In her new book, The Internet of Garbage, Sarah Jeong states that “the Internet is, and always has been, mostly garbage.” She talked with The Toast about topics discussed in her book, including online harassment, doxing, spam, free speech, and the challenges of moderating content platforms and social media networks. You can buy Sarah’s book on iTunes or Amazon.

The Toast: If the Internet has always been mostly garbage, why did you write this book now? Do you think we’re better positioned in terms of either will or technology to take more of the garbage out?

Sarah Jeong: The book positions online harassment as part of a larger category of long-extant problems, but when it comes down to it, it’s still a book about online harassment. One of the things I wanted to do with the book was to hammer in how online harassment has been around forever — but I don’t think there would have been an audience for the book until fairly recently. There’s a lot more mainstream awareness of harassment and online misogyny in particular.

Why do you think that is? More media coverage, more survivors of online harassment speaking out?

100% media coverage. Part of that has to do with journalists being aggressively harassed — the journalists then turn around and use their platforms to show the world what is happening to them.

But that’s not the whole story. The Internet now includes a much broader swath of the entire population, which means that the old trite victim-blaming along the lines of “it’s just the Internet” doesn’t work so well. We now recognize the Internet as just another arena for our day-to-day lives, a place that’s no less real than the offline world. The Internet’s ubiquity also means that large-scale incidents of harassment become very large-scale, sucking in celebrities, journalists, even entire media organizations.

In the book, you mention some of the issues with media coverage of harassment — from reports not being clear about the definition of “doxing” to the focus on white cis women who’ve been harassed to the tendency to make harassment seem smaller or less threatening, less real-world, than it really is. Now that we are talking about it more, how can we ensure better, more accurate coverage of this issue? (Apart from sending a copy of your book to every single member of the media!)

The most important thing to address is how people of color — particularly black women — are either erased or villainized when we talk about online harassment. I would love to see a book about online harassment that centers on people of color. I wish my book could have done that, but unfortunately, there just aren’t a lot of studies on, for example, how race exacerbates harassment. There aren’t a lot of media accounts, either. When black women get harassed, either their stories never appear in the media, or their stories get retold, blaming the black woman for the ensuing harassment. See, for example, Jon Ronson’s shameful treatment of Adria Richards.

This isn’t just an issue of equitable treatment in the media. It actually has serious policy ramifications. Some of the most prominent funded anti-harassment activism centers on carceral remedies — that is, resorting to police, prisons, and the criminal justice system. If you’re a person of color, trans, and/or a sex worker, you may be less willing to go to the police.

A related problem is how the problem of harassment is cast as “a torrent of mean words.” And yes, a torrent of mean words really sucks to experience, and user interfaces should be designed to mitigate that, but that’s just froth on top of things like having your address published, your social security number published, your children threatened, your accounts hacked, strange packages arriving your door, strangers following you around your city. One reason why the media focuses on unruly speech over, say, doxing or stalking or swatting, is that mean tweets are out there in the open for everyone to see. No need to do any actual reporting. But this tendency is very harmful. It treats targets like they are fearful and upset because of “mere words.” Targets of sustained harassment aren’t thin-skinned, they’re often being subjected to campaigns aimed at making them afraid.

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DONT LET “THE MAN” TELL YOU WHAT TO FUCKIN DO WITH YOUR BODY AND YOUR KEYBOARD

YOU WILL NEVER LIVE UP TO THE SEXIST, PATRIARCHAL STANDARD OF WHAT MAKES A “GOOD” SOURCE CODE OR AN “ACCEPTABLE” ALGORITHM

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