Find a way to de-weaponize the internet

Imagine moving to a neighborhood where social interaction is friendly, where people share news and information, call on one another when there’s trouble and watch each other’s kids to ensure they’re safe. Imagine you could communicate with nearly anyone in the world by clicking a key on your computer, and where information about virtually every topic is just a few keystrokes away.

That would be the ideal Internet and World Wide Web. When the Internet was born in 1983 and the web was introduced 10 years later, hopes were high they would make everyone virtual neighbors worldwide for greater understanding and peace.

Now imagine that bad actors with dishonorable intentions move in, including bullies, scammers, conspiracy mongers and cyber-terrorists who believe that neither laws nor morals apply to them.

Welcome to the internet and web today.

The internet has been weaponized by trolls and terrorists; scammers and spammers; sadists and seditionists; bullies and blackmailers; hackers and haters. They use it for phishing, fake news, fraud and persecution. Unscrupulous organizations steal and sell trade secrets and personal information. Others extort ransom by shutting down the critical networks of local governments, hospitals, first responders and others. Trolls can ruin reputations and careers, subject people to slander and ridicule, as well as spread lies that can never be recalled or erased. Bullies and sadists use it to prod vulnerable victims into harming, or even killing, themselves.

Mother Jones recently reported about Kiwi Farms, an online group whose members coordinate attacks on vulnerable victims. They employ doxing (maliciously publishing private information about someone), swatting (making false calls to send SWAT teams to private homes), defaming, stalking and ridicule. They are cyber-cowards who hide deep in websites that allow them to remain anonymous.

“Kiwi Farms harvests anguish,” Mother Jones reporter Ali Breland writes. “It thrives on pain and revels in death.” It assembles dossiers on vulnerable people and distorts the information to torment them with “persistent and twisted harassment campaigns.”

“Most websites aren’t known for having a ‘kill count.'” Breland says. “Kiwi Farms is.” Its users link, conspire and collaborate to bully victims. He quotes another journalist who found members of Kiwi Farms were reportedly “systematically trying to cause suicides.” In one case, a woman set herself on fire in a public park.

A healthy democracy depends on an informed citizenry. But people use the internet to spread disinformation, misinformation and anti-democratic ideologies. Many politicians inject venom into election campaigns and use the network to anger and activate their voters. For example, former President Donald Trump routinely spread insults, conspiracy theories and disinformation in many of his 23,858 tweets while in office. Before Twitter suspended Trump’s account on Jan. 8, 2021, he had nearly 89 million followers, received 390 million tweets, and got more than 1.7 trillion “likes,” according to an organization that tracks social media.

Experts say bad actors cannot remain 100 percent anonymous, but there are several ways internet users can make it nearly impossible to identify them. Visitors to the so-called dark web conduct both legal and illegal transactions. An anonymous online message board that advertises itself as “the Darkest Reaches of the Internet” has reportedly been linked to mass shootings and QAnon conspiracies.

Breland calls the worst abuses of the internet “the dystopian endgame of those who think that doing anything short of pulling the trigger themselves is ‘free speech.'” Bad actors seemingly think internet anonymity lets them get away with conduct that’s likely illegal offline.

For example, some participants in the Jan. 6 insurrection apparently didn’t realize that free speech and assembly are not absolute constitutional rights. For example, certain speech is not protected, including incitement, defamation, fraud, obscenity, child pornography, fighting words and threats.

“Infowars” host Alex Jones was fined nearly $1 billion dollars for defaming the parents of the 20 children and six teachers killed in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school. The court found Jones’ text messages showed he spread rumors that the grieving parents were actors and claimed the massacre was faked to justify confiscating guns. In another case, a judge declared Michelle Carter guilty of involuntary manslaughter for sending her boyfriend texts that goaded him into suicide.

Kristin Bride, an advocate for social media reform, recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee her 16-year-old son died by suicide after receiving nearly 100 negative, harassing and sexually explicit messages online. She sued the social media company that hosted the harassment, but the court dismissed the case, citing the 1966 Communications Decency Act. It says Internet companies are not liable for the content that third parties post on their websites.

The president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children testified to Congress that his organization’s tip line received more than 3.2 million reports of child abuse in the United States during the past year. He said companies are not obligated to report child sex trafficking or online enticement of children and victims have no recourse if a company takes no action to stop it.

Government regulation of the internet is controversial. It’s like inviting Big Brother to the neighborhood. Still, it would be a dereliction of duty for the Senate not to pass legislation this year to keep bad guys offline. At the very least, it should be easier to identify the miscreants who weaponize what should be one of society’s greatest assets.

The House must address this, too. The criminal corruption of the internet is more important than revenge hearings about Hunter Biden’s laptop or paranoia that the Justice Department and FBI are biased against conservatives.

William S. Becker is co-editor and a contributor to “Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People,” a collection of more than 30 essays by American thought leaders on topics such as the Supreme Court’s perceived legitimacy. Becker has served in several state and federal government roles, including executive assistant to the attorney general of Wisconsin. He is currently executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), a nonpartisan climate policy think tank unaffiliated with the White House.