One
evening in March, library assistant Graham Mallaghan was leaving work
at the University of Kent in Canterbury when he noticed a group of
people hanging about outside the exit. Some of the group started
shouting abuse. 'Wait till he comes out, we'll kick his f****** head
in,' one of them yelled.
For Mallaghan this incident was part of
a confusing pattern, in which he increasingly found himself being
intimidated and threatened with no apparent explanation. No
explanation, that is, until an acquaintance told him to look on
Facebook, now the most talked about of the online social networking
sites.
When Mallaghan logged on, he found a group called For Those Who Hate The Little Fat Library Man, dedicated to insulting him.
One
of Mallaghan's responsibilities is to enforce the library's noise
regulations, and he believes the group was set up by students unhappy
with his efforts. Mallaghan, who is 37, says that it quickly began to
have an impact on all aspects of his life: 'At its peak the group had
363 members. Both my wife and I had the brakes on our bikes cut. People
would run up to me and take photos on their phone ' at one point there
was a competition on the group for who could get the best close-up.'
Websites
such as Facebook and MySpace are the primary exports of the Web 2.0
revolution, which brought user-created internet content to the fore.
The biggest of the sites, MySpace, launched in August 2003 and now has
more than 200 million accounts worldwide. Facebook has gathered more
than 49 million accounts so far, including more than five million in
the UK, its third-largest market. Globally it is adding 200,000 users a
day. The MySpace audience is mainly composed of teenagers, while
Facebook's users are older ' dominated by college students and young
professionals.
The sites have grown exponentially over the past
four years by offering a fast, free and easy way for people to come
together online and coalesce into an ever-shifting network of social
connections around hotspots of friendship, work and shared interests.
This can lend new energy to existing friendships and seed new ones at
an astonishing rate. All you need is the patience to create your own
homepage on one of these sites and the lack of inhibition required to
start sharing details about yourself, your life and thoughts with the
world. The doors of the social network are thrown open.
The
networking currency is 'friends' ' online camaraderie expressed in the
links that users create between their homepages and the pages of others
members of the network. And because you never need leave your computer
to stay in touch with your friends, you can have many hundreds of them.
Mallaghan
remains perplexed by his experience and believes the huge number of
people bullying him had to do with the medium in which they began doing
it. 'It was as if they compartmentalised online and real life. But I
couldn't do that ' their behaviour online had a profound effect on me.'
He believes sites such as Facebook 'lend themselves to this kind of
thing' and worries about how people behave when 'something gives them
false courage, and they don't imagine they're going to get caught'.
When
I approached - through Facebook - one of the group administrators, or
presidents, of the For Those Who Hate The Little Fat Library Man group,
she responded with a statement. 'Other than my name being put on the
website I had no part to play in this event whatsoever. I do not want
anything to do with your story as I had no part in this at all. Do not
put my name in any article whatsoever.' But once you are out there on
the network, all sorts of unwelcome visitors can come calling, and
there is not much you can do about it, except perhaps to stay silent
and hope they go away. The founder of the group did not respond to my
Facebook advances.
Laura Evans (not her real name) sits by the
window of a north London coffee shop. Autumn is stating its case in the
streets outside. Papers, sweet wrappers and leaves cluster and form
eddies before tumbling along in the direction of the City. Blowing into
her cup, Evans looks out at the street and remarks on the chill in the
air. Evans, 24, tells me she became a member of Facebook last year for
the most obvious reason of all - her friends were already on it and she
had started to feel that there was a party going on somewhere that she
was missing out on.
'At first I was against it. You think it's
only for geeks, but my friends were always telling me about this
Facebook thing and that Facebook thing, so I just thought 'why not give
it a go?'' Evans built a personal homepage on the site and although the
online profile she created for herself 'was a bit unrealistic', she
started to attract new friends almost straight away. 'Once people
started messaging me I felt obliged to reply, and then you start
getting sucked in. I got a bit addicted to it and started checking it
every day' so you're always on there trying to make new connections.'
But
this greedy pursuit of friendships is not without its pitfalls. 'I had
tons of friends, all different kinds of people, some I already knew,
and others complete strangers,' says Evans, marking off the different
groups on her fingers. 'Old school mates, people from parties and
things like that, lots of 'randoms' who I sort of knew as friends of
friends, ex-boyfriends ' for some reason they think it's a good way to
re-introduce themselves - and of course my friends who got me on there
in the first place.'
In August, Evans received a private message
from someone she had cut out of her life a few years previously. She
had changed her phone number and e-mail, and even moved house in a bid
to lose contact with certain people, and now they were back in her
life. The ease with which they had found her came as a shock.
The
message said: 'I bet you didn't think you'd find me on here, well here
I am. You changed your number, like a coward' Let's just hope we never
have to bump into one another ever again.'
'I was just sat there
staring at the computer in shock for hours; I just kept re-reading the
message over and over. I don't think I ever once thought about it being
unsafe - you just log off if anyone annoys you. But here, at the click
of a mouse, was one of the people I had worked hard to distance myself
from, and he had thrown a knife at my online social bubble.'
Evans shut down her account last month, but admits that she still feels like she is missing out on something by not having one.
Social
networking has rapidly transformed the way we interact with each other,
and has started to redefine the idea of friendship, making it something
much more nebulous than in pre-web days. But where casual friendship
thrives, so does casual enmity. The free association that social
networking sites put within everyone's reach cuts both ways, creating
an equally fast, free and easy tool for those who do not want to be our
friends. And the social pressure users feel to create more and more
connections scatters personal information about themselves more and
more indiscriminately.
'It is a classic symptom of the early
development of these sorts of things,' says Neil Munroe, external
affairs director of Equifax, a credit reference agency that offers
consumer advice on the risks of online socialising.
Easy access
to personal information is a perennial problem for technologically
advanced societies. But Munroe believes that the detached nature of
social networking encourages people to be far more liberal with
information which offline they would consider private. In this online
environment ' with its apparent dearth of immediate consequences of our
actions - social networkers often impart personal details which can
lead to them being harassed or bullied, on and offline. A survey
conducted by Equifax for the UK's National Identity Fraud Prevention
Week in October revealed that 83 per cent of people using online social
networks were giving their full name, 38 per cent revealed their dates
of birth and 63 per cent made their e-mail addresses public.
While
Mallaghan's and Evans' stories demonstrate just how easy it is for
adults to attract unwelcome attention on networking sites, younger
online socialites have long been at the sharp end of internet-based
crime, with countless stories of sexual predators taking advantage of
the veil of anonymity the web offers them.
In the US, social
networking sites are facing increased legal and political pressure from
state law enforcement officials to introduce controversial
age-verification technology. Aimed at rooting out online sexual
predators posing as young people, the new technology is designed to
protect children, who make up 22 per cent of social network users.
Executives from MySpace's parent company, Rupert Murdoch's News
Corporation, held meetings this month with state attorneys-general.
But
for many youngsters and their parents, the threat of bullying,
transferred from the playground to MySpace and similar sites, is as
much of a concern. In September, the British government published
guidelines on how to tackle the issue of cyber-bullying, a problem -
according to research conducted by the Department For Children, Schools
and Families - experienced by one in three children. Ed Balls,
secretary of state for children, schools and families, said:
'Cyber-bullying is a particularly insidious type of bullying as it can
follow young people wherever they go, and the anonymity that it
seemingly affords the perpetrator can make it even more stressful for
the victim.'
Action is being taken to protect children from
internet abuse. However, if - as in Mallaghan's case ' the victim of
cyber-bullying is an adult, who is responsible for protecting them?
One
answer is Mallaghan's employer, the University of Kent. 'We have no
objection to students using sites such as Facebook as long as they do
so in a responsible manner,' a spokeswoman said. 'However, some of the
comments on the website were deeply offensive and, as Graham's
employer, we alerted Facebook to this contravention of its code of
practice.'
According to the Association of Teachers and
Lecturers' guidelines, this was the correct route for the university to
take. When cyber-bullying affects an employee the guidelines suggest,
having been informed of the material, 'the senior manager should
approach the website hosts to ensure it is either amended or removed as
a matter of urgency, ie within 24 hours.' They go on to say: 'If the
website(s) will not co-operate, the senior manager should contact the
internet service provider.'
Facebook says it shares the view that
cyber-bullying is unacceptable. A spokesman said: 'Facebook does not
condone cyber-bullying on the site and will disable accounts that are
found to be intimidating others in any way.' In its terms of use,
Facebook states that members will have their accounts deactivated if
they intimidate, harass or bully other users or engage in predatory
conduct or stalking. Among other rules, members can lose their accounts
for creating a false identity.
Matthew Harris, a partner at law
firm Norton Rose and a specialist in information technology and
intellectual property law, explains that harassment or bullying can
result in action being taken against the bully. But, he says: 'Just as
the bully is liable for his actions, when the bullying occurs online,
anyone who facilitates it over the internet ' for example, a social
networking site - and continues to do so once they have been made aware
that it is occurring could be equally liable.'
Mallaghan says the
website did not respond to the university's complaint and 'did not seem
to do anything at all about it'. Instead Facebook responded by
informing the university that it did not take complaints from
institutions. So he contacted the site himself to request that the
group be closed. He also went on the website and used the 'report
group' function to alert Facebook to the situation.
Facebook
continued to allow the group to exist on its website, and failed to
respond to any of Mallaghan's pleas to get it removed. Eventually, with
the help of a colleague's son, Mallaghan was able to access the For
Those Who Hate The Little Fat Library Man group himself, and remove its
contents more than a month after it was created.
For Evans, the
idea of cyber-harassment is part and parcel of the social networking
experience. Looking out of the window of the coffee shop, she points to
the people bustling past one another in the soggy, grey light of the
street. 'They wouldn't dream of exchanging insults,' she says. 'Put the
same people online and they'd be slagging each other like there was no
tomorrow.'
Dr Karen Long, a lecturer at the University of Sussex
who specialises in the social psychology of the internet, says the web
merely serves as a new platform for behaviour that has always been
around. She describes the exchange of abuse between social networkers
as 'the same as people writing insults on the walls of public toilets'.
But
she agrees that there are important differences in the online
experience. 'The factors that limit behaviour in face-to-face
interaction are absent online,' she says. 'Status markers don't exist,
so people feel freer to be more anti-social.' The perceived escape from
responsibility is one of the great dangers of social networking. Many
users of the websites believe what happens online stays online, but as
with Mallaghan, this is not always the case.
The law goes some
way to protecting internet users from abuse. But often it is more
effective for individuals to defend themselves. To this end, there is a
growing number of voluntary groups that work to uphold the values of
good cyber-citizenship online, patrolling the web for people who misuse
the environment it provides.
From its small offices in
Pennsylvania, Cyber Angels has rolled out a worldwide operation,
offering protection to web users. Launched as an arm of the Guardian
Angels - a volunteer group that was set up in 1979 to patrol the
streets and subways of New York ' it offers support and advice to
victims of cyber-stalking and bullying. It provides free weekly online
classes, covering a range of subjects, to help web users understand
what they can do to protect themselves from potential bullying.
'We'll
help you collect all the information you need to take it to the
police,' says Katya Gifford, a spokeswoman for the group. 'The biggest
number of complaints comes from social networking site victims; it's
the number-one type of case that we deal with, and the problem seems to
be growing.'
Back in the coffee shop, things have got very noisy.
It seems the hospital around the corner has just finished hosting a
post-natal class for all the mothers and babies in London. The place
thunders with a cacophony of hissing espresso machines, screaming
infants and soothing maternal tones.
Evans is telling me about
life after Facebook: 'I was controlled by it for a while, I couldn't
shut it down, even when I wanted to, and I was always checking it. It's
a bit of a social disability not being on it, but I just think that is
ridiculous. I'd rather be left out than controlled by it.'
To
research this piece Ed Hammond set up a two Facebook accounts, one
under his own name and another using a pseudonym. Within five days the
pseudonymous account was disabled and his e-mail address blacklisted.
The other side of social networking
Enemybook
Goes under the strap line 'Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer'.
Set up as a riposte to the perceived bogus nature of many online friendships, Enemybook runs off the back of Facebook.
It
allows you to add people as Facebook enemies below your friends,
specify why they are enemies and notify them that they are enemies. You
can also see who lists you as an enemy, and even become friends with
the enemies of your enemies.
Snubster
Similarly to
Enemybook, Snubster derides the notion of social networking sites, and
can run off Facebook. Users can build lists of personal enemies from
their Facebook contacts, who will then be sent a snub and will be
alerted that they are either 'On notice' or 'Dead to me'.
Hatebook
Modelled
on the Facebook concept, and with an almost identical layout, Hatebook
offers a less friendly approach to the world of social networking. You
can befriend 'Other haters', and your homepage alerts you when 'Other
fricking idiots' contact you. The site also provides you with an 'Evil
Map', marking the locations of other users. The antithesis to
Facebook's emphasis on making friends, this is an open forum for abuse
and aggression.
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