互联网有毒：暴民遍地恶语成风

曾几何时，互联网还是一片充满各种可能性的乐土。来自五湖四海的人们通过互联网这个平台，与素未谋面的陌生人交上了朋友，并且用LiveJournal、GeoCities和Myspace等聊天工具分享他们的热情和见解。互联网的诞生还拉开了信息民主化的大幕，从此，信息再也不会被完全掌控和操纵在主流媒体手中。

而如今的网络已经变得比当初复杂得多了，写博客似乎已经成了老年人的消遣，我们的注意力基本上都被少数几家大公司（尤其是Facebook）所操纵，而且几乎所有青少年都有他们自己的“个人品牌”。早期互联网给人的那种单纯的大学文青范儿早已荡然无存，如今的互联网就像一个粪坑，各种无下限和泼脏水。你在Twitter上不管搜索一下哪个公众人物，都可以看到一大堆跟种族主义或性别歧视有关的攻击和威胁。

更糟糕的是，你就算自己不招惹这些下三滥的东西，这些攻击和威胁还会自己送上门来。比如作家杰西卡·瓦兰蒂最近宣布退出社交媒体，缘由是一位Instagram的用户向她发来消息，威胁要奸杀她年仅5岁的女儿。瓦兰蒂今年七月在Tweeter上表示：“我不应该每天在恐惧里生活。”

像Twitter这样的网络服务商一直希望他们的用户群体能够做到自律，使那些网络流氓羞于搞出出格的言行。

网络暴民心态，加上隔着屏幕造成的人性化交流的缺失，使得愤怒和恶毒的情绪在网上四处蔓延。互联网的本意是要构建一个互联的世界，但是在朝着这个美好愿望前进的过程中，我们却失去了作为一个普通人应有的礼貌。据网络安全公司诺顿（Norton）最近的调查显示，网络上对女性的骚扰已经成为“家常便饭”，在被调查的30岁以下的女性中，有76%曾在网上遭遇过恶意辱骂和骚扰。

对于Facebook这种热门网络服务商来说，如果他们的平台上总是充斥着各种辱骂和歧视，显然不利于自身业务的（因为用户和广告商必定会敬而远之）。Facebook目前就正在开发一些工具以解决网络骚扰问题。Facebook的子公司Instagram最近也允许泰勒·斯威夫特等明星设置一些“敏感词”，以自动筛出她们的照片下方的恶意评论。

Twitter并不要求用户实名注册，并且它曾一度自称是“言论自由党的言论自由之翼。”但是如今Twitter也不得不朝这个方向走了。近日该公司CEO杰克·多西决定，公司要将抑制网友的恶意攻击谩骂作为头等大事来抓，这说明Twitter的立场已经发生了重大转变。前一阵一位Twitter网友因公开煽动其粉丝攻击女演员莱斯莉·琼斯而遭到Twitter封禁。消息付出之后，网上的“言论自由党”们纷纷跳出来抵制Twitter。然而这些“言论自由党”们错了。我们曾希望建立一个开放、文明、自律的网络环境，然而现在这个希望已经破灭了。主宰当今的互联网的几个大平台越早意识到这一点，我们所有人才能过得更安全，同时也更文明。

本文的另一版本以“霸凌与流氓”（Bullies and Trolls）为题刊登在了2016年9月1日刊的《财富》杂志上。（财富中文网）

译者：朴成奎

Once upon a URL, the World Wide Web was a place of fantastic possibility. People went online to meet and befriend total strangers. They could share their passions and opinions on LiveJournal or GeoCities or even Myspace. The democratization of information, no longer controlled and distributed exclusively by the mainstream media, was liberating.

Today the web is far more sophisticated—the idea of blogging seems quaint, a handful of giant companies (mostly Facebook) controls what we discover, and teenagers all have their own “personal brands.” More notably the innocent, collegial, summer-camp feeling of the early web has been replaced by a cesspool of attention mongering and outrage. Peruse the Twitter mentions of any public figure, and you’ll find a trove of racist and sexist attacks and threats.

What’s worse, those threats now come in the form of push notifications to our smartphones. Author Jessica Valenti, for example, recently quit social media after an Instagram user sent a rape and death threat directed at her 5-year-old daughter. “I should not have to wade through horror to get through the day,” she tweeted in July.

Web services like Twitter had long hoped that the vibrant online communities they created would police themselves. Trolls and bullies would be shamed into playing nice.

But mob mentality and the impersonal way screens dehumanize digital communication have allowed hatred and venom to flourish online. Somewhere along the way to the web’s starry-eyed promise of a connected world, we lost track of common decency. Online harassment of women is becoming an “established norm,” according to a recent study by cybersecurity company Norton, which found that 76% of the women under 30 surveyed had experienced abuse or harassment online.

Hosting a pit of vitriol is not good for business (users and advertisers will flee), so what’s a popular Internet service to do? For Facebook, it’s building tools for the targets of harassment. The company’s subsidiary Instagram recently allowed Taylor Swift and other celebrities to filter out certain words and phrases from the comments below their photos.

Twitter, which doesn’t require people to use their real names and once called itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” is moving in that direction. CEO Jack Dorsey’s decision to prioritize curbing abuse marked a major shift. Fellow members of the “free speech party” balked when the company permanently banned a bully who directed his followers to attack actress Leslie Jones, prompting her to publicly quit the service. But those free speech defenders are misguided.The promise of an open, decent, self-policing web that people actually want to spend time on is dead. The sooner the platforms that control today’s web understand that, the safer—and saner—we’ll all be.

A version of this article appears in the September 1, 2016 issue of Fortune with the headline “Bullies and Trolls.”