Online harassment is a digital rights issue. At its worst, it causes real and lasting harms to its targets, a fact that must be central to any discussion of harassment. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to craft laws or policies that will address those harms without inviting government or corporate censorship and invasions of privacy—including the privacy and free speech of targets of harassment. But, as we discuss below, there are ways to craft effective responses, rooted in the core ideals upon which the Internet was built, to protect the targets of harassment and their rights.

— Nadya Kayyali and Danny O’Brien – “Facing the Challenge of Online Harassment”

Important reading for those of you who still don’t see online harassment as a problem. What good is free speech when speaking up puts your safety at risk? I trust the EFF to find solutions that maximize everyone’s freedoms. I’m particularly a fan of counter-speech. Silence in the face of abuse is consent to it continuing.

[W]hat if in 2000 years we look back on our current internet, and think of it as a fascinating but heartbreaking tale of hubris. A moment in time where people were consuming a type of technology they knew wasn’t good for them because it conferred status and prestige. And that thing they craved so much was slowly making them lose their minds.

— Rose Eveleth – “The Internet Is a Series of Lead Tubes”

Fascinating food for thought. Are we truly able to handle globally scaled, constant connection without going mad? The jury is still out on that, but remember that it only took the Romans two centuries to connect their plumbing with their illness. But if the Internet, as we know it now, is making us sick, can we even fix it?

These are not abstractions. And this is where the arguments about the freedom of speech become most tone deaf. The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered. The enlightenment principles that undergird free speech also prescribed that the natural limits of oneís liberty lie at the precise point at which it begins to impose upon the liberty of another.

—Jelani Cobb – “Race and the Free-Speech Diversion”.

Freedom of speech also applies to people criticizing the speech of others. In all the debate around campus protesters for safe spaces and trigger warnings—or against racist behaviors on campus—the attitude I keep seeing is that these protestors are the enemy of free speech. Nothing could be further from the truth. Free speech is not free speech when it is used to silence the marginalized. When speaking up puts your life at risk, how is that free?

It has so quickly become acceptable practice within mainstream web publishing companies to reuse people’s tweets as the substance of an article that special tools have sprung up to help them do so. But inside these newsrooms, there is no apparent debate over whether it’s any different to embed a tweet from the President of the United States or from a vulnerable young activist who might not have anticipated her words being attached to her real identity, where she can be targeted by anonymous harassers.

What if the public speech on Facebook and Twitter is more akin to a conversation happening between two people at a restaurant? Or two people speaking quietly at home, albeit near a window that happens to be open to the street? And if more than a billion people are active on various social networking applications each week, are we saying that there are now a billion public figures? When did we agree to let media redefine everyone who uses social networks as fair game, with no recourse and no framework for consent?

—Anil Dash – “What Is Public?” — The Message

An important question to ask. I’m guilty of embedding tweets without permission, and I’ll try to reach out in the future. Beyond that, though, part of the problem is that on social networks—especially Twitter—privacy is a binary. You’re either entirely public, or entirely private. Real life does not work that way. Why should the places we live online work that way?

Being a woman in tech is fraught with all kinds of complications, and speaking up against inequalities in technology and harassment leaves victims open to more harassment. It is a fight I want to fight. But why should it be something women and marginalized groups have to fight on their own? Why do diverse and safe spaces have to come at such a high cost?

— Caroline Sinders – “I Was on One of Those Canceled SXSW Panels. Here Is What Went Down.”

An important look inside the SXSW debacle from one of the people involved. Caroline makes a great point: how can you provide a platform marginalized groups fight inequality and refuse to defend them against the abuse it opens them up to?