The fight for civil rights in the United States has historically focused on equal access to physical spaces: schools, workplaces, lunch counters, hotels, voting booths. This emphasis is understandable, because these were the places where people learned, worked, socialized, and voted. Civil rights activists made clear that people who are excluded from, or exploited in, these spaces cannot fully participate in civic life. But as the role of technology in our daily lives has increased, it has become clear that civil rights protections are as necessary in virtual spaces as in physical ones. This reality has perhaps never been more apparent than today, as so many of our crucial activities shift online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the most significant insights of the civil rights movement is that protecting civil rights is a project of collective responsibility. Far more than proscribing individual acts of discrimination is required. Civil rights law requires that the caretakers of crucial spaces have affirmative obligations to maintain them in ways that promote equal access, and holds them accountable when they fail to do so. School administrators, private employers, hotel proprietors, and restaurant owners all have responsibilities to ensure that their spaces are free of discrimination and abuse. Educational institutions and employers must craft and enforce anti-discrimination policies and they must respond to credible complaints of sexual harassment or racial abuse. Hotels and restaurants must ensure that individuals are not denied service on the basis of protected characteristics.
As we, both individually and together, have argued for more than a decade, civil rights should not be limited to physical spaces. In particular, we have emphasized the importance of “cyber civil rights”—the ways that networked technologies are central to life opportunities and all of the ways that privacy invasions and other online abuse can imperil those opportunities.
We have written about how online assaults have wrecked people’s job prospects, educations, and social lives. One of us (Citron) started talking and writing about destructive cyber mobs in the winter of 2007. Some of the internet’s key features—anonymity, mobilization of far-flung individuals, and group polarization—act as a catalyst to radicalize online behavior. Other features, such as information cascades, enhance the destruction’s accessibility. Cyber mobs engage in an escalating competition to wreak destruction that often involves sexually-humiliating and -terrorizing abuse. We have documented how sexual privacy invasions like nonconsensual pornography, video voyeurism, up-skirt photos, sextortion, and deep fake sex videos have made it impossible for targeted individuals (who more often are women, women of color, and LGBTQ individuals) to work and live free from terror.
In a 2012 article, one of us (Franks) argued that custodians of virtual spaces should have similar civil rights obligations as the custodians of physical spaces. Then, the proposition was novel and quite controversial, and thankfully it is less so now. As in physical spaces, harassment and discrimination in virtual spaces undermine equality. The harmful impact of online abuse is multiplied by the design and dynamics of networked technology, in particular anonymity (abusers can avoid detection); amplification (abuse can be crowdsourced to and magnified by a wide audience); permanence (harmful content or private information can be nearly impossible to remove from the Internet); and virtual captivity (online abuse can follow a victim into every aspect of her life, and opportunities to escape from the global reach of technology are extremely limited). Website operators, much like school administrators, employers, and the proprietors of public accommodations, are uniquely situated to prevent and minimize civil rights abuses within online spaces under their control and run for their financial benefit.
Such a duty of online care, however, has been directly rejected by the dominant interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Instead of imposing even minimal obligations on online platforms to prevent or address entirely foreseeable attacks on civil rights, Section 230 has been broadly interpreted to free them of all responsibility. For years, powerful tech companies, politicians, and self-styled civil libertarians have offered various justifications for why the custodians of online spaces should be exempt from the responsibilities demanded of custodians of physical spaces. Some argue that that online harm is not as serious as offline harm (“speech is not violence”), or that people subjected to abuse always have the option to ignore it or “log off,” or that truly egregious acts of abuse can always be taken up with law enforcement. Implicit in the rejection of well-established principles of collective responsibility for civil rights abuses is the view that equal access to online spaces is simply less essential than equal access to schools, workplaces, and public accommodations.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, triggering widespread stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures. Almost overnight, schools, workplaces, and public accommodations became virtual. Students migrated into online classrooms; employees fortunate enough to still have jobs began working from home; friends and family members connected by crowding around computer screens. We — at least those lucky enough to have reliable internet access — now live, work, study, play, and socialize online. Now more than ever, civil rights are cyber civil rights.
Today, those civil rights are under widespread attack. The rapid shift to online education and work-from-home using unfamiliar, untested, and in many cases insecure communication technology has created multiple vulnerabilities for everyone online, but especially for vulnerable populations. Internet, social media, and online conferencing use can take a toll on mental health generally, and even more so when users confront widespread harassment, surveillance, and exploitation.
Trolls are “using Zoom’s screensharing feature to blast other viewers with the most awful videos from across the internet, from violence to shocking pornography.” These “Zoombombers” have been hijacking lectures and classes all over the country. Public workshops and dissertation defenses have been flooded with pornographic images, forcing them to shut down. University classes have been bombarded with racist and vile messages. Online high school classes have been interrupted by racist invective and men exposing themselves.
The same is happening in virtual workspaces. Online events hosted by journalists, venture capitalists, and restauranteurs have been overrun with pornography. The Anti-Defamation League’s Chicago office has received calls from different Jewish organizations reporting that their video meetings had been targeted with anti-Semitic attacks.
Professional meetings and calls are prime targets for voyeurism and unauthorized recording. Sensitive information from Zoom calls, including intimate conversations, nudity, and personally identifiable information about children, are accessible on the open web. “Videos viewed by The Washington Post included one-on-one therapy sessions; a training orientation for workers doing telehealth calls that included people’s names and phone numbers; small-business meetings that included private company financial statements; and elementary school classes, in which children’s faces, voices and personal details were exposed.”
Cyber mobs are gathering on familiar sites like Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan. The New York Times found more than a hundred Instagram accounts, dozens of Twitter accounts and private chats, and message boards on Reddit and 4Chan where “thousands of people had gathered to organize Zoom harassment campaigns, sharing meeting passwords and plans for sowing chaos in public and private meetings.” Attackers find targets by entering random numbers into the Zoom ID field that takes users to calls in a kind of cyber mob roulette.
The risks to women’s civil rights are particularly grave. Stay-at-home orders mean that many domestic violence victims are trapped with their abusers. The orders have also led to the fraying or dissolution of intimate relationships more generally, leading to increases in individuals lashing out at estranged or former partners. What is more, social distancing measures and other exposure avoidance measures severely restrict conventional and already insufficient responses to both in-person and online intimate partner violence and other harassment, such as contacting law enforcement or leaving one’s home.
Our current historical moment has dissolved the fragile boundary between our offline and online lives. It is clearer than ever that civil rights and liberties must be protected as robustly in virtual spaces as they are in physical spaces. This can only be accomplished if the custodians of those spaces take responsibility for the civil rights violations that flourish on their watch. The administrators of our virtual schools, workplaces, and public accommodations must take measures to prohibit and prevent discrimination and abuse in their spaces. There are no civil rights without cyber civil rights.