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1 Introduction
In 1999, two former employees - together with a third accomplice - began a smear campaign on Internet bulletin boards against a biotech company. Today, the bulletin board includes thousands of postings containing false information and allegations against the company and its officers. In November 2005, Fortune, a national business magazine in the United States, ran a cover story: "Attack of the Blogs. " In 2006, a Turkish hacker defaced over 38,000 websites in a single day.
In most discussions of Web 2. 0 - the buzz-word to describe the interactive phase of Internet development characterized by extensive end-user participation through blogs, wikis, podcasts, vlogs, and other means of self-expression - the emphasis falls upon what is socially beneficial about the shift underway from consumers to creators. The movement toward online user-generated content, and the corresponding decentralization of the media environment, is in many ways good for the health of democracies and markets. "Market are conversations," said the authors of the break-through book, the Cluetrain Manifesto. All this is true - most of the time.
In this paper, we take up the dark side of online behavior. Our frame of reference is from the perspective of institutions - often corporations, but also conceivably universities, NGOs, agencies, and so forth - that are the subject of unusually aggressive online campaigns intended to cause harm to those institutions.
The core aim of this paper is to determine what motivates aggressive online behavior and what, if anything, makes it different than offline aggressive behavior aimed at corporations and other institutions. What drives former employees of a company to devote much of their spare time to organizing online protests against their former employers? What are the most appropriate - and likely to be effective - institutional responses to phenomena such as aggressive online behavior and Internet extremism? Perhaps at the most fundamental level: is there something going on online that is different from criticism of corporations that has gone on offline for as long as business has existed?
In this White Paper, we seek to explore these and related questions. Our orientation is to consider these problems from the approach of a corporation or institution facing such critics, not from the perspective of the critic or from a high-level public policy viewpoint. We approach this problem first at an analytical level (to understand the phenomenon and to set it into a useful context), and then at a normative level (to consider what might be done about it by an institution, but not at the level of public policy).
2 Three Types of Online Behavior Targeted at Corporations and Other Institutions
Our inquiry starts with an important principle: aggressive, destructive online behavior must be distinguished from those legitimate forms of expression that are essential to the proper functioning of markets, democracies, and societies at large. By "legitimate" forms of expression, we mean that the activity is protected not just protected by law by the First Amendment in the United States and its analogues around the world, but also that the activity is socially beneficial and does not violate established social norms for acceptable online behavior. Our perspective is that a continuum exists, with constructive behavior on one hand and destructive behavior on the other. Much lies in between.
Online critics often act in this middle ground. The result is that institutions seeking to respond in some fashion to an online critic face a highly complicated situation. In most jurisdictions around the world, legal responses are unlikely to be effective means of addressing the problem, as most online speech (as in the case of other speech) enjoys the protection of the First Amendment or its analogue. This paper seeks first to map the full spectrum of online behavior targeted against corporations and other institutions, but then to hone in on the behavior on the more aggressive end of the spectrum.
Media psychologists differentiate between various forms of online behavior. These categories include aggressive, discriminating, pro-social, and cooperative behavior. For the purposes of the study, we adopt three main clusters of online behavior that are grouped along a spectrum from what is generally considered to be "constructive" behavior on the one end to what most agree would qualify as "destructive" behavior on the other end of the scale.
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