Junk the online junkies, save the innocents

A recent piece of news has highlighted the cruel side of online violence. Qiqi, a high school student in Lufeng city of Guangdong province, committed suicide because she could not bear the humiliation of being called a thief. The tragedy has its seed in a CCTV footage of Qiqi that a store owner posted online, accusing her of stealing goods from the store. The video triggered a flood of online attacks on the girl, which didn't stop even after her death, with some heartless netizens saying, "she deserved it".

Online violence usually brings out the baser, illogical side of attackers and forces targeted victims to commit desperate acts.

I used to write a regular web column for China Daily a couple of years ago, and one of the greatest satisfactions of the job was getting feedback from readers. But the feedback also comprised comments that were often just personal attacks against me. Readers may assume that insulting comments is a harmless act, but evidence suggests that there is a big downside to mean-spirited remarks.

According to two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele, readers visiting newspaper and magazine websites for science news, may be influenced as much by the comments at the end of the report as by the report itself. In the course of their research, Brossard and Scheufele found that the tone of the online comments significantly altered the public's view about the technology. According to the two researchers: "Simply including an ad hominem attack in a readers' comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought."

In September, Suzanne LaBarre, online editor at Popular Science, announced that the publication had decided to shut off online comments, because "comments can be bad for science". LaBarre suggests that, "a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story ... And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science."

Echoing LaBarre, James Fallows, explained why he did not allow comments on his columns on The Atlantic's website: "Unless a comment stream is actively moderated, it inevitably is ruined by bullies, hotheads and trolls."

And Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history of science at Harvard University, says: "The Internet has become a forum for the spread of disinformation."