The South African Internet has been abuzz in the last few days about a chat service called Outoilet*. It seems that the site was one of those dark underbelly things – a place where people slandered each other, hooked up with each other, and shared naked pictures of each other.
So it was just like the normal Internet, really.
Well, it seemed so until someone realised that these “people” were, in fact, school children. The site even provided chat rooms that were conveniently named for the schools they served. Implicitly, a great deal of the users of the site are assumed to have been underaged and, also implicitly, the exchanges that were going on fell foul of South African child abuse laws.
Really, this is cause for very serious concern.
Yesterday, however, it was announced in the press that the site had been blocked by both major South African mobile network operators, Vodacom and MTN. This is a result of a campaign initiated by World Wide Worx, the South African technology polling company headed by Arthur Goldstuck. Arthur, always well meaning and immaculately coiffed, tells of his heroic role in the saga here. He also provides a great informational piece here.
I am sure that Arthur and his fellow cadres acted with the noblest of intentions. Nevertheless, I have a serious problem with what they have done, and it isn’t just because I don’t like other people deciding what I can and cannot see. I have a problem with their reactionary vigilantism that has prevented the investigation and prosecution of the sexual predators from whom they are trying to protect children.
Censorship, in my opinion, should be the last resort under any circumstances. Of all the objectionable things that happened on Outoilet, there are none against which there isn’t already a law. People seem to feel that when something happens online, it is bigger, scarier and more malefic than when it happens in any other forum. That, plainly, is bullshit.
Arthur cites bullying as one of the evils from which South African children are constitutionally protected. I wish that this protection existed when I was at school. I would have been a much happier child. However, when I consider the question of whether I would rather have people saying nasty things about me on the Internet or beating me to crap for no reason (and no, I don’t want to be friends with you on Facebook you psychopathic asshole), I’d take the online nastiness any day. Kids are nasty little bastards to each other at the best of times, and their ability to collude even against their own best interests makes it impossible to protect them from emotional bullying in any medium. The best you can hope to do is keep them physically safe from each other.
Far more serious are the allegations that children were sexually abused as a result of using the site. Well, closing Outoilet down doesn’t make these predators go away. Closing the site down doesn’t stop children from sharing pornography or horrific recordings of schoolyard rapes. Closing the site down just drives these disturbing things deeper underground, and makes it even harder to stop them.
I am deeply saddened by two aspects of the Outoilet saga.
Firstly, Outoilet was simply a window through which we got to glimpse a small part of a great social evil. The hurtful and illegal things that were written there were not a result of the Internet, or the availability of the site itself, but the result of this social evil. The window has been closed but the victims of Outoilet, and victims they are, are no better off. Whether online or not, they are still being victimised, bullied, preyed upon and humiliated by the same people. I hope that Arthur spares a thought for them while patting himself on the back.
Secondly, the police and related organisations seem to have been powerless to investigate the site and its users. If sexual predators leave their phone number on a site, it should be possible to trace them. It doesn’t seem like anyone even tried. I suspect that this is because our police force has their hands full with conventional crime, and lacks training in online crime to an extent that makes the Internet seem as remote and magical as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
As computer professionals, perhaps we should be offering our services to the police force, and providing the training that is necessary to protect our children in circumstances like this. Perhaps we should be doing this pro bono, thereby doing something real to protect our children and bring those who prey upon them to book.
The alternative, censorship, chills my very soul. This isn’t an Internet problem. This is a people problem. A group of self-appointed, private individuals have just held a lynching. They have taken down someone’s Web business because they didn’t like what the users of the site were doing. That is like arresting the CEO of Chrysler because someone used a C300 as a getaway car in a bank robbery. Aside from that, their actions are indistinguishable from vigilantism, which is offensive and illegal in itself.
There is no heroism in removing a social problem from public view. Real heroism involves being the instrument of lasting social change. Perhaps, when all of the self promotion and mutual appreciation is over, the members of this lynch mob will consider contributing some of their gains to counselling programs in schools, and training in online investigation for the police. Leave a comment if there is anything that I can do to help.
*: For those not familiar with the Afrikaans tongue, “ou toilet” means “old toilet”. This site seems to have been an attempt to replicate the time honoured tradition of scrawling libelous, abusive and dirty messages on the walls of old toilet buildings, of which most people at my school were victims at one time or another. In fact, the stuff that appeared on Outoilet seems to have been exactly the same as the stuff that appeared on our toilet walls, except for the single consideration that modern, digitised media beats the old analogue Bic pen scrawls for lifelike veracity. Also, putting this social construct online has eliminated the need for the mysterious lunatic who had the job of pissing on the floor every day.
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My car could do with a wash.
Now that is what I call lasting social change…