Up next in this Weizenbaum Conference session are Sabine Barthold and Richard Joos, whose interest is in fighting dark participation through digital vigilantism. Dark participation is a growing threat to online communities; it undermines functioning online communities and turns them into toxic and dysfunctional spaces, for political reasons. Such attacks are often orchestrated amongst large groups of actors.
Traditional counter-strategies are platform governance, but its effectiveness is strictly limited; and societal responses, but these often fail due to limited resources and understanding amongst law enforcement organisations. Instead, a further option may be to employ DIY defence approaches and swarming techniques: interconnected networks of individuals draw on algorithmic amplification techniques and leverage with highly invested communities to respond en masse to perceived threats, and this can also move from online to offline spaces. This is swarm culture, and can be described as a form of online community vigilantism.
Such approaches actually draw on the same mechanisms that dark participation also engages in; this is trolling the trolls, and provides a sense of agency for the victims of the original trolling. But they don’t come without their own risks: the original trolls may not always be able to be identified; the activists engaging in digital vigilantism also place themselves in potential danger; their actions may only further feed and encourage the trolls; and the dynamics of such vigilantism might spiral out of control and harm others.
Counter-swarming can work in some cases, though; in either case, the key steps are to recognise the patterns of dark participation campaigns, organise a response, name and shame the offenders, and reclaim spaces for safe communities.
