Solidarity against online harassment

We at Take Back the Tech! are thrilled to see this very powerful statement from Tor and are always happy to partner on related initiatives. Online harassment causes real harm and restricts a variety of rights from freedom of expression to right to work.

For anyone facing online harassment, we have resources on our site: https://www.takebackthetech.net. For developers, we recommend incorporating the Feminist Principles of the Internet into your work in order to create technology and digital spaces that are open, inclusive and equal and that reject violence in all its forms: http://www.genderit.org/articles/feminist-principles-internet

In solidarity,
Take Back the Tech!

Thanks Tor Project, for taking a stand against online harassment! (On top of all the other things you do.)

Click-baiting writers like to portray you as somehow responsible for everything illegal or idiotic that people do over the Tor network. It's not so simple.

This is an important and welcomed step. I stand by the colleagues at the Tor project and I proudly join them in this invitation to improve the space we work in. Let's aim for dialogue instead of harassment, but let's not be shy of calling it out when we come across it.

Best,
Enrique Piracés

Thanks for this public statement. It is good to be explicit about our expectations of basic decency to one another, though it's a bit depressing that these standards aren't obvious for every thinking and feeling person already.

In solidarity,

Daniel Kahn Gillmor (dkg)

Thanks for taking a stand. Online harassment is why we can't have nice things.

It is good to realize not just the victim suffers, but everyone who stands by and does nothing loses. The community loses and society at large loses.

We fully trust the people at Tor and support them in their fight for freedom and and a better world.

- The Greenhost Team -

"Don't feed the trolls" works when they're isolated. But when they become organized mobs and plan malicous harassment campaigns, they feed themselves. Standing up to them and saying 'no', firmly, becomes necessary. Thank you for this.

Thank you for this effort. Online harassment is not being addressed, and the emotional, physical and psychological toll it has on women and sexual minorities is enormous. As a staff at a rapid response grantmaking organization, we are Urgent Action Fund take online harassment very seriously, as women and trans* human rights defenders continue to get attacked online, which further undermines their work.

I literally had to leave Twitter, because the entire platform is just rife with mistreating people who are unhappy with their own bodies, and seeking to match their brain with it.

Personally, I don't recommend Twitter or Facebook for a multitude of other reasons. There is a reason most of my real friends use Diaspora and not Facebook.

Start caring about trans rights, then we'll talk.

I'm proud to see such strong solidarity in our community on this issue.

Folks may be interested in a recently published guide "How to Survive the Internet: Strategies for Staying Safer Online" by Yael Grauer. It discusses some ways of defending oneself against online harassment & targeting, you can find it here:

https://yaelwrites.com/saferonline.pdf

(disclosure: I provided some feedback on an early draft)

Michael

Where was your solidarity when Brendan Eich was being harassed for having the wrong political opinion?

A thousand thanks to all Tor staffers for your hard work!

arma's post raises more questions than it answers in my mind, but it is probably not a bad thing to state that you are determined to protect your staff from harassment.

I'm totally with you guys.

We in Tunisia were able to change our lives, lead our revolution and ouste what we once thought an undefeatable dictator using the Internet. With Freedom online, we really changed our destiny, and the destiny of our children as well. We must keep it safe an free.

Rafik.

Thanks for taking an important step to create coalitions who stand in solidarity against online harassment.

As is the case in an offline world, people get harassed because of gender, believes, political affiliation, etc. This is not how we should treat each other and work towards a better and more equal world.

Let's create that better and more equal world.

In solidarity,
Jurre van Bergen

I LOVE YOU TOR guys.

I think that, whether you're talking about online harassment or just how to behave in an academic environment, everyone could use more education about these kinds of issues. What I see in University environments a lot are students who are otherwise good people and just aren't aware of their own nature, and other students who think the behavior is specifically targeted at them and not a general problem that the more aggressive student has. For example, male students tend to talk over female students who are, e.g., giving a talk. I've seen it a hundred times where a female student is giving a presentation and a male student interrupts, then another male student jumps in, and suddenly it's a discussion amongst the male students and the female student is standing there wondering whether she'll be allowed to speak again. I just try to: (1) educate the more aggressive students that they may not realize they're doing it, but they are; (2) keep it in my mind, since I have the exact same tendency and sometimes don't catch myself; and, (3) let the speaker know that others not letting them speak is a general problem that they should be aware of and that other students have faced, too.

My point is that education is needed all around. We need to educate people who are prone to harassing behavior about what they're doing, we need to educate people like me that are well-meaning but not as sensitive to these issues as we should be, and we need to educate people that may become targets that---while the specific instance of harassment is specific to them---the problem is a general one that a lot of people face.

Jed Crandall
Associate Professor, Dept. of Computer Science
University of New Mexico

I've often wished that civics courses (with a strong helping of ethical philosophy and topical cybersafety) were standard fare in US high schools. The problem is that parents (and school boards) tend to react badly when their child reports that their teacher asked them to read... almost anything a teacher might assign for a classroom discussion about ethical philosophy.

Its all very well making wonderful statements that everyone can agree with. However I don't see anything in the way of solutions being presented. And, let's face it, technology like Tor is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it makes it harder for internet bullies to locate you and a curse because it makes it harder for victims of internet bullying to identify them!

I can't help feeling that this statement is somewhat defensive given that Tor technology does make it much easier to bully people anonymously. I have no idea how you are going to prevent internet bullying at the same time as making it harder to trace or identify any of the people doing the actual bullying.

So, whereas I like the sentiment of this message, I am skeptical about what can be done to remedy the situation.

Calls for solidarity must always be called into question. Allowing a respected body to act on behalf of its community to inform them how they should be behaving is inherently a call for centralized control regardless of good intentions. This is the case here, and I find the support for this move a sign that skepticism towards authoritarian language is dwindling.

"Harassment" is a nebulous and poorly defined term. Unless you can cite a clearly written and objective law agreed upon by consensus as to what harassment truly is, saying you stand in solidarity against "online harassment" is a defacto endorsement of censorship. As an example, I have seen "harassment" being used to describe any form of contact between parties on a public forum. One can argue this is an extreme outlier but only after "harassment" is clearly defined.

Your article here creates a false equivalency between real word abuse and online "harassment". A person suffering from abuse in the real world often has bodily harm and emotional distress which is unavoidable. Online harassment, in of itself, never has bodily harm and the emotional distress is almost always avoidable by not engaging with toxic individuals. The comparison portrays a skewed version of reality in order to emotionally appeal to the audience to stop them from questioning your statements.

The sexism card is also on the table in full display. Their is a common belief that women online receive more harassment and/or receive worse harassment than then men. There has been no peer-reviewed rigorously provided body of studies confirming this to be reality. Without a source to back up the assertion, it is meaningless. Further, would it not be better these measurements are being done to prevent all harassment regardless of one's identity?

Most troubling is the line "Further, we will no longer hold back out of fear or uncertainty from an opportunity to defend a member of our community online." which implies a guilt-before-innocence mentality. If someone comes to you claiming they are being harassed, would you blindly believe them and act on their behalf to take punitive or legal action against the accused? Such an attitude will lead to false flags and will promote an environment of abuse from those trying to prevent it.

Thank you to Tor for speaking out publicly against this kind of abuse and harassment.

Thank you for taking an unequivocal stance against harassment, and for committing to contribute to the larger conversation. -Yael

To Mr. Crandall: what female researchers ask is a basic working environment rights. Justifying it by saying male don't notice it is just an excuse for undermining the problem. Also, postponing finding solutions for it.

Thank you to *everyone* @ Tor.

Signed in solidarity!

It is sad that in the year 2014 we still need to deal with this shit.

Absolutely well said. I'm so proud to support a project that has these ideals and helps provide protection to online abuse/harassment. Just one of many solid uses and benefits of using Tor.

Many thanks to all Tor staffers for your hard work!

Against online harassment .Solidarity!

Jinping xi !!!!

What about those evil entities such as Cloudfare and Google who continue to harass Tor users?

I have been following the Tor project for a very long time now, and I want to make it crystal clear: I stand with you.

Good post and it's nice to see the name list growing, but I wonder about the inclusion of obvious pseudonyms and submissions from anons. For example, I could have created a post saying, "Please add my name, Roger Dingledine, to the list."

I guess that the worst that could happen is someone is placed on the list that doesn't want to be on, or a pseudonym is on that is then used somewhere online to harass. Is the point of signing the post supposed to be showing that there are real people who are willing to work towards the goal?

i salute you what you have done

It was about time we started to act about this issue. Great initiative

I'm a co-founder of AntiPolygraph.org, a non-profit, public-interest website. I literally depend on Tor daily and am deeply grateful for the hard work of everyone at the Tor Project.

I deplore the harassment campaign directed against Tor developer Andrea Shepard and wish to publicly express my solidarity.

George W. Maschke
AntiPolygraph.org

Raising awareness is generally good.
What does it mean to "not tolerate harassment"?
Especially in a Tor context, might it mean for example that the answer to (anonymous) bad speech is a flood of (anonymous or not) counterarguments and support? Or is there a backdoor being considered to trace harassing users?

This is excellent. Thank you so much.

in addition to it's privacy enabling, tor is also helpful for advancing human rights. so this statement against harassment fits easily within that human rights work.

some people are just so miserable they can't see it benefits all internet users to be against harassment.

keep up the good work!

Freedom for all. Peace. :)

Thank you for highlighting this issue. I condemn all forms of of harassment, on-line or otherwise. The right to anonymity and free speech does not confer a right to harass, insult or otherwise maltreat any other person.

I am proud to add my voice in support.

Mick Morgan

Am I the only one who had hoped that Tor would refrain from making any political/social justice/otherwise biased statements?
I honestly expected a complete neutrality towards any internet activity from the project that claims support for internet freedom.
As much as I'm against any harassment, this blog entry did strike me as dissapointing.