A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Online Harassment

Last October, designer & researcher Caroline Sinders made a three week trip to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sydney to study their cultures of online harassment. Today, she shares some of her findings on Buzzfeed:

More generally, in Hong Kong, journalists told me that personal data is so widely accessible that most internet users don’t see or expect “privacy” in the same way that American users do. “The idea of privacy and owning your own information here isn’t as strong as it is in the US…it’s easier to sell the data because, of course, it’s just data,” is how one cartoonist put it.

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In interviews with Chinese journalists and students, I learned about these new terms to describe online harassment on WeChat… and Sino Weibo…

Hanging: Gua, 挂，hanging, when a Big V or popular Weibo or Twitter user reposts or quotes a comment made by a regular user, amplifying their post and handle to shame them in front of a much larger audience…

Fleshing or meat hooking: 人肉搜索 translates to ‘flesh search.’ People at computers making a series of searches, aka “Let’s flesh him.” Fleshing combines group gossiping with doxxing… Fleshing expands systematically and thoroughly throughout networks. Where doxxing often amounts to circulating disjointed information without any particular focus on verification, fleshing builds out a large base of information that is cross-referenced, verified and footnoted.

What’s important to note about these terms is that a system designed to recognize online harassment terms or specific kinds of interactions would have a hard time proving that fleshing is harassment.

Read the full article: What Is Doxxing Called On Sino-Weibo?