Vicious Internet Communities: and Amanda Knox

I suppose people have lots of opinions about Amada Knox the recently found innocent accused murderer in Italy, but I didn’t realize just how wild those opinions were until I read a Kindle single by Douglas Preston, Trail by Fury: Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case. [It’s about a 15 minute read.} And where the “fury” primarily takes place is on the Internet. The author and several others who have come to her defense have been threatened, their families threatened, lost jobs, demonized and the like. Preston seeks to understand the phenomenon. Just Google Amanda Knox with an adjective and see what happens.

He notes the work of Zeynep Tufekci a sociologist who deals with the Internet. He has a blog I want to check out called Technosociology.

He also speaks about generally respected or at least known reporters such as Wikipedia and how to begin with their information was highly distorted. And then there is Ann Coulter who wrote, “Despite liberals’ desperate for need for Europeans to like them, the American media have enraged the entire nation of Italy with the bald-faced lies about heinous murder in Perugia committed by a fresh-faced American girl.” Well, she seems to hate everybody anyway.

Preston turns to evolutionary biology for answers and they are intriguing, apparently only found in we humans. It goes something like this. We don’t like or tolerate slackers as they are harmful to the group. The phrase, “If you don’t work you don’t eat,” is exemplary of this thought. Think about all the folk you know who complain about slackers and condemn them with little actual knowledge of a specific situation. By the age of 3 we have generally developed this idea of punished third party of perceived slackers. We tattle.

Samuel Bowles, director of Behavioral Sciences in the Santé Fe Institute challenges the standard economic assumption that people are entirely motivated by self-interest and studies altruistic behavior. He calls it group evolution: some will act for the benefit of the group over totally selfish people. They become cooperative in dealing with slackers. We don’t want slackers bringing the group down. Many become avid about this and enjoy this punishing behavior. This also explains warfare, but I’ll skip that argument for now.

This type of punishment is parochial and tends to go wild. This stands in contrast to the law, which says we have the right to confront our accuser(s) and must examine all pertinent evidence.

Now comes the Internet and these internet communities that develop such attitudes describes but they are essentially anonymous unlike small communities where folk really know each other and must deal with more than stereotypes. The “Internet, which allows for the free rein of our punishing instincts with no checks and balances, no moderation, and no accountability, and conducted with complete anonymity.” There “is no softening effects of real human interactions.”

So in the Amanda Knox case, which factually and by law she is innocent, show the darkest of evolutionary biology running riot.

Good read for a buck and raises an interesting insight into Internet communities.