Instagram Has a Massive Harassment Problem

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/instagram-has-massive-harassment-problem/572890/?single_page=true

by dsr12 • 8 years ago

160 106 8 years ago

theatlantic.com

danso5• 8 years ago

The problem is "massive" in the way that Instagram itself is massive, and having a public account opens you up to a massive attack surface (i.e. the global, growing audience of Instagram and the Internet at-large). As in the case with Facebook and Twitter, there's only so much a social network can do without putting real controls on who can create an account and who can participate:

Like Twitter, Instagram enables the easy setup of endless anonymous accounts: All you need is an email address and you can start posting within minutes. Abusers leverage this functionality to create armies of fake accounts to attack people. But while Twitter now allows users to protect themselves—by muting replies from people who don’t follow you, who you don’t follow, aren’t verified, haven’t confirmed an email address, and more—Instagram has only implemented some of these controls.

Instagram had a nicer overall "personality" to it initially because it was centered around the posting of attractive, innocuous photos. But in the end, it's still a platform that allows anyone to disseminate information of any kind (not just comments, but screenshots and images of text memes), so there's no reason to think that as it becomes massively mainstream, it won't have the exact same problems as Facebook and Twitter.

edit: fixed grammar

village-idiot• 8 years ago

I think social media operators are under-valuing the risk that harassment has to their organizations. Social media companies live and die by the network effect. New social sites sometimes hit a magic threshold point after which they take off like a rocket as "everyone" is on it. Dying social sites drop below that same point, after which it's a "ghost town", and usership falls flat.

There are all kinds of things that can cause that to happen, famously redesigns and changes to moderator actions has done it in the past. But in general having a continuously shitty experience as people harass you is a pretty compelling reason to not use a social site. I cannot help but wonder if enough people will leave to trigger a mass exit or not.

peterwwillis• 8 years ago

*Humanity Has a Massive Harassment Problem

FTFY

seany• 8 years ago

Maybe it isn't actually that big of a problem?

untog2• 8 years ago

Maybe it is?

bilbo0s4• 8 years ago

Internet crazies waiting for you at your home or place of employment, most definitely is a problem.

Internet crazies swatting you because you got a portafort in fortnite, or some equally trivial offense like that, most definitely is a problem.

And that's not even getting into the more sinister stuff that the fbi has to deal with.

dickinson99• 8 years ago

Close the tab, app, etc. Walk away from the computer.

wgerard3• 8 years ago

Bit hard to do when they're calling your work, visiting your house, swatting you, etc.

izzydata4• 8 years ago

Posting identifiable information on the internet should never be done. Perhaps middle schools and high schools need to teach kids about the dangers of the internet.

black6• 8 years ago

Precisely. It's not as if you are Buzz Aldrin, trying to walk away again and again and continuing to be harassed by a moon landing conspiracy theorist. The 1's and 0's are easily silenced.

hooph00p2• 8 years ago

No.

danso5• 8 years ago

Given than HN is a discussion board frequented by people who generally see the Internet as a fundamental aspect of “real life”, it seems ironic to argue that people should solve their social media problems by just logging off. It’s feels akin to telling someone who is forced to live with throttled capped Internet bandwidth to “go outside and read a book” or “just go to the movie theater”.

Presumably, the people who are most unhappy about Instagram harassment are people who use the social network to make connections and friendships that they can’t make otherwise — there is no line between their social network relationships and “real life” relationships, especially as the former so often becomes the latter. That Instagram is so massively popular, and even an engine for economic activity, is a sign that it’s not something that people can simply log off from. Imagine telling a developer to just “log off” and get a “real” job if Microsoft were to kill every Github repo that didn’t agree to abide by new draconian licensing and terms of service.

liftbigweights• 8 years ago

Then stop using instagram.

What's with nytimes, theatlantic and the rest of the media and their endless spam and whining about social media?

If you don't like it, stop using it? Leave HN alone.

HN has a massive nytimes, theatlantic, etc spam problem too. We don't have a way to filter useless clickbait media.

If the "journalist" at theatlantic don't like instagram, go start your own version of "nice" instagram and make billions.

untog2• 8 years ago

Leave HN alone.

You realise these things appear because HN users submit them, and other HN users upvote them?

danso5• 8 years ago

Instagram is part of one of the world’s largest tech companies, which makes most of its money by having people freely use and live on its service. Considering its user base is in the hundreds of millions, this makes it a company worth covering by news organizations.

Your comment is as inane and oblivious as me telling you to stop whining about The Atlantic, because it’s free and if you don’t like what you see you should just log off.

tantalor• 8 years ago

Then stop using HN.

What's with liftbigweights and their endless spam and whining about interesting, on-topic submissions?

If you don't like it, stop using it? Leave HN alone.

liftbigweights has a massive HN spam problem too. We don't have a way to filter trolls.

If the "user" at liftbigweights don't like HN, go start your own version of "nice" HN and make billions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

marcodave3• 8 years ago

"... Instagram enables easy sign up via just an email address"

Is the "easy sign up" such an important selling point, that anything more complicated drives away users?

I'm wondering how could be possible to avoid hoarding burner accounts just for the sake of trolling, while at the same time not requiring 1Billion people to send in scans of their ID to prove their identity.

Not to mention that even requiring ID for proving identity, one can still troll and harass as long as it's not caught on the fact

danso5• 8 years ago

IIRC, virtually every service just requires an email address, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter. I’ve found that Twitter now quickly throttles any dummy accounts I make by requiring a phone number. But obviously, there’s huge downsides to requiring a phone number.

bearcobra• 8 years ago

Requiring confirmation with an SMS code seems like a reasonable step to tie accounts to a more permanent identifier which can then be used for moderation.

tracker14• 8 years ago

For a nominal fee, one can get a burner phone/account to sign up for any number of sites. It does very little to de-anonymize someone.

jonknee2• 8 years ago

But this is Facebook we're talking about, they'll just use that for creepy advertising targeting and not take the harassment seriously.

wgerard3• 8 years ago

Bringing this to a top-level comment:

People wildly underestimate how dedicated and adept some people are at finding PII given even minute details [1]. The only real way to avoid sharing PII is to stay off the internet entirely.

Even then, pandora's box has already been opened. Your PII is available even if you haven't explicitly chosen to share it [2].

Once it's out (and spoiler alert, it's out), "stepping away from the computer" is no longer an option. The article describes in detail how it transitions from online to real-life harassment: Swatting, stopping by your personal residence, calling your work, calling your friends and family, etc.

Yes, it happens to people of moderate means and very minor celebrity. Yes, you can suffer physical harm or death as a result [3]. Yes, we should also try and solve the swatting problem from the police side as well.

1: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/4chan-shia-labeouf-secret-l...

2: Equifax

3: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/30/us/kansas-swatting-death-affi...

justicezyx• 8 years ago

Actually, if anyone pays any attention to Chines online space, "human flesh search" has been working for over a decade since the early dawn of the mass adoption of Internet in China.

The moral of the story is that no matter how careful one protect their identity, they always leak more than they thought they are leaking.

reggieband• 8 years ago

Reminds me of a video [1] posted by Tom Scott from "Things you might not know" youbtube. He and a friend posted a photo of themselves watching the eclipse somewhere in the USA and it is scary how accurately their location was found by Internet sleuths.

I feel bad for the new generation of Twitch/Youtube people who are exposing themselves to the Internet. There are some freaky good stalkers out there.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGqEBvlmFAQ

girst• 8 years ago

Also from Tom Scott: "I know what you did five minutes ago"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYVBshcN7wU

justaguyhere• 8 years ago

I feel bad for the new generation of Twitch/Youtube people who are exposing themselves to the Internet

It starts even before they expose themselves in the form of parents who post everything about their kids on Facebook.

Bograff• 8 years ago

There are some freaky good stalkers out there.

That doesn't quite do the situation justice. The stalking gets crowdsourced; often to people who are well practiced at it.

tomcam• 8 years ago

I literally did not think that level of precision would be possible. There were people from Cardiff, England who located these two gentlemen at a tiny tiny airport in Missouri. Incredible and mildly frightening.

legostormtroopr• 8 years ago

I mean if you want a great account of how little information can be used to find you, you have to include the greatest game of capture the flag: Shia LeBeouf's "He Will Not Divide Us" vs 4chan.

a flag emblazoned with the words "He Will Not Divide Us" would be flown for the duration of the presidency. The camera was pointed up at the flag, set against a backdrop of nothing but sky.
Within 38 hours of resuming transmission, the flag was located by a collaboration of 4chan users, who used airplane contrails, celestial navigation, and other techniques to determine that it was located in Greeneville, Tennessee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaBeouf,_R%C3%B6nkk%C3%B6_%26_...

megaman82• 8 years ago

Swatting should be considered very risky now. One guy got like 15 years in jail for Swatting. I don't understand how anyone can take the risk to do it

handedness• 8 years ago

Never underestimate someone whose still-developing brain thinks they can't be tried as an adult.

Or, for that matter, extradited.

e9• 8 years ago

I am off the grid (no social media, scrubbed basic internet mentions, etc) and with every breach there is more and more PII that I can find online about me which is insane...

paxys• 8 years ago

The only real way to avoid sharing PII is to stay off the internet entirely

That doesn't always work either. A lot of PII shared completely offline finds its way to the internet, and third party hacks make it accessible.

erikpukinskis• 8 years ago

For anyone else who didn’t know what PII is: personally identifying information

simonebrunozzi• 8 years ago

I had to search, so sharing it here in case someone else is wondering: PII stands for Personally Identifiable Information.

jerf3• 8 years ago

I continue every month to be more convinced that the fundamental problem is that any platform where anybody, unsolicited, can for free send messages to anybody else, will forever have the "thundering hordes of assholes"[1] problem once it hits even modest scale. Having to hire people by the hundreds to "moderate" is desperately trying to salvage a fundamentally unworkable system, not a solution, even before we get into the interesting second-order effects such "solutions" can create, and what it does to the moderators themselves psychologically. You can't build a solution based around A: hoping the assholes just don't show up or B: that you will be smarter or more dedicated than the assholes.

I don't necessarily have a perfect solution all lined up, but just correctly identifying the problem is step one. I've mentally noodled with a number of models. But the thing they have in common is that none of them start with a new user being able to fling whatever they want to whomever they want for free.

[1]: I don't actually consider it a failure of the system if you encounter an asshole every so often. That's life. But when you start a video stream and you end up with so many assholes typing asshole comments so quickly that you literally can't even read them before they scroll away, even if you want to, that's a structural problem, not just a social problem.

noobermin• 8 years ago

This is HN, the glorified peanut gallery, but seriously, what are your ideas? I'm curious to have a discussion about them and see what others think too.

jerf3• 8 years ago

One is the original weblog model, with either no comments enabled or with some sort of whitelist comment participation. You can write whatever you want, and some asshole over there can write about how stupid you are, and it doesn't have to bother you unless you deliberately visit the asshole. Back before social media, there were cases where there were entire weblogs devoted to replying to literally every post some other weblog made, but nobody cared except the few who deliberately sought that out, because you had to go out of your way to visit.

I suppose I should point out explicitly that my goal is not to create a 100% comfortable world in which you never encounter an asshole, but to create something a bit more like the real world where by the time you're an adult and you've found a place for yourself in the world, by and large you probably don't have a problem dealing with lots of people-you-consider-assholes personally. (You may professionally, but that's a different sort of problem.) Even if you maybe have a problem with one or two people in particular, you almost certainly do not set a foot outside your bedroom door and immediately get several thousand people screaming at you at the top of your lungs. But you're going to encounter a few, sure.

More on the Reddit model, I outlined something here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16570017 The observation that it is computationally expensive is true, but I'm not convinced it's intractably so. There the idea is that if some anklebiter starts replying to your every comment, by default you at most see something greyed out or collapsed if you did not have any previous connection to them, and they can't bother you. I think to jumpstart the system you'd always have to have a couple of random comments show up, and some of them may be assholes, but it wouldn't be the case I was describing where you can get this unrelenting torrent of abuse.

(I think such a system would have more manipulation resistance, too. $MEDDLER could go to some political forum that works that way, and maybe they could convince a few people or a subcommunity to upvote them, but they wouldn't be able to completely take over an entire topic by sheer mass the way they can on Reddit. You can't get a world where $MEDDLERs don't exist, but you don't have to have a world in which only $MEDDLERs and $MEDDLER-approved accounts exist on your forum.)

jungturk2• 8 years ago

I'm curious about a messaging system where the cost-to-send is inversely proportional to your anonymity.

pbhjpbhj• 8 years ago

Peanut Gallery definition:

"A peanut gallery was, in the days of vaudeville, a nickname for the cheapest and ostensibly rowdiest seats in the theater, the occupants of which were often known to heckle the performers." (Wikipedia CC-SA, via Google)

That's a new one on me.

devinhelton• 8 years ago

Anything that makes the user invest a bit in the reputation of their account before they are allowed to message strangers would do the trick. Charge $10 for signing up. Limit @-mentions until you have built up a small following and activity track record. Require an application to join the forum. Etc, etc.

If a cost is evenly moderately costly to create, and abusive comments quickly result in bans, then the ratio of abusers quickly goes down to a very low level.

The problem is that making it costly to sign up goes against the business model and growth model of sites like Twitter, Reddit, or Instagram.

tracker14• 8 years ago

Is the solution more anonymity, or less? Are reputation systems a good idea in general?

On the one hand you have google/facebook pushing people to reveal their real names on accounts... on the other you have sites similar to this one where you don't have to reveal much, but rely on karma/reputation a bit more.

In the end, it's a matter of dealing with the best and worst of mankind. As sad as it is, bullying didn't start with the internet, and it won't end with it. It sucks to be on the receiving end, and although I, personally, haven't always been the best at dealing with it, people need to learn that skill.

The world, despite best optimistic intentions, is not a kind, fair place to be.

kazinator• 8 years ago

The solution is to disable communication by default. Nobody can post anything to any feed on anyone's profile, nor send any private message, unless they are in the list of approved users.

To get linked, you initiate a the "add me to your group" request. This request is just a flag which asserts "X is interested in linking with Y". It cannot be repeatedly asserted, and no text or images may be attached to it. (If someone wants to harass you with these contact requests, they will have to keep creating new profiles, and fill those profiles themselves with hateful content targeting you.)

The system could use Bayesian filtering on profile content to determine which kinds of accounts you don't like linking with.

siruncledrew• 8 years ago

I think your sentiment is pretty realistic overall. Unless we as a society start trending towards some kind of dystopian hellscape where every single person has a "worthiness" score and all the assholes who fall below a certain threshold are purged from society, then the sad truth is we are stuck living in world with assholes. Given the unlikelihood this kind of "asshole holocaust" will ever come to fruition, the most we can do is strive to lead exemplary lives and continue to reject the behavior of assholes and instead seek to correct it.

erjjones• 8 years ago

I don't necessarily have a perfect solution all lined up

The "metaverse" . Where you can be what you want people to see w/o others knowing what you are. #highfidelity

gaius2• 8 years ago

The "metaverse" . Where you can be what you want people to see w/o others knowing what you are

That is a nice idea but I'm not sure it will work because consider Stack Overflow: most users there are little more than a number and a geometric shape, as far as what others see, and yet they still felt they needed to formalise a code of conduct based on survey results that certain demographics felt unwelcome.

mwfunk• 8 years ago

I agree, and have always thought that most online communities have baked-in expiration dates based on what I think of as asshole entropy. Over time, such platforms will always tend towards more assholes, as asshole behavior triggers more asshole behavior, and drives away non-assholes. The only question is how long does it take to reach that point.

Another way to look at it is, good comments are capable of inspiring more good comments, but low-quality comments always seem to lead to more low-quality comments. So comment quality in general is also subject to entropy in most forums and social networks that I've seen.

Some combination of moderation and lacking appeal to general audiences allows specialized forums like HN to reach a steady state, with probably more assholes than desired and fewer good comments than desired, but at least it's not continually hurtling towards collapse.

russdpale3• 8 years ago

Asshole Entropy.. I like that term. You may enjoy this old but very relavent article titles a group is its own worst enemy http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

bcOpus• 8 years ago

Maybe the answer would be that such communities should be restricted in their growth in terms of how many they can manage without the “thundering horde” taking over, rather than how many they can sign up.

tomp4• 8 years ago

I was thinking of a potential solution to this (and many other problems) - filter lists. Instead of putting the onus on the company/social network to police the users, all the content they post and potentially (well, definitely) angering significant parts of the population (e.g. either the democrats, the republicans, or both!), they could just add opt-in "filter lists" that would be curated by (groups of) users. A few would be enabled by default (e.g. gore, NSFW, etc), others you could discover simply by searching for specific keywords (e.g. "filter all neo-nazis" or "filter all anti-fa") (like browser add-ons) or by ranking them by popularity, and whatever filters you have enabled, the webpage would also show you how many users/posts/comments are hidden by your filters. That way, noone could accuse any organisation of censorship, the lists could be shared between websites (reducing the effort and enabling smaller companies to function), and the only real responsibility of the companies would be to keep illegal content off the site (or something that break all online etiquette, e.g. doxxing).

danso5• 8 years ago

Twitter has had (unofficial, via third-party services) user created blocklists for awhile now, but still feel like something only used by power users. And the complaints/anger over censorship still exist — IIRC, Wil Wheaton (the uber-Twitter power user) was hounded off of Twitter and Mastodon because of his promotion of a controversial user’s blacklist:

http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...

https://medium.com/@AmberEnderton/wil-wheaton-has-a-listenin...

tomp4• 8 years ago

Ideally companies/platforms would provide first-class support for them, and even urge the users to choose their own after they sign up!

Wil Wheaton isn't a platform, he's a private user, and it's not entirely unironic that he "got" what he was promoting for others (being de-platformed)...

criddell• 8 years ago

My favorite user blocklist was the one that listed every Twitter advertiser. I think the maintainer shut it down, but I thought it was a pretty neat idea.

monksy2• 8 years ago

For a primarily phone-based application, this seems pretty weird to me. (It's harder to navigate and participate in compared to say reddit or fb)

I use Instagram, however, the only "harassment" I receive is spam and occasional mentions from p_rn bots. I also keep my profile and I'm not trying to push, sell, or make myself a celebrity.

What I think that may be happening: There are a lot of people who are trying to leverage their message or themselves to a level of celebrity and they don't realize that this is one of the consequences of it (or that they refuse to accept it).

tracker14• 8 years ago

I agree, to an extent. When people invite celebrity status, there will always follow trolls. It simply doesn't matter how great you are. And many don't have the stability and coping systems to deal with it.

In saying this, I'm definitely not saying I do... I take a lot of things far more personally than intended, and can only try to not let my instincts drive me when I do. It isn't easy to be on the receiving side of things... that said, I don't think outright censorship is the answer. Couldn't this kid report/block other users on the system giving him grief? Also, for those blocked, probably shouldn't indicate that they've been blocked.

I've always found it funny that on Twitter, when someone blocks you, you can no longer see their public profile and tweets. It'd be far better to allow you to see it, but only the blocked see their own retweets/replies. I don't think the people making decisions always think through their decisions.

The problem with something like this drawing attention and potentially reacting too quickly is the chance to make things worse is far more likely than actually approving anything.

Sharlin3• 8 years ago

For a primarily phone-based application, this seems pretty weird to me.

You seem to be pretty out of the loop when it comes to Instagram's primary user group. Many teens/early 20s these days don't even have a computer, a smartphone is all they use. They're definitely accustomed to phone UIs.

I use Instagram, however, the only "harassment" I receive is spam and occasional mentions from p_rn bots.

Don't generalize from a single datapoint, especially when that datapoint is not a representative sample at all.

What I think that may be happening: There are a lot of people who are trying to leverage their message or themselves to a level of celebrity and they don't realize that this is one of the consequences of it (or that they refuse to accept it).

This is just straightforward victim blaming without even trying to understand what is actually going on.

monksy2• 8 years ago

They may be accustomed to the UI but from using the IG App you don't have the full capability to be aggressively persistent on the phone as you would on the desktop. Yes, mean things do get said, but I would hardly believe that it's as easy as they claim.

This was my experience. I'm a private individual whom doesn't use it to build an audience, sell anything, or any of the like.

Celebritihood has it's upsides and downsides. Am, I saying it's a good thing that it happens no.

jonknee2• 8 years ago

Instagram's harassment problem is like many others and is a problem for young people and women (and especially young women!). I'm a guy in my 30s and post pictures exclusively of landscapes, harassment is obviously not a problem for me. I'm sure my experience would be different if I was currently in high school or if I was a woman who posted pictures of myself.

tl;dr the HN demographic is not the one that gets harassed on almost any platform, but especially IG.

Animats• 8 years ago

Harassment is mostly a problem because of anonymity. Facebook has a point with their "real names" policy.

Maybe we need systems where you can either be anonymous and censored, or identified and uncensored. You get to pick.

yarrel• 8 years ago

Real names don't stop harassment, whether on the WELL in the 90s or YouTube in the 2010s.

They do however harm the most vulnerable in society, either excluding them from platforms or making it easy for their harassers to find and target them.

Anonymity is at worst neutral for harassment. Removing it doesn't do what people hope.

moogly• 8 years ago

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/01/05/using-real-names...

pkamb2• 8 years ago

With the popularity of non-real-name Instagram pages and "finstagrams" it seems strange that Facebook has not implemented a checkbox for "seriously, this is not my main account, please stop linking it to my main account or phone number or facebook account or suggesting it to ANYONE I might know in real life". But, then again, it is Facebook we're talking about.

gaius2• 8 years ago

"seriously, this is not my main account, please stop linking it to my main account or phone number or facebook account or suggesting it to ANYONE I might know in real life"

Their T&Cs prohibit having more than one account, so they would never implement this feature no matter how much sense it makes.

pkamb2• 8 years ago

The instagram app has great multi-account support...

ecnahc515• 8 years ago

That's for Facebook.com not instagram. Instagram actively promotes multiple accounts.

megaman82• 8 years ago

I dont understandy, Why doesn't instagram just come up with some negativity filter/heuristic? Once someone reports being harassed to instagram, they can activate the filter and block all messages/tagging with negative content in it, for any and all messages directed towards the target.

Sharlin3• 8 years ago

The platform has cast itself as the internet’s kindest place.

Excuse me but what? I thought it was common knowledge that Instagram is one of the worst places on the net when it comes to bullying.

moneil971• 8 years ago

A better system is needed to allow for verified accounts, without requiring the kind of info that would allow hackers and bad actors to access your real email, address, phone number, etc. Dual authentication is a start but for now, it requires putting even more info out there (I didn't share a phone number on any site until I had to for authentication purposes).

Instagram Has a Massive Harassment Problem

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