but we have to feel safe if we're going to put ourselves out there, right? So I'll leave it there too, right? Yeah. Thank you. I would like to ask you as a legal scholar if there are constitutional insights or legal insights that could help Wikipedia come up with better processes so that it doesn't have all male arbitration committees, given the fact that such a disproportionate number of the participants are men, even though of course there are many men in this audience who are supporting the anti-harassment, which I think we also need to bear in mind, that's not just women who can be supporting this, you know, the whole He For She campaign. So, but clearly if Wikipedia is going to be the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and as you mentioned, going to produce knowledge that reflects the experiences of more diverse people, it needs to think really hard about what are the processes that put people in place in Wikipedia's power hierarchies that lead to decisions like banning women who complain about harassment and all the ways of silencing them. But I do think that Wikipedia, I mean, often kind of tries to think about, you know, these processes without looking to the insights that come from all these legal structures and constitutions and so forth around the world. And if there's a way to make that information more accessible to those who are trying to sort through these rules, it would be really helpful. Right, okay, so I love this question of course because it asked me to think about sort of due process, which I've done a bunch of work on. So I have an article called Technological Due Process, and it's really about automated decision-making systems, but there's so much to draw on the lessons of procedural due process, like what is a fair hearing, right? And there's a whole literature on like the core components of a fair hearing and what that means, and it includes an impartial decision-maker. Now in our sort of doctrine of what that means, it basically means there's no conflict of interest. That is, you're not invested in the company that you're so adjudicating. And so you sort of spoke about gender, right? How is it that we're gonna, you know, how can a man adjudicate, you know, where another man is the harasser? It's not always men who are the harasser. It could be women, of course, too, right? But I think we haven't, at least in the law, that lesson we've never said that, right? We think really narrowly about the way in which we understand an impartial decision-maker, right? But the due process tradition also teaches us that we should give people a chance to bring evidence forward and have the ability to present evidence and to have counsel if they so want it. That is, we provide at least, when we're talking about having a hearing, right? If the government wants to take something away from you, a benefit of some sort of license, then they owe you some fair hearing of some sort, some process, either before or after adjudication. And so there are some lessons, I think, we can take from it and riff, right? Like, so the impartiality thing is something that's really narrowly understood, like what do we mean by an impartial decision-maker that maybe you can develop and think through in a way that's more reflective of the Wikipedia experience. Thank you. Okay, so you had a lot about the victims, but often the problem is a lot more two-sided or no, multifaceted than this, because the victims can often be abusers themselves and a lot of abusers are often victims in their own right. And then of course there's also just abusers as trolls or bullies or whatever. So what I wanna ask is, what about the abusers? Like, what are their motivations and how can this basically affect how we deal with them? Right, so I mean some of the answer about who these folks are is really hard to answer because unlike in Wikipedia, most other sites, people are either pseudonymus or anonymous and we can't trace them, right? And if law enforcement never intervenes, we have no idea who they are, right? If for the most part law enforcement hasn't. So I can't, if that makes sense, like even in Anita's case, you know, we've not seen any forward movement on the law enforcement piece. So it's very hard to make a set of assessments about a set of people we have no idea who they are and it's just seriously understudied the question of at least from a social science perspective, right, who the abusers are, we don't know. You know, it's true that in my book and in my work, I am focused more on the person who is truly targeted and isn't striking back. And that is the better part of the story for harassment and stalking outside of Wikipedia, right? That is when you face either it's in a domestic circumstance which you then recruit and you have sort of cyber stalking by proxy, you get people to help you, right? You get a mob going. It's sort of one person who knows the victim and then it starts a flame. And usually it's someone who you know, right? But it's true that strangers can engage in it and we just don't know who they are, right? So perhaps that is something to study, perhaps not the individuals themselves with the psychology behind it. No, no, so a lot of my, like when I talk at universities is like, we need you social scientists, right? Like I'm not writing about state AGs and privacy and norm entrepreneurship. So I'm kind of, not that I'm leaving the space but we need more work, I roll out a book, I'm good, right? Like we need more work, we need to pass this on to another generation of people to think about, right? So I think that's right, we do need to think about that. But I think it's also unfair to say that it's true that some, and I actually know a bunch of cases in which a victim became a harasser and a harasser has become a victim. Does that make sense where, and there's a whole psychological story that I am a lawyer, right? I can't answer, I don't wanna get into stuff I don't really know. Does that make sense? But we do know that domestic violence perpetrators are victims too from their childhood. Like this is not a surprising cycle or story, right? Of abuse, it's just one I'm not equipped to, I'm not an expert on. All right, thank you. But it's something to think about. I wanna take it from just a tad different angle. When I was 15 years old, I was raped, or nearly raped rather by a younger boy in my high school. And it took me eight years of traumatic work to get back to normality, but since then, I mean, in Wikipedia I have a lot of friends, especially a lot who are gay, I'm not, but there has been harassments in getting people to these conferences, including Wikipedia, the International Conference here in 2012. And it's becoming a case of, unless there's absolute work done and absolute pushing, we don't have any way of dealing with this. Plus, for those who have been here on the site a long time, we have two websites, I will not advertise them for obvious reasons, that are ex-Wikipedia or Wikipedia critics who take it upon themselves to harass other Wikipedians in a stage where usually nobody looks. I mean, it was pointed out to me, I had, I very open on my user page, and people were harassing me on the website looking up my credit card information, and doing other things that really should be targeted. And yet I don't exactly see any method and the foundation won't step in to shutting these sites down and getting rid and having Google or something get rid of access to these. Cause you Google my username, use my name, it's gonna show up and who's to say it's fair. Right, so let me take the, so let me just say that thank you for sharing that with us. And I think really important to note that in my work, that of course it's not just women, but it's so often sexual minorities, right? Who face this kind of abuse? So I hope I was conveying that, if I didn't, I apologize. And it's true that especially for women, the sort of darker their skin, or the more they are like sort of non, the normal traditional story of sexuality, the abuse is so grotesque, right? So I think you're totally right is like Danielle, also widen your lens, it's true that LGBT folks like get really harassed online and that's absolutely right. But your question is, okay, so just quick clarification, the two sites you're talking about, is that within Wikipedia? So that there's... They are not owned by us, but they are sites basically dedicated about us. Right, but we can't control them, right? And so of course, you know, what's interesting is you said, if we're gonna publish people's credit card information though, this is one area in which normally we think of truthful facts as we don't inhibit that, right? That is we have this profound commitment to truths. And so even a credit card number is a truthful fact that even if betrayed in confidence, if it's posted online, you know, we might say, look, are you gonna punish someone? But in fact, it's one of the very small areas that we say like nude photos, credit card numbers and SSNs, you can actually sue someone for public disclosure of private fact, so yes, our commitment to the first amendment, but that can actually, a credit card number is like a key to your bank account, right? So that we don't think it's speech producing or truth producing in that way that we think of truth. So I mean, you could, frankly, Google's policy for search is for credit card information, social security numbers, and now nude photos, they'll de-index those sites if your credit card date is banned, just saying. It's not just that. I mean, the two sites in question also have probably harassed, I have done harassment of me on the website. I've done many other editors over the years, and yet we still somehow let Google link to them into, we still condone their existence on the internet, despite the very vulgar and very questionably honest. But that's the same problem that victims face. Does that make sense? That's where the rubber does hit the road in our commitment to free expression, right? And then we can't even control those folks. So to the extent that they're engaging criminal activity that we can prescribe and regulate, we do often have jurisdictional struggles, right? We can't get at the abuser because we don't have the resources to extradite them and there's no extradition treaty. Do you know what I mean? Right, I mean, so we have to have both the will, the resources, and the sort of legal grounds to grab the person, and we may not have them. Nobody's over there. Okay. There was something left dangling earlier. You were asking why the audit trail doesn't help in establishing whether there was harassment or not. There are several reasons for that. One of them is that Wikipedia's archives are absolutely voluminous and they're huge. And to find, to retrace all the instances where a person communicated with another person and which article they were communicating about and what that article looked like at the time and what the issue was at the time can be incredibly complex and quite apart from retracing everything that happened maybe over a period of years between a couple of contributors, the other problem then is that people will see it from different perspectives. So if you have a woman arguing and a man arguing like in this recent arbitration case with an editor called Lightbreeder who was in many ways a very valuable voice in Wikipedia which has now been silenced because she's gone. I really loved the way that she spoke up for women's perspectives and she was very outspoken and she got into many arguments about it as a result. What happens is you have a community which is 90% male and who will tend to sympathize more with a male half of that conversation than with a female half of that conversation. So while it's difficult to get consensus that something is harassment or that something shouldn't be allowed. Someone mentioned Manchester earlier, the situation here is that it's a British contributor who uses English in a British way so he uses a C word differently than people in the States would use it and he insists on his right to use it when he feels like it and he doesn't really care how that affects women who feel that word should really not be used in conversation with them. And he's a valuable, yeah okay, so basically he has got his defenders and there are very many women who are simply flabbergasted that something like that can fly. Which is a similar situation where you're dealing with a community that's skewed gender-wise in the first place and people's judgment about what is harassment differs. Right, and that's where I want that wonderful comment by I don't know your name. Yes, your question about due process and what that looks like, I think this is a community that can make its own choices. So when you have a case in which we have a woman who's very outspoken and has been very outspoken for feminists' opinions and is accused of harassment, I think that's where you get three adjudicators to our women. I mean that is your choice to decide who's on your review panel, right? Well that is what the community is struggling with because the arbitration committee is nearly all male. And again- And we might change that, no? Do we have like a political moment a second ago? No? Right? We're gonna fix that. Okay, so like, so I think we have some stuff we need to fix here. That definitely is fun. We clearly do. We have work to do. And I think some of this work also needs to be done in public. You know, I think there need to be press articles about the situation. And if you can help with that, then that would be very- Okay, yeah, blog for Forbes. We can figure that out. Right? Yeah. No, but thank you. Yeah. Oh, hi. I'd like to speak up on behalf of women who live in the United States who have professional jobs, who are covered by the EEOC guidelines, non-discrimination and harassment, who cannot bring their families, their agencies, their employers, et cetera into disrepute. Here we are on this wild and tum- wild tumbling website. And it's supposed to be open to everyone. And if you implement non-harassment for everyone, well, that includes people coming out, just coming out of prison or still in prison. Includes people in war zones. It includes people in fire stations and emergency response, who have a legitimate reason to defuse a little tension now and then in a morbid sense of humor. It includes places like a place where I used to live overseas where it was considered perfectly normal to require women to sleep with their boss. That was just part of life in that society. It includes regional differences where somebody says something to you and it means you better clean their clock or feet don't fail me now. And for them, it's just, hey, we're hanging out with our friends doing our thing. But here you are. You don't know if this person is local. You don't know if this is some rap musician cut and loose or you don't know if it's a threat. And at the same time, you can't say anything because you have the constraints of maintaining a professional job, the reputation of your family or employer in your agency. If there's a certain level of social norms and a level of politeness in public, there's a level of politeness in an international setting that's pretty well determined here in Washington, D.C. In the meantime, you set up this kind of social group for people who are cut and loose. And I have no idea how do you work in the different cultures, the different nationalities, the different social norms and the different requirements. I mean, I am really tired of tiptoeing around a lot of total psychomaniacs on this website. I'm tired of it, frankly. I'm tired of it. What do we do? Right, I mean, so I think like, so you mentioned, let me just, because I think you have a couple of questions in there. So let me take at least two of them. The one question is like, how do we figure out what is harassment, stalking and threats when we have all sorts of, A, we don't know what it means, B, we have all sorts of different norms depending on the countries we're in, right? And we do have some instruction from the law, which is that how do we determine a threat? We look at all the facts and circumstances. We look at what's said, we look at how it was said, we look at who said it, who's it directed at, right? We do have some cues, right, on Wikipedia. So it's not like we're helpless. I don't think we are. I think we do have some measure of assessment but as a community, you can figure out how you want to take those cues and understand them, right? And work on helpfully providing examples to your community of what constitutes a threat, what constitutes harassment and stalking, like not just define it, but give examples and give examples from within your own community, right? That is editors vis-a-vis each other, what is not okay, right? And we can, we have done it in the law, you can do it here, right? You can make contextual assessments so long as you know the question, the right questions to ask, right? Now I can't solve the problem of different norms, international, the US. I guess I can only work with ours, right? And if that's gonna guide you, that is our kind of US-centric norms with, I mean what's interesting is you're saying internationally, you can say whatever you want. They hate speech laws. I'm actually really shocked that you say that, right? They don't have a First Amendment, right? So in Canada, in France, you can't, the Holocaust denial to so utter it is a crime, which in the United States it's not. So it's interesting to me that you say, like anything goes across the Atlantic, which I find shockingly not true as a matter of the law. So I think let's all ground ourselves in the reality of that, right? And I think we should take a US approach if that's what you wanna do, right? And we have lots of norms that we can incorporate from state side, from here. And I think we have the tools, right? Your second question was about the workplace and what do we do when editors like, I'll have real full-time jobs and like they're being targeted and there's a problem. We know that Wikipedia isn't, I mean in Wikipedia isn't for most people their workplace so that it isn't in the way we traditionally understand Title VII, right? There isn't that kind of accountability, Title VII applies only to employers and employees in spaces that employers can control. So while we can learn from that civil rights sort of laws, Title VII and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we can't directly import them, right? But it doesn't mean we can't and I guess that's the whole point of my book is for us to understand the economic consequences of online abuse, to realize that when we target someone and it's searchable and it's in the first page of a search of their name that it truly interferes with their tangible life opportunities and it's something you as Wikipedians can take into consideration. I really appreciate it, that was a lot of fun. Today is the unconference day so I'll likely know about these sessions that are coming up. So for the next hour, there's not a, there's not exactly a break right now. For the next hour, we have in this room the lightning talks so people will give five minute presentations on any topic you like including, I'm talking about provincialism and why it's so great and should be on my encyclopedia and you can also announce your candidacy for the arbitration committee here today. Please do, please do. That would be the ultimate outcome of the lightning talks. Yes, please present that, that would be wonderful. In the Jefferson room, we have for the next hour we have split into beyond edit-a-thons. Sorry, sorry, okay. You hear me now? No? Excuse me? Sorry. Hello? Hello?