The Internet has become the world’s go-to source for anything and everything. With it expanding to the point where it can branch people from around the world, the possibilities to create positive output is endless. And because of this fact, it has become somewhat of a haven for free speech and imaginative liberty. But, on the flipside, it is home to people with malicious tendencies who use the Internet for manipulation and ultimately harassment. With a lot of social platforms being the main grounds of these acts, it becomes the job of software engineers that maintain these places to find ways to stop people like this.
Ethics itself is quite a hard topic to go about in terms of software engineering. Having the skills of creating websites that handle private information or to obtain information through databases, effectively allows us to easily violate many ethical issues. In a funny way, “With great power comes great responsibility,” becomes a fitting phrase for us. So to me, ethics in software engineering ultimately makes us gatekeepers from preventing harassment and also refusing to use it for malicious intent.
Everywhere you go, opinions will be shared between huge groups of people. You see this in politics, academic debate, and normal everyday banter. However once you take that opinion to extreme lengths, that’s where it goes too far. This is the case with Gamergate, where thousands of people flocked together on Twitter, 4chan, and 8chan to talk down towards the idea of increasing feminism in video games. In my opinion, if you want to appeal to a wider audience of consumers, you should provide elements within your product that will attract them without it being too forced. But, with the argument of most Gamergate supporters, they believe this idea goes quite far, saying that it becomes progressive propaganda, detracting what originally makes video games appealing to the masses. Some people have valid arguments with this stance, but as seen within many articles around Gamergate, people used the movement as a guise to harass people freely as it is “justified”. I for one think that the movement is a terrible representation of gamers around the world, so this violates the idea of freedom of speech as it stamps out other people’s opinions.
As software engineers, finding solutions for suppressing things like Gamergate becomes very touchy as the line for where we can punish this kind of behavior is skewed. Because privacy is a huge part of ethics for many websites, it becomes very tough to find those who commit such harassment. So if you can’t really punish those who cause these acts, then the next best step is to inhibit activities of these groups from hurting others. That comes to increasing security so that possible victims can’t get doxed, and creating algorithms to filter out supports from gaining too much traction. As frustrating as it seems, you can’t simply do a google search to find these people as VPN’s and other methods become commonplace. That’s why the Gamergate situation led to zero lawsuits. So the best thing that us software engineers can do is be the wall that protects victims from harassment.
It’s quite tough to think that we should be the one’s to prevent such harassment from happening on the Internet since this topic can be attacked on many fronts. As we can’t really proactively manhunt harassers, the best that us software engineers can do is create systems and platforms that prevent harassment in the first place. So whenever we are working on a project, we should keep in mind that the way we make our systems could have possible holes that allow harassment to flow. In a sense, this works hand in hand with privacy so this topic could be elaborated on much more, but for now we just need to keep in mind that we are the ones who can maintain what people can say, whether it is for better or worse.