This article was taken from the November issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online
Every time I see the news," the posting reads, "I want to throw the TV out of the window. I see criminal filth like paedophiles getting soft sentences and middle-class liberal whiners defending their 'rights'. Does anyone actually think the law counts for anything any more? The police seem far too busy catching speeding motorists rather than dealing with the real criminals. Has anyone ever been so mad that they considered taking things into their own hands and fighting the criminal scum themselves?"
The above dispatch is entirely fictional - or rather, these are the words of a fictional identity placed on Facebook by wired. The list of replies it receives, however, is entirely genuine (in all their raw obscenity). "You ain't alone," one reads. "Many I know feel the same, it's just criminal that the average law-abiding mug has to take the flak whilst the scumbags get away scot-free." Another reply rants that "the law is wrong and it benefits bad people in every walk of life. It's a joke." The commenter suggests visiting a London mosque in order to "drag the horrible cunts in my van and leave the rest to the imagination. But I couldn't. Guess why? The fucking so-called police have got them under guard." Both responses came from a group entitled "Vote BNP To Stop Britain Going Down The Pan". They have since been deleted; it's unclear whether this was done by Facebook or the moderators of this group. "Why do they consider it a crime to 'take the law into one's own hands'?" bemoans another reply in a group named "Vigilante" (sub-heading: "Declare War On Paedophiles"). Below that, on the messageboard, intentions are spelled out in clearer terms. "One vigilante is better than 20 cops," says a commentator from Leeds. Someone else recounts that he has "just been described by a probation officer as a vigilante, ie: taking the law into one's own hands". He concludes by arguing that the best way to deal with sex offenders is to "free up space and money and kill them all". At the time of writing, all of this content remains live on the site. Last November, thousands of UK Facebook users signed up to groups such as "Death is too good for Tracey connelly, torture the bitch that killed baby P" [sic] and "Baby P Killers should be hanged Drawn and Quartered". The identities of those involved in the Baby P case - Tracey Connelly, her partner Steven Barker and Barker's brother, Jason Owen - were placed online for all to see, despite a court order that insisted on preserving their anonymity during their trial. Although the groups were not closed down, Facebook was quick to remove any details in breach of the law. The latter group is still running, with the mission statement of "setting up a campaign to bring capital punishment back into the UK for Child Murders [sic] and serious paedophiles where guilt is absolute". "Initially we did have a big problem with people looking up the names of the murderers and then posting the details on to the group," explains Adam Yates, founder of "Baby P Killers should be hanged Drawn and Quartered". He claims he "didn't support the names being published because of legal reasons. But now they have been found guilty, I don't see a problem with it. I must say, Facebook didn't contact me at all about the group. As I understand it, I was not breaking any rules as I was not inciting hatred. The group is called 'Baby P Killers should be hanged Drawn and Quartered'. This is an opinion and is not telling anyone to go and commit a crime."
Pitchfork-wielding mobs have yet to take over the UK, but it's clear that a proclivity for impassioned responses to emotive issues can be intensified via social media. Christine Hine, the editor of Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet, says: "If there is such an issue to respond to, people become aware of it very quickly. Crucially, this can bypass the usual controls over media content, so although mass media may be constrained from covering a particular topic or naming names, the internet can easily spread this information. "It's not that the internet creates new social movements," Hine continues, "but it has provided opportunities for people to react to social issues of all kinds in new and creative ways. Some of those will be troubling, because they seem to evade existing structures of control and regulation." She has observed noticeable parallels between "direct action" behaviour and the rise of an increasingly interactive internet. "Back in the late 90s," Hine recalls, "I studied the use of the internet in the case of Louise Woodward [the teenage British nanny jailed in Boston after the child in her care died in unexplained circumstances]. These were the relatively early days of the web, when there were no blogs and people were laboriously crafting single web pages. I found websites created by individuals who said they had been moved by the television coverage of the case and felt they had to 'do something' - and for this set of individuals, creating a web page counted as doing something. It showed a growing trend for people to see the internet as a site of social action."
As impassioned as online responses can be, actual violent direct action has never been a particular concern to UK authorities - unlike in other countries. Atreyee Sen, at the University of Manchester, has analysed vigilantism in developing nations. "The internet has had a huge impact on the nature and dynamics of contemporary vigilantism," she says. "Securing funding and financial transfers via the internet is relatively easy, and it diminishes the hazard of middlemen between illegal vigilante groups and their sponsors. This sustains vigilante activities in most parts of the world."
Alison Cavanagh, the author of Sociology In The Age Of the Internet, says: "Vigilantism is something of a value term. It should be understood in context, rather as one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter." She, too, sees little reason to fear physical mass violence stemming from online threats originating in Britain: "The UK has a fine tradition of moral panic, but this has not often taken the form of mass action." But where there is online endorsement of vigilantism, it usually emerges from the extreme far-right. Paul Bocij, author of The Dark Side of the Internet, agrees. "I've certainly found a tendency towards right-wing views," he says. "A great deal of harassment, for instance, is targeted against gay people and against ethnic minorities. In the UK, we recently had some low-level cyber-stalking targeted at BNP members - though we've also had Combat 18 and others in the past."
Redwatch was originally a neo-Nazi magazine which made its way on to the internet in 2001, thanks to former BNP member Simon Sheppard. With prominent links to Combat 18 (as well as other UK extremist stalwarts such as Blood & Honour, Aryan Unity and the British People's Party), it is now hosted in the US to avoid British law. Redwatch lists the addresses and other personal details of left-wing or antifascist activists, and even mainstream political figures. Many of its targets have found themselves subject to death threats, and at least one car has been firebombed after its owner's details were published.
The Redwatch site is laid out like an amateur Geocities home page from the mid-90s (to much ridicule and trolling by the likes of b3ta). Of a similarly amateurish slant is Navigor (the National Vigilante Organisation), created in 2006 by BNP member Albert Hurwood. This unequivocally supports vigilantism, arguing that "the death penalty is the only answer to feral scum".
In a world of user-friendly social-networking sites, anyone can easily adapt an online template to create their own little corner of cyberspace. So the "I Like Beer" group has the same default layout as "Kill The Local Rapist" (both genuine) - giving even internet novices a simple way of getting an extremist message across.
The Facebook terms of user conduct state that it is unacceptable to "upload, post, transmit, share, store or otherwise make available any content deemed to be harmful, threatening, unlawful, defamatory, infringing, abusive, inflammatory, harassing, vulgar, obscene, fraudulent, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable". Likewise, "content that would constitute, encourage or provide instructions for a criminal offence, violate the rights of any party, or that would otherwise create liability or violate any local, state, national or international law." Nevertheless, within half-an-hour of creating our fake profile, Wired had signed up to 20 groups with titles such as "Vigilante Justice", "Hang, Gas or stone the peadophile cunts!!!" [sic] and "HANG THE BASTARDS WHO DID THIS TO A WW2 VETERAN " (referring to the savage beating of a Blackpool pensioner during a burglary; it currently has over 500,000 members and counting).
Dallas-based lawyer Brian Cuban campaigns against what he sees as a glaring discrepancy between Facebook's terms of service and actual content. He published an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg in early May, which gathered widespread attention via Twitter and blogs. Concentrating on the hate-speech aspect of Facebook's Holocaust-denying groups, the letter argued that such sites "promote their message of hate using Facebook as a recruiting ground. By allowing these groups, Facebook is not promoting open discussion of a controversial issue. It is promoting and encouraging hatred towards ethnic and religious groups, nothing more." "Those type of groups try to 'evolve' on Facebook on a weekly basis," Cuban says. "It's up to Facebook to monitor and shut them down as quickly as possible."
What, then, is the process by which Facebook determines whether a group is "harmful" or "threatening", and thus worthy of removal?
Barry Schnitt - senior manager of corporate communications at Facebook - was interviewed by CNN in early May about the Holocaust-denying groups. "Just being offensive or objectionable doesn't get [you] taken off Facebook," he said. "We want the site to be a place where people can discuss all kinds of ideas - including controversial ones." What remains opaque, however, is how, when and why "controversial" crosses the line to being dangerous. "The issue is not that they do not react quickly after being made aware," Cuban elaborates. "The issue is that their subjective standard is so cloak-and-dagger. No one knows how they make their decisions. We need more transparency on these decisions. When they do not react, I would like to know what thought process went into the decision to do nothing." So what level of response has Cuban had from Facebook? "Other than the standard corporate-speak emails," he says, "Facebook has never seen fit to respond to me directly."
Although Wired approached Facebook about slightly different subject matter - the incitement of vigilante action, as opposed to straightforward hate speech - its reaction to our queries was similarly dismissive. Among other things, we wanted to know: who is responsible for the definitions used when labelling content? If someone set up a Facebook group which seemed to encourage vigilantism, what criteria would it have to fulfil to be removed, as there do seem to be active groups that breach the code of conduct?
After much correspondence, Facebook stated that it was "not able" to answer all of our questions. Instead, it forwarded us the generic press-statement material with which Brian Cuban is all too familiar - and yet, bizarrely, also insisted that the content of its response was not to be quoted directly in Wired. A summary of the most interesting points, then: a dedicated team deals with the issue of investigating user complaints and flagged content that violates the Facebook terms. As for policing methods, this information was characteristically vague, although contradictions did arise: parts of the response indicated that terms-breaching content would be removed, but then other parts indicated that it merely might be taken down.
Facebook is not alone in taking an evasive approach. MySpace, too, has plenty of active vigilante content - groups such as "Anti Pervert/Pedo Vigilante Group", "we hate peados" [sic] (an "independent vigilante group") and "White and Bloody Proud" ("keep Britain tidy - bin a Paki"). Again, MySpace was unwilling to engage beyond providing us with a generalised "Safety And Security Overview" document. Although MySpace's inner workings are a little more transparent than Facebook's - we know that IP logs of unsuitable uploads are kept, and that there are dedicated law-enforcement and security- incident-response teams - its response to us focused exclusively on the technical implementation of these rather than the decisions behind that implementation.
MySpace has previously been consulted for advice on the Social Networking Guidance initiative arranged by the Home Office, which dealt with the issue of child safety online. But as for its view of extremist vigilante groups on such sites, the Home Office declined to comment. Instead, it maintained that - as vigilantism is a policing matter - it would rather leave matters to respective regional police departments.
So we approached a number of police forces to help us with our inquiries. West Midlands Police, for one, has taken some pride in its engagement with social-networking sites, having created profiles on both YouTube and Facebook. "We have a duty and an obligation to communicate with as wide a volume of people as possible," explains chief inspector Mark Payne.
Payne heralds Facebook's potential in playing "an active role in fighting crime". But he recognises that such sites can also encourage new forms of mob crime. "While I think 'real life' vigilantism is relatively rare," he says, "the internet is a new method of communication that we've got to catch up with quickly, because to some degree it's crept up on us. We can engage with the traditional media and ask them not to put out certain information to the public. With social media, we don't have the same contact and it's very difficult to engage."
Could Payne's force do anything to prevent a repeat of something like the "Baby P" identity exposé on the internet - or something much worse? "Perhaps it's less about us trying to restrict the flow of information," he reflects, "and more about trying to understand the fact that you can't protect information now in the same way you used to. We're almost at the stage now where it's impossible to restrict information, and it is going to be made available to the public. So we need to work out strategies based on that. I think that there is a danger of vigilantism - of people using information to harm or inflict violence on people... That's not what anybody wants. But neither does anybody want increased legislation and restriction of information."
A spokesperson for Greater Manchester Police informed us that, although it had noticed "significant increases in web-based hate campaigns", there was no evidence of resulting crime that suggested a need to change policing structure or policy. As with the Met, it was happier to let ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers) give further details.
Stuart Hyde is an e-content leader for ACPO ("dealing with online issues for the police service, both politically and operationally") and president of the Society for the Policing of Cyberspace (POLCYB). "A large proportion of the population is using Facebook," he says. "Like any tool and any technology, there are dangers. You find risks in any walk of life, but certain risks are very low. There's a lot of rubbish spoken about how, for example, if you go online you're going to be surrounded by paedophiles who are going to steal all your personal data. But there are people who collectively want to cause damage and destruction to society. The phenomenon of flashmobs isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if it's used to cause damage then it can be dangerous. "It's easy to argue that online vigilantism could increase. I think that those who want to cause mayhem and do damage will inevitably use the facilities of that technology. Our role is to prevent those opportunities and stop them - and to bring them to justice."
Whereas the police forces we spoke to had minimal direct engagement with the sites themselves, Hyde maintains that ACPO and POLCYB have a more progressive approach. "The relationships are more mature than a few years ago when people didn't understand the technology," he says. "I don't think things are perfect, but they're certainly better here than in some countries."
Reluctant though the social-networking sites are to divulge how they police themselves, they are clearly not seeking to encourage vigilante content. As Christine Hine says: "If you're looking for root causes, it's not really fair to look at the internet in isolation. We should look at the role played by the mass media - both in framing issues of social concern and in framing our ideas of what the internet is for. It's more helpful to see internet vigilantism as part of the spectrum of new social movements building on the capacities of the internet."
Along with the standard replies, Facebook also sent Wired a link to a BBC news story suggesting that the police themselves do not see much of an issue. The news story relates to "Northumbria Police - What a Group ov Wankers" [sic], an 11,000-strong Facebook group posting various violent threats towards the department and its officers. Still active - and growing - the group features such discussion topics as "Shank a Pig a Week" and "What's The Daftest Thing You've Ever Been Locked Up For?"
Facebook referred us to comments in the report made by Paul McKeever, chairman of the Police Federation, who suggested that much apparent vigilante-endorsing content posted online is purely posturing and of little real danger: "It's the sort of comments made by teenagers. It is very abusive and written by people who appear not to have grown up very much. It's a bit of a slippery slope if we start choosing which sites we want to close down. We could end up in a society perhaps we don't want." "They are wasting their time trying to belittle me," reads an online response (still live) by one of the group's founders. "I gave up giving a fuck what anyone thinks of what I say or do a long time ago when I lost faith in the system and the people running it. What the fuck do I have to care about? No kids, no job to be threatened with. They would love to control me but they can't. "They think it's a childish joke?" the commenter adds. "See if they laugh when a pig dies because of it."
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
