It was the kind of court case that could not have happened 10, five or even three years ago: an internet troll charged over offensive comments he’d made in response to a Facebook post of a screenshot of a Tinder profile quoting a Drake lyric.
“Just before we get started,” said the judge as he entered the courtroom, holding a thick sheath of paper on which tens, if not hundreds of comments made by the defendant and others were printed, “what is ‘inboxing’?”
There was a pause. The counsel for the defence responded to the best of her ability.
“The inbox is where you get your messages on Facebook.”
From this inauspicious start, Zane Alchin – charged over 55 comments he had made in the course of two hours on Facebook in August 2015, several of which referred explicitly to rape – was convicted of using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend.
On paper it was a victory for the anti-trolling movement. Despite its prevalence – according to the UN nearly three in four women have witnessed or experienced some form of “cyber violence” – charges are rarely laid over online abuse. Paloma Brierley Newton, the complainant to whom Alchin had addressed many of his comments, had first overcome hurdles to report them to police then kept the momentum with a media campaign.
Even reaching the point of sentencing, nearly a year later, felt like an achievement.
But in the courtroom there was no sense of a wrong being righted – only reminder after reminder of why, for every Alchin, there will be those who never see justice.
From the outset, it was clear that the platform itself posed a problem. In general, talking about online dialogue is fraught with difficulty, and this case demanded a lot of it. It asked the questions:
What might compel a young woman to describe herself as the “type of girl to suck you dry then eat some lunch with you”? Why would a man go out of his way to make fun of a stranger to his own Facebook friends and followers? Why would someone post publicly, repeatedly, quite specifically about rape and sexual violence?
The sentencing judge, magistrate William Pierce, had read the sprawling comment thread for the first time less than an hour before entering the courtroom. He remarked on the “huge number” of posts, as well as the “number” by Brierley Newton, and the “somewhat inflammatory ... sexual nature” of the Tinder bio that sparked it all.
I’d watched the “flame fight”, as the lawyer termed it, unfurl on Facebook in August last year, months before Alchin was charged. There were likes. There were shares. There were comments and screengrabs and blocks and all the creation and curation of content that goes on when it goes down online. Even if you were very familiar with the facts, it was difficult to follow, and compounding the problem was a generation gap.
Played out anew in a courtroom nearly a year later, it demanded his defence lawyer explain the internet. We heard the definitions of “OMG” and “IRL” and “fuckboi” – “the equivalent of calling girls ‘slut’,” she said. (“No, it isn’t,” hissed a reporter next to me.) The fact that women were called “‘basic bitches’, several times” was held up as an indicator of the “level of conversation”.
Seemingly more by accident than design, in the retelling Alchin’s comments became the worst of a bad bunch – not simply “offensive” but violent, misogynistic, persistent. The fact that he’d posted 55 times in two hours, often singling out an individual, and the explicitness, the specificity with which he’d addressed her seemed to get lost in the he-said, she-said.
In the comments reported in the police fact sheet and Brierley Newton’s victim impact statement – not even a complete account of what he posted – Alchin had made graphic, violent references to rape and sexual violence. No one – not the police, not even Brierley Newton – had truly believed that Alchin intended to rape her. But the fact that it had occurred to him to reference it, or the possibility that it communicated something about his attitude towards women, was not raised in the courtroom at all.
To quote his defence lawyer: Alchin was simply “being deliberately offensive to others”.
Pierce said his comments were “sexually explicit ... quite disgusting ... deliberately offensive” – but that he had not threatened or incited rape.
The incident was spoken of, by both his defence lawyer and Pierce, as a social media block war in which Alchin had undeniably overstepped the line but in which no one had been blameless, and from which he had not escaped scot-free, even before charges were laid.
Alchin had experienced “significant extra-curial punishment”, said Pierce, citing a “vast overreaction” from others involved, including Brierley Newton, and the threats and harassment he had received from her supporters. Media coverage, it was implied, was part of that punishment. But some of Alchin’s comments had gone “a bit far”.
In his summing up, Pierce told Alchin that “before the days of Facebook” – simpler, better days it was implied – the charge of using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend had been applied to boyfriends threatening their girlfriends over the phone. It was a “unilateral thing”, he said.
With the “whirling maelstrom of hate” on the internet, a “few mildly explicit comments” was the price of entry. Actually, he used the analogy of a sports game: “if you’re on the football field, you consent to a few bumps”.
The week before the sentencing, I had been tweeted at by a man identified only as John. I’d never encountered him before. He told me that he hoped I was raped and beheaded, “not necessarily in that order either ;)”.
It didn’t occur to me to even block him, let alone report him to the police. (Merely “hoping” I get raped probably doesn’t equate to a threat, anyway.) It was a one-off; he was a faceless “egg” account. It’s still active on his profile, the most recent tweet he sent.
I didn’t consent to a few bumps, but I’ve accepted that they happen. Brierley Newton had chosen not to. She was in tears when she left the courtroom.
Ending online abuse has in part been discussed as a criminal justice issue: how to hold perpetrators accountable under the law. When simply identifying them is difficult, a charge is an achievement; a conviction is a win.
This felt like more of a concession – that a couple of references to rape is a good innings for a day on the internet, that we have to tolerate someone who sets out to be “deliberately offensive”, that we can’t clean up the web. And if the courts write off the issue of online abuse, we can expect those “bumps” to get bigger.
