SXSW’s online Harassment Summit Nods on the downside, however Finds Few real solutions

The South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin is a party of the fun, camaraderie, and innovation of the web, however in recent years the adventure has been forced to take a frank take a look at the darker facet of the online—harassment and bullying.

This year the convention organizers facilitated an event known as the online Harassment Summit, a gathering of victims of online harassment and trade representatives who may have the ability to come up with positive tips on how to do something about the issue.

final year, SXSW organizers needed to cancel a few panels related to the Gamergate controversy, through which feminine gaming developers had been showered with on-line hate and even death threats. some of the poster kids for the controversy, Brooklyn-based gaming blogger Caroline Sinders, took section on this year’s summit. every other event featured a gaggle that stated it used to be interested by ethics in gaming journalism however was once widely regarded as sympathetic to the male participants of the gaming group who took phase within the harassment.

This 12 months’s day-lengthy summit passed off at a Hyatt Regency across the river in South Austin, moderately removed from the main conference downtown. Many were concerned about possible security problems on the adventure, as Gamergate continues to be an emotionally charged issue for many.

fortuitously, the summit went off without any incidents. Attendees mentioned the police and safety presence was once “exceptionally excessive,” experiences united states lately. Summit attendees even had to have their luggage checked, and panels on the adventure opened with a commentary directing attendees to “act responsibly and treat each different with recognize.”

Sinders advised the BBC that the out-of-the-approach area of the summit says rather a lot about how the tech trade regards the difficulty of harassment. She says the trade has begun to acknowledge that harassment is an actual downside, but has made little actual growth toward fixing it in a scientific manner.

“I concern at a spot like [SXSW], because it was once thrown together so all of a sudden, it was extra round speaking about harassment and not about fixing harassment,” Sinders mentioned.

Executives from facebook, Google, Cisco, and IBM sat on probably the most panels. fb’s head of coverage administration, Monika Bickert, stated monitoring and imposing principles about harassment and hate speech on the social platform is troublesome because hate speech is available in so many forms, and because it can be steadily the context by which a comment appears that determines whether or now not there are hateful intentions in the back of it. She estimates that facebook gets 1,000,000 stories a day of that you can think of hate speech violations on the social network.

also talking used to be Brianna Wu, a developer of games aimed toward ladies, who was once forced into the middle of the Gamergate controversy after she used to be centered by way of violent and misogynistic threats—a few of them death threats. Wu referred to as on social media corporations like facebook to do extra to police and prevent harassment on their networks.

Wu, who cited that her husband and even her dog had additionally been threatened, took explicit goal at YouTube and Reddit, among other systems the place Gamergate supporters meet, claiming that they aren’t proactive sufficient at removing offensive content material, reviews the ny instances. “i can’t say this naturally enough: Reddit is failing girls in every marginalized group spectacularly,” Ms. Wu mentioned. because the times noted, policing content material is a gigantic endeavor—taking into consideration that users add about 400 hours of video a minute to YouTube and Reddit has a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of standard monthly users.