How do online communities define and enforce policies against harassment and public shaming?

Key findings

• Policy ambiguity: Defining what constitutes harassment or public shaming in a community's code of conduct can be challenging. Behaviors range from simple name-calling to more severe actions like humiliation and cyberbullying, requiring clear and precise definitions to ensure consistent application.
• Context matters: The severity and impact of speech can vary significantly depending on the context, platform, and target. What might be acceptable in a private conversation could be deemed harassment in a public forum.
• Enforcement challenges: Effective policy enforcement requires a robust system for reporting, reviewing, and acting on violations. This often involves a mix of automated tools and human moderation, similar to how hobbyist email blacklists and official blocklists operate to maintain email hygiene.
• Subjectivity of harm: Perceptions of harm are subjective, leading to debates over what constitutes 'insulting' versus 'constructive criticism'. This can complicate policy application, especially when trying to differentiate between legitimate critique and targeted abuse.
• Impact of public shaming: Public shaming, while sometimes used as a form of social control, can lead to disproportionate responses, privacy violations, and relentless torment for the targeted individual, as explored by The Conversation.

Key considerations

• Clear code of conduct: Communities should establish a clear, accessible, and frequently updated code of conduct that explicitly defines prohibited behaviors, including various forms of harassment and public shaming.
• Reporting mechanisms: Provide easy and confidential ways for users to report policy violations. Transparency about the reporting process, without disclosing specific details of individual cases, builds trust.
• Moderation training: Moderators require training to apply policies consistently and fairly, understanding nuances of online interactions and potential biases. This is crucial for managing disputes and preventing a hostile environment.
• Private dispute resolution: Encourage and facilitate private resolution of conflicts where appropriate, especially before issues escalate to public shaming. This minimizes further harm and maintains community decorum.
• Consequences and accountability: Clearly communicate the consequences of policy violations, from warnings to temporary bans or permanent removal, ensuring fairness and accountability for all members.

Key opinions

• Humiliation is harmful: Marketers frequently express that public humiliation, especially when unwarranted or amplified by a crowd, can be profoundly damaging to an individual's professional standing and personal well-being.
• Context matters in criticism: There's a strong consensus that public call-outs or challenges should ideally be confined to private channels, especially if they target specific individuals rather than general ideas or concepts.
• Fairness in moderation: Marketers seek fair and impartial enforcement of community rules, emphasizing that policies should protect those being harassed and not inadvertently silence victims or enable perpetrators. This resonates with the need for clear guidelines for handling spam and abuse complaints in email deliverability.
• Public platforms, public consequences: Some marketers believe that if an individual chooses to make a statement publicly, they should be prepared to address public reactions, provided those reactions do not cross into harassment. However, the line here is often debated.

Key considerations

• Distinguishing intent: It's important to discern whether a public comment is genuinely insulting or merely a request for a second opinion, even if perceived as annoying. The intent behind the communication significantly impacts its classification as harassment.
• Avoiding retaliatory shaming: Even when feeling targeted, individuals within a community should avoid using public forums for retaliatory shaming, as it can create a hostile environment. This applies equally to responding to negative feedback, where it's best to respond to abuse complaints constructively.
• Promoting healthy discussion: Marketers emphasize the need for community guidelines that encourage respectful debate and discourage behaviors that might negate someone's expertise based on irrelevant factors like gender or tenure.
• Moderator role: Community moderators face the delicate task of enforcing policies while avoiding the appearance of silencing legitimate concerns or protecting aggressors. Their role is to ensure a safe space for all members.

Key opinions

• Complexity of online interactions: Experts acknowledge that online communication, especially without non-verbal cues, can be easily misunderstood. What one person intends as a simple question, another might perceive as a slight or challenge.
• Policy enforcement is key: Effective community moderation is crucial to prevent discussions from devolving into public shaming or 'lynching'. Policies must be clearly defined and consistently enforced to maintain a respectful environment, much like how email blocklists function to filter out malicious activity.
• Dangers of misinterpretation: The lack of tone and body language in text-based communication makes sarcasm and intent difficult to convey, leading to misunderstandings that can escalate conflicts.
• Protecting community integrity: The primary goal of community policy should be to ensure a safe and productive space for all members, preventing any single conflict from disrupting the broader purpose of the community. This aligns with ensuring domain reputation by maintaining sending practices.

Key considerations

• Clear definitions of harassment: Communities must clearly define harassment to cover a broad range of offensive behaviors, including those that demean, humiliate, or embarrass a person, emphasizing their unlikelihood in terms of social and moral reasonableness.
• Proactive moderation: Moderators should be prepared to intervene swiftly to shut down threads that escalate into public shaming, even if the initial intent was not malicious. This prevents a positive community from being derailed.
• Encouraging private resolution: When personal conflicts arise between members, experts recommend guiding them to direct messages for resolution. This prevents private disagreements from becoming public spectacles.
• Balancing free speech and safety: Platforms must navigate the delicate balance between allowing diverse opinions and protecting users from harm, ensuring policies don't inadvertently silence vulnerable voices or legitimate critique, as highlighted by Word to the Wise in discussions around DMARC policy.

Key findings

• Legal definitions: Legally, harassment involves behaviors that are disturbing, upsetting, or threatening, often evolving from discriminatory grounds and impacting a person's rights, as defined by Kirsch & Kirsch, LLC.
• Platform standards: Social media platforms establish community standards that address behavioral policies like harassment, spamming, and hacking, recognizing these as tactics in influence operations, as noted by Carnegie Endowment.
• Free speech limitations: While respecting freedom of speech, many legal frameworks acknowledge that harassing speech, especially that which threatens or demeans, falls outside protected expression, as discussed by The First Amendment Encyclopedia.
• Impact on individuals: Studies show that targets of online harassment and public shaming often experience relentless torment, humiliation, and a feeling of having no relief, with significant psychological and social repercussions.
• Evolving threats: The online landscape is constantly changing, with new forms of harassment emerging, requiring continuous adaptation of policies and enforcement mechanisms by platforms and legal systems.

Key considerations

• Comprehensive policy scope: Documentation emphasizes that policies should cover a wide range of offensive behaviors, from simple name-calling to more severe forms of sexual harassment and body shaming, and explicitly prohibit public dissemination of embarrassing information.
• Defining cyberbullying: A critical first step in handling online harassment is establishing clear definitions of cyberbullying, typically understood as a repeated pattern of behavior intended to scare, harm, anger, or shame a targeted individual, similar to preventing bot sign-ups that disrupt online spaces.
• Proportionality of response: While public shaming can serve as a form of social control, documentation suggests that its application must be proportionate and not violate individual privacy, recognizing its potential for severe negative consequences.
• Continuous policy review: Given the dynamic nature of online interactions, platforms and legal bodies should regularly review and update their policies to address new forms of harassment and ensure their effectiveness, aligning with safely transitioning DMARC policies to stronger enforcement.