Toward a formal sociology of online harassment

ISSN: 1795-6889 www.humantechnology.jyu.fi Volume 15(3), November 2019, 326–346 326 TOWARD A FORMAL SOCIOLOGY OF ONLINE HARASSMENT Abstract: Online harassment and various subcategories of it, like doxing and swatting, have attracted enormous interest for several years now—and particular interest in the world of game studies in the wake of 2014’s GamerGate harassment campaign. Such protracted, crowdsourced campaigns remain undertheorized, however. Using contemporary research to modify Georg Simmel’s formal sociological method, I provide researchers and the wider public with an easily visualized structure that most harassment campaigns follow: the form of an inverted pyramid bearing down on an individual target, stratified into three orders of harassment, each defined by level of severity and invasiveness. With this form, the public can more clearly visualize online harassment as a structural rather than individual phenomenon. This form makes a significant contribution to social media research by providing an approachable theoretical framework for future studies and can also frame design interventions on harassment. Keywords: online harassment, formal sociology, game studies, GamerGate, Internet studies. ©2019 Katherine Cross and the Open Science Centre, University of Jyväskylä DOI: https://doi.org/10.17011/ht/urn.201911265023 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Katherine Cross University of Washington Seattle, WA USA Toward A Formal Sociology of Online Harassment 327 INTRODUCTION Online harassment—purposefully abusive, unwanted, often repeated interactions with another person online—has come of age. Although it has existed since the earliest days of the Internet, it has now come to dominate in many societies, reaching the highest levels of mainstream politics. From debates in the U. K. House of Commons about whether the Prime Minister’s rhetoric inspires online threats against his opponents to the U.S. President’s penchant for tweeting bilious comments at or about anyone who displeases him, examples of online harassment’s commonplace banality abound. But this newfound normality is not online harassment’s only novel feature. With the dawn of the 2010s, a phase-change in online abuse occurred that shifted it from a largely episodic, individual phenomenon to an indefinite, campaign-based affair. Historically, online harassment depended on crowdsourcing—the use of the Internet to gather attention and incite action from a distributed group of users—but, by the 2010s, two new features became increasingly common in episodes of online harassment: organization and longevity. By 2014, with the onset of the GamerGate harassment campaign (see Table 1 for description of the events and organizations mentioned in this paper), the evolution from individual harassment to long-term, collectivized abuse was complete. The GamerGate campaign, which began with the harassment of game developer Zoe Quinn over false allegations that they1 had traded sex with journalists for positive reviews2 (Perreault & Vos, 2018), quickly metastasized into a reactionary movement against any hint of feminist or progressive activism in the world of video gaming (Mortensen, 2018). GamerGate, a movement made up of a small but enthusiastic group of video gamers and fans, targeted women, queer people, and people of color in gaming with protracted campaigns of online harassment that included a great deal of bigotry. From engineering boycotts of news outlets whose female writers essayed against GamerGate to driving developers and critics from their homes and issuing bomb threats against feminist speakers, GamerGate sustained an assault against many targets for a protracted period of time (Frank, 2014; Wingfield, 2014). It was organized from platforms such as Reddit and the 4chan imageboard, where targets were monitored and rationales developed for strategically targeting them, their families, and their workplaces with harassing behavior. Video gaming’s seasonal storms of harassment—which, in the past, had targeted figures like former BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler or Ubisoft producer Jade Raymond3—had consolidated into a whole new climate of abuse. Harassment neither begins nor ends with gaming, of course, but it fell largely to gaming fans, journalists, critics, and academics to analyze this sudden shift toward campaign-based harassment and its significance. How can scholars take the hard lessons learned in the world of video gaming over the last 5 years and synthesize it into useful knowledge that has general applicability? In previous work about the causes of online harassment, I focused on how the Internet’s cultural conceit of unreality—the popular idea that the Internet is unreal and distinct from “real life”—licenses this behavior by making it easy to ignore the humanity of one’s interlocutors (Cross, 2014). In the wake of GamerGate, and with the aid of much of the academic work that has been done on online harassment since, it is now possible to extend this analysis through identifying a formal structure of behavior common to most online harassment campaigns. The formal sociological method pioneered by Georg Simmel (1917/1950a, 1908/1959) provides researchers with a way of seeing a general social pattern in online harassment, and more recent research on specific cases of campaign-based harassment sheds even more light on the matter. Cross 328 Table 1. Definitions of Terms, Groups, and Events Involved in Online Harassment or Abuse Discussed in this Research. 4chan and 8chan 4 chan is an anonymous imageboard (i.e., a forum in which users post images that can then be commented on) infamous for its loosely moderated and freewheeling subforums. It is also well-known for producing memes that have influenced popular culture and for directing harassment against individuals. 8chan is an especially virulent offshoot, populated by people who find even 4chan’s loose moderation to be too restrictive. Multiple mass shooters have posted about their plans on 8chan. Anonymous An activist group that grew out of 4chan, using anonymous in-person protests and online hacktivism to pursue political goals. It was born out of an anti-Scientology protest in 2008. ComicsGate A recent movement in the world of comic book fandom that sought to oppose the presence of women in the comics industry and the promotion of diversity in comic book storylines. Doxing The practice of publishing an individual’s private information online before an audience hostile to that individual; usually a “dox” will include a home address, place of employment, telephone numbers, and, in some cases, social insurance numbers. The practice is sometimes described as “dropping dox” on or about someone. GamerGate An online harassment campaign directed at feminists and progressives in game development and games journalism. Their targets of harassment were loosely defined but primarily women, LGBT people, and people of color. It began in 2014 and continued until mid-2015, though remnants still congregate in online forums like Reddit. KiwiFarms A forum devoted to stalking and harassing people from groups despised by the site’s denizens. Their targets are chiefly transgender people, people with disabilities (especially neuroatypical people), furries, and Otherkin.4 QAnon A sprawling online conspiracy theory that emerged in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency. Named for “QAnon,” supposedly an American intelligence operative with Qlevel clearance who has gained a following of conspiracy theorists through sites like 4chan and Twitter, the participants believe, among other things, that Donald Trump is secretly breaking up an international pedophile ring run by the world’s elite liberals. Sad and Rabid Puppies A right-wing movement within science fiction literary fandom that sought to oppose the diversification of the medium and to elevate the work of likeminded reactionary authors, while reacting against the literary awards won by authors like N.K. Jemesin and Ann Leckie. Swatting The practice of making a false report to an emergency hotline (such as 911 in the US/Canada or 000 in Australia) that precipitates an armed police response against a target’s home. For instance, using information revealed in a dox, a harasser may call the police alleging that the target has taken hostages or is running an illegal drug laboratory. The purpose is to allege something so egregious that a SWAT team or its local equivalent will barge into the target’s home, potentially injuring or even killing the target. A formal sociological approach, with its emphasis on finding “patterns that transcend their specific instantiations” (Zerubavel, 2007, p. 133), reveals that most online harassment campaigns converge upon a single target through employing three different modalities that can be categorized as distinct types of harassment. I call these modalities the three orders of online harassment and describe each in detail using illustrative case studies drawn from across the Internet. The orders form a useful model of online harassment that can improve both public and academic understanding of the phenomenon. Although GamerGate was a clear case of a Toward A Formal Sociology of Online Harassment 329 harassment campaign, I show how other less well-known incidents of online abuse illustrate the emergence of a form for harassment that unites these disparate cases. Of note is the fact that this method of harassment is employed by diverse groups of people: from Anonymous, to 4chan, to faceless mobs of sexual harassers, to progressive activists, and to older social conservatives. The argument here, however, is not intended to suggest that there is a broad equity in who gets harassed or that the harassment always has the same sociostructural impact. Rather, I mean to highlight in this paper the fact that many of the people who are harassed are often antagonized online through a process that is so rote as to nearly be scripted. Thus, I argue that this script is best understood as a form in the Simmelian sense. There is, for instance, isomorphism in how Internet users will “call targets,” how a sense of outraged injustice lends moral fire to the attacks, and how the use of methods such as DDOS (distributed-denial-of-service) attacks or swatting can inspire less committed participants to continue with low-investment, individuated harassment on sites like Twitter or Facebook. I will address these issues and explain, in detail, the practices that make up the form of online harassment I have identified. To quickly sketch the form, it can be best understood as an inverted pyramid with an individual deemed to be an acceptable target of harassment at its nadir (see Figure 1). The pyramid is stratified into three broad categories of harassing behavior, or what I term orders, that constitute both the harassment itself and that which fuels the behaviors. Starting from the nadir and moving up the pyramid is first-order harassment, which involves the most severe attacks against the target’s Web presence and physical life, like doxing, swatting, DDOS attacks, and stalking; here, the harassers do something to the target. Second-order harassment is the most commonly known variety: person-to-person online abuse through social media or email; here, harassers say something to the target. Third-order harassment sees the crowd Figure 1. The Sociological Form of Online Harassment. The inverted pyramid depicts the distance, relationship, and activities of the abusers from most distant toward the target of the abuse. Third-Order Harassment: Indirect enabling/apologism/memetics, organization Second-Order Harassment: Person-toperson online abuse; slurs, vitriol First-Order Harassment: Hacking, doxing, swatting Target Cross 330 talking to each other about the target, justifying, excusing, or minimizing the harassment and creating a social climate that makes abuse more likely. I begin with a review of the relevant literature on online harassment and the culture of structural prejudice that often surrounds it. From there I explain my methodology, briefly introducing the case studies I examined, before reviewing some literature on the formal sociological method itself. I then elaborate the form of online harassment, explain its constituent parts, and explore the case studies that show the diversity of applications for the sociological form of harassment that I identify here. I conclude with brief thoughts on research and policy implications. ONLINE HARASSMENT, IDENTITY, AND PREJUDICE: A REVIEW The corpus of literature related to the myriad issues involved in online harassment reflects a wide variety of disciplines and approaches. However, feminist scholarship in the social sciences and humanities has shone perhaps the brightest and most consistent light on online harassment. Such scholars have advanced useful theories exploring the gendered and racist dimensions of online vituperation. Their work demonstrates online harassment’s remarkable parallelism with patterns of patriarchy and white supremacy in the physical world—whether it be Orientalist racism in online games showing how race remains a powerful touchstone for Internet users (Nakamura, 1995, 2000) or how antiBlack racism on Xbox Live shapes player experiences in a space where whiteness and masculinity are unmarked norms (Gray, 2012, 2014). These scholars have ensured that structural prejudice is a part of the discussion when these cases are brought into forums of academic and public opinion. They emphasize the sexist, racist, and homo/transphobic nature common to much online harassment, arguing that the dehumanizing effects of the Internet are sharply amplified by the latent othering of women and minorities in the physical world (Ballard & Lineberger, 1999; Jenkins, 1998; Kuznekoff & Rose, 2013; Meyer & Cukier, 2006; Nardi, 2010; Norris, 2004). In different ways, this body of work shows how online abuse, fueled by a culture of prejudice, has a disparate impact on certain groups. In Nardi’s ethnography of World of Warcraft, for instance, she observed that women, including herself, were subject to harassing sexual inquiries over voice chat that men did not face (Nardi, 2010, p. 153); Kuznekoff and Rose’s study (2013), with experimental controls, empirically demonstrated that Nardi was correct. The online harassment research that has emerged in response to GamerGate has extended many of the conversations that were begun by this earlier work, which had correctly identified race and gender as particularly vexed sites of online abuse. Sexism, racism, and homo/transphobia remain especially common avenues of online attack, both in video gaming and elsewhere. But beyond merely identifying the existence of prejudice, more recent scholarship led by women and people of color has explored how harassment works in greater detail. Gray (2012, 2014), Chess and Shaw (2015), Gray, Buyukozturk, and Hill (2017), Massanari (2017), and Vossen (2018), among others, had been crucial figures in identifying the unique features of GamerGate early on. Vossen (2018) explored how movements such as GamerGate make online spaces culturally inaccessible for marginalized people. In Massanari’s (2017) term, it became a “toxic technoculture” aided by the gamified systems in place on social media platforms that incentivize harassment, allowing it to make the leap from individual to structural. Expanding on this, the research curated by Grey and Leonard (2018) demonstrated what that structure’s effects can be: Toward A Formal Sociology of Online Harassment 331 It is regarded as a system and thus must be met by systemic solutions that grapple with the collectivized nature of prejudice, be it through community management (Cote, 2018), building queer spaces (Skardzius, 2018), or confronting the reality of systemic prejudice in the gaming industry itself (Vysotsky & Allaway, 2018). Meanwhile, Mortensen (2018) dubbed GamerGate a “long event,” capturing one of the critical dimensions of the campaign form: its longevity. This work pointed to an understanding of a structural phenomenon that is defined in large measure by that longevity, as well as crowdsourcing and organization. Though writing before GamerGate’s advent, Nardi (2010) also illustrated how abusive behavior in games is often encouraged by the game’s ruleset and code, whereby a competitive online game had “rules…in place to promote a certain style of play,” a “ world encoded into the rules” (2010, p. 71), underscoring the “power of designers to shape activity” (p. 70). This dovetails with later research like Massanari’s (2017), which demonstrated how the design of social media platforms give rise to harassing practices. Although anonymity is heavily emphasized as a cause of harassment in popular culture (e.g., Holkins, 2004), as well as journalistic and academic investigations of the matter (see Fost, 2007; Levmore, 2010; Nussbaum, 2010), I proposed an alternate theory in past work (Cross, 2014). My theory draws on scholarship in sociology and psychology and focuses on what John Suler (2004) called the “dissociative imagination” that allows online users to distance themselves from the consequences and implications of their behavior on the Internet. I argued that a “mobius strip of reality and unreality” prevails online, where Internet users behave as if their actions are not real and lack consequences while justifying their behavior through appeals to concrete causes and moralities (Cross, 2014, p. 4). I extend that argument here by elaborating on the shape of the behavior this entails, for nearly all the harassment I describe here is defended by people who suggest that it is not real or, at least, not consequential in any meaningful way. METHODS To illustrate the relevance of a modernized formal sociological approach, I examine several recent online controversies that resulted in online harassment of one or more targets. They were chosen because of their relative popularity, each reaching the critical mass of virality required for a true harassment campaign to begin. As I explain each order of harassment in detail, I will illustrate that order’s existence and relevance through these cases, which include viral controversies, specific harassment campaigns, and a sample of YouTube comments. Although GamerGate provided a point of departure for this paper, it will be instructive to explore less-wellknown incidents to see how GamerGate’s structure, albeit novel in its particulars, nevertheless has much in common with other forms of harassment. The formal sociological method, modified by the insights explicated in the literature review, will illustrate these similarities. Formal Sociology Simmel’s (1907/1971a, 1908/1971b) formal sociological method is, in brief, a sociology of recurrent patterns or relationships that exist across a wide variety of social contexts; it seeks to find the patterns endemic to social organization. Simmel argued that “detach[ing] by analysis the forms of interaction or sociation from their contents” formed the foundation “of a special science of society as such” Cross 332 (1908/1959, p. 316), in short, sociology itself. “There remains for a sociology in the strictest sense ... nothing but the treatment of [those] forms [of interaction or sociation]” (p. 319). It is in this sense that the word form is used throughout the paper to describe a form, a shape, or a model of a type of social interaction, in this case, online harassment. Simmel’s approach similarly identified common types of social interaction, such as “exchange” or “domination,” that demonstrate what each phenomenon had in common. Eviatar Zerubavel described formal sociology as a “research strategy that guides… sociologists in their efforts to distill generic social patterns from their specific cultural, situational, and historical contexts” (Zerubavel, 2007, p. 131). Formal sociology constitutes a kind of social geometry that represented Simmel’s (1907/1971a, 1908/1971b) attempt at rationalizing the then-young discipline of sociology into a discipline that could stand on an equal footing with the physical sciences. As Zerubavel noted, formal sociology in Simmel’s conception “almost resembles physics in its quest for transhistorical as well as transcultural generality” (2007, p. 132; emphasis in original). The method seeks the common pattern to a class of phenomena that transcends particular manifestations of the phenomenon. Simmel’s (1907/1971a, 1908/1971b) arguments about formal sociology were sometimes contradictory but can be reduced to a few key points. First and foremost, he was not attributing essences to social interaction but rather recognizing that there were patterns of social behavior that were common to groups across obvious superficial boundaries. In short, similarities matter as much as differences (Simmel, 1917/1950a). In “The Stranger,” Simmel illustrated this through the eponymous figure, defined by a social location relative to larger collectives that were “near and far at the same time” (Simmel, 1908/1950b, p. 407, emphasis in original). What he called “the sociological form” of this figure was determined by a commonality that transcended several distinct social classes and phenomena, drawing links between the social characteristics of nomads, traders, and European Jewry. While some research would emphasize the differences between these groups, formal sociology looks for their commonalities, what Zerubavel called their “cross-contextual similarity” (2007, p. 136). Formal sociology does not render context irrelevant or unimportant, but it instead emphasizes the value of understanding how and why similar patterns of behavior may develop across distinct fields of interaction. Far from being essentializing, it renders another dimension of social interaction visible and amenable to study. The formal sociological method suggests that commonality within difference is identifiable and that this commonality matters because it can furnish answers to specific inquiries that either particularism or a grand theory might miss (Mills, 1959; Zerubavel, 2007). This balance is best illustrated by the contemporary uses of formal sociology. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart (1983) was a pathbreaking study that identified the concept of “emotion work” as a potential site of alienation in labor. Her study focused extensively on the gendered dimensions of women’s emotion work, particularly through analyzing the experience of flight attendants. But she also used the formal method to compare their experience to that of men in male-dominated professions intensive in emotion work such as bill collection. Similarly, Lynn Chancer’s Sadomasochism in Everyday Life (1992) analogized workplace relations and heterosexual partnerships using her formal frame of sadomasochistic relationships as a metaphor. Zerubavel (2003) himself examined concepts like time and memory, while sociologist Thomas DeGloma explored the formal similarities among personal awakenings, such as religious conversions and coming out as queer (DeGloma, 2014). None of these studies erase particularity, Toward A Formal Sociology of Online Harassment 333 nor deny its importance, but each also uses the forms they identify to generalize across a variety of subjective frontiers. These studies inform how the formal method will be employed here. Formal Sociology in the Present Study The analysis set forth in this paper provides a useful example with which to explore the merits of the formal sociological method. In the case of online harassment, it is important to understand that harassment is not distributed evenly across the population of Internet users, nor does it have identical effects on those who are targeted. In other words, people belonging to groups underrepresented or subject to discrimination in certain virtual spaces will be hurt more severely—and in more directly material ways—than those belonging to majority or privileged groups. Such harassment is terroristic; the disproportionate vituperation of some women online (Kuznekoff & Rose, 2013) has often had a chilling effect on the speech or participation of other women (Yee, 2008, pp. 93–95; see also Citron, 2009, 2014; Nardi, 2010; Shaw, 2014). Although this overview is brief, it raises the very real and important differences between episodes of harassment directed at men and women, to say nothing of the myriad distinctions brought forward by antiqueer and antitrans harassment, where antagonism toward the existence of transand nonbinary people is increasingly becoming a theme in online abuse. These distinctions matter and have important implications for gender equality in tech spaces, to name but one example. Nevertheless, based on the cases of online harassment episodes explored later in this paper, it becomes clear that, when people online organize or coalesce into groups that antagonize a single target, they do so in broadly similar ways. The method employed in this paper, therefore, will deliberately avoid dwelling on the contextual differences between the different episodes of harassment described in favor of finding a pattern common to them all. As Zerubavel put it, “Social pattern analysts are… purposefully oblivious to the idiosyncratic features of the communities, events, or situations they study, looking for general patterns that transcend their specific instantiations” (Zerubavel, 2007, p. 133). A social pattern manifesting in different contexts of online harassment, then, is useful data, and formal sociology can help researchers see it. In this paper, I embrace some aspects of Simmel’s (1917/1950a) “social geometry” while leaving others aside. For instance, I do not share Simmel’s belief that this method is purely objective or that it constitutes a purer form of sociology, with the details of context best left to other disciplines (Simmel 1917/1950a, pp. 21–22). But social geometry is valued as both metaphor and visualization in sociology. Sociological subject matter, after all, often assumes a shape. Hierarchy conjures images of pyramids or skyscrapers, social networks engender webs, and geographic sociologies depend on understanding the role of space in making or breaking social phenomena—the way a public park’s design may encourage or discourage certain behaviors. The preeminent shape in the analysis of harassment I advance here will be the inverted pyramid. True to the formal method, the shape is determined by the phenomenon it describes. The inversion of the pyramid attempts to illustrate the way that harassment converges, like a titanic spearpoint, onto a single target. The method of harassment described here is, at heart, an individualist phenomenon. Whatever “problem” justifies the harassment, the harassers see the assault of one individual—often representing the embodiment of some larger idea, social Cross 334 problem, or undesirable group—as the solution. The harassers then become a wave of individuals revenging themselves upon a lone target. THE FORM ITSELF The method of harassment described here is distinguished by its convergence on a single target (see Figure 1). The term convergence, used throughout this paper, is a considered one. It suggests, at a stroke, both process and shape. As one moves down the pyramid, one gets closer to the target—moving from indirect chatter about the target down to performing physical actions against the target’s person and/or property. Each level of harassment is distinguished by distance from the target. Relation to and distance from the single target of the harassment is what orders the scale in the form depicted in Figure 1. In the case of GamerGate, the target would be a single person, with each order of harassment describing a layer of the campaign against them. An individual becomes an effigy, a symbol for everything opposed by the harassers. This meant rigorous ideological policing of targets who did not conform to GamerGate’s reactionary, corporatist ideals (Gray & Leonard, 2018; Quinn, 2017). Some popular commentators have already noted that GamerGate presaged larger harassment campaigns with similar modes of operation (e.g., Marcotte, 2016), but the form I have identified makes the structure of those similarities easier to see. The Lone Target Online harassment is, invariably, directed at an individual person. The reasons for this may vary. Perhaps that person did something the harasser disapproved of, or belongs to a minority group despised by the harasser, or was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. But harassment falls upon a specific target, whether the harassment consists of a hostile meme, hacking someone’s website, swatting their home address, or sending them a death threat via email. What of situations where the target is attacked as a representative of a larger group? In this case, the logic of the form still applies. If the person is targeted because of, say, their religious affiliation or work for a specific news outlet, the result is the same. A lone target must bear the psychic (and occasionally physical) burden of being harassed through the Internet. In particular, the impact is the same when one is describing a campaign like GamerGate that attacks multiple targets simultaneously because they share broad characteristics. An abridged list of GamerGate targets would include Zoe Quinn, journalist Leigh Alexander, Anita Sarkeesian, game developer Brianna Wu, sociologist Adrienne Shaw, among others; all are individuals who dealt with all three forms of harassment bearing down on them at once. The use of a lone target as a focal point should not be seen to deny the sociostructural reality of online harassment, especially those varieties inspired by structural prejudice. Instead, my model uses targets’ personal experiences as a focal point for understanding the personal impact caused by each of the three orders of harassment. In addition, an individual can often become a symbol for something that harassers perceive as a wider problem. Consider the commonplace cri de coeur, “You are everything wrong with ‘X’!” That mentality, in turn, invokes a punishment imperative, a way of revenging one’s self against a much larger problem. Toward A Formal Sociology of Online Harassment 341 CONCLUSION I have used Simmel’s (1917/1950a; 1908/1950b) formal sociological method, modified by the insights of contemporary gaming and technology scholars, to identify cross-contextual similarities in social practices that encompass forms of online harassment that transcend boundaries of gender, race, class, or political affiliation. Common trends and behaviors link online harassment across these boundaries that determine the geometry an observer may ascribe to it. Much of this harassment converges on a single target, and the harassment behaviors then can be subdivided into three orders—these can be understood as forming layers of an inverted pyramid converging on the target. The first order involves invasive abuse, such as DDOS attacks or doxing, and can include direct attacks on the person in the physical world. The second order is direct, person-to-person harassment online (e.g., a harassing tweet or email). The third, foundational order is the communal apologism for the harassment from those not necessarily directly involved but which provides moral justifications for the actual attackers. The third order of harassment sees the crowd talking to each other about the target; the second order is where they say things to the target; the first is where they do things to the target. These key features are shared by most online harassment campaigns. Through understanding how they form an easily visualized social structure (Figure 1), researchers can better make sense of this new frontier in online social organization. IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH AND POLICY This formal sociological approach can frame research design and policy interventions on major social media platforms, online games, and websites. The pyramidal taxonomy described here makes abundantly clear that harassment campaigns are rarely the product of individual bad behavior; rather, they have cultural roots that must be addressed in order to properly engage and remedy the problem. Further, the emphasis on collective action here is useful for guiding design interventions at social media companies; it suggests that the most productive site for intervention is not necessarily the individual harasser, but those aspects of the platform that facilitate what I have called third-order harassment. Structures such as Twitter’s threading function or its lack of granular control of responses (one can either lock his/her account or be open to the entire platform with minimal, heavy-handed filtering) or Facebook’s unwillingness to moderate groups that promote ethnic or gender-based hatred facilitate third-order harassment. Such systems and such groups provide the foundation for harassment that targets individual users both online and in the physical world. In addition, this theory may guide interventions and collaborations in other spheres as well; there is ample scope for follow-up research, particularly using network analysis to shed more empirical light on this theory. The formal approach, in the meantime, clearly can identify and illustrate online harassment and gives those who must advocate for themselves a much-needed tool with which they can demonstrate the structural nature of the abuse they are facing. Cross 342 ENDNOTES 1. In the soon-to-be-implemented 7th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, the APA style states the use of they can be employed in instances where the gender of the person indicated as the sentence’s antecedent is unknown or unclear (or as a gender-neutral alternative to him/her) or if the person to whom that pronoun refers prefers it as a pronoun. 2. This was the genesis of the phrase “Actually, it’s about ethics in games journalism,” which became the movement’s (widely mocked) motto. GamerGate harassers alleged Quinn had benefitted from corrupt gaming journalism, and that this justified any ongoing harassment. In truth, the movement’s members despised Quinn for making a widely praised and simple game about depression and were furious that it (which they regarded as “not a real game”) was receiving praise. Meanwhile, Quinn’s ex-boyfriend wrote a blog post falsely alleging that Quinn had traded sex for positive press. Thus a fig-leaf justification for GamerGate’s actions was born, despite the fact that GamerGate largely ignored or downplayed genuinely serious issues in gaming journalism, such as major studios retaliating against publications that gave their games bad reviews. Indeed, GamerGate called for a studio to do that very thing to Polygon, a gaming news site, because their reviewer used feminist rhetoric in his review of Bayonetta 2. 3. Figures like Hepler and Raymond became targets due to specific, localized outrages—for instance, a 2006 interview with Hepler resurfaced in which she stated that she would like to see video games make combat sequences skippable for a player who wanted to experience only a game’s story. When it resurfaced in 2012, it touched off a firestorm of outrage from some self-identified “hardcore” gamers who wanted her fired from BioWare. Meanwhile, Raymond’s only “crime” was that some male gamers alleged that she “slept her way to the top” at Ubisoft because they found her physically attractive. These episodes of harassment have become periodic and expected in the world of video gaming. In Raymond’s case, the abuse came in a torrent and then slowly subsided. GamerGate differed by becoming a campaign that attacked multiple targets while sustaining itself over a prolonged period. 4. It began life as an extension of a 4chan harassment campaign against Christine Chandler, an autistic artist and fan fiction writer who is more commonly known as Chris-chan. The site is named for how her harassers imagine Chandler, who has a speech impediment, would have pronounced “CWCki forums,” which was the original name of the site. That original name was drawn from Chandler’s initials. The harassment against her began in 2007 and continues to this day. Her subforum on KiwiFarms has nearly 500,000 mostly negative posts. 5. Anita Sarkeesian is a feminist filmmaker who, for several years, hosted on YouTube the Feminist Frequency video series, which took a 101-level approach to feminist media criticism. After using Kickstarter to fundraise for a new miniseries that explored the use of sexist tropes in portraying female video game characters, she was subjected to waves of sustained harassment from mostly male gamers who were furious at her implication that their favorite games might have misogynistic content. 6. These tweets, and all other similar examples of harassment on social media, are exact. All errors and idiosyncrasies are in the original unless otherwise noted. 7. Sarkeesian kept a detailed record of her harassment, a good sampling of which can be found on her website: http://www.feministfrequency.com/tag/harassment/ (the link will show all posts she has tagged as displaying harassment). She also posted one week’s worth of Twitter abuse, sampled from the height of GamerGate: https://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/109319269825/one-week-of-harassment-on-twitter 8. The popularity of this episode is part of the reason I took it as a case study: It illustrates the sheer popularity of this sort of behavior. As Slate’s Dave Weigel noted at the time, “The Internet loved it, especially BuzzFeed, whose Rachel Zarrell aggregated Gale’s tweets and photos. Her post, on one of the year’s slowest news cycles, got nearly 1.4 million reads” (Weigel, 2013, para. 1). 9. 8chan has been directly linked to three 2019 mass shootings: the Poway, California, synagogue shooting; the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque massacre; and the Latino-targeted shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Wal-Mart. The Isla Vista, California, massacre (2014); the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue shooting (2018); the Parkland, Florida, school shooting (2018); and the recent killing of people outside a synagogue in Halle, Germany (2019) were all celebrated on similar websites where language and Toward A Formal Sociology of Online Harassment 343 postings like those found on KiwiFarms are quite common. It is, thus, reasonable to assume that any post like the one cited in this paper constitutes a credible threat. The formal sociological method shines here because it allows researchers to recognize the homology in posts—and their meanings and impacts— across several disparate sites within idiosyncratic subcultures. REFERENCES Anonymous (2013, November 30, 8:26 a.m.). Re: Since when did telling a woman to eat your dick standing up for service workers? [comment]. Retrieved from http://www.losangelista.com/2013/11/since-when-is-tellingwoman-to-eat-your.html Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 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