AUSTIN, Texas—In October, the South By Southwest festival canceled plans to host a pair of 2016 SXSW Interactive panels amid worries about threats of violence and disruption. Public outcry soon followed, with critics pointing out the irony of a panel about online threats and abuse being canceled for that very reason. SXSW responded by not only reinstating the panels but by attaching them to an even larger, full-day Online Harassment Summit.
While the resulting event on Saturday proved notable for its variety of speakers and their diverse thoughts on how to both moderate and protect various kinds of online speech, it was nearly overshadowed by a frosty pall. SXSW's Online Harassment Summit is the only event in the festival's 22-year run to include a security checkpoint—which visitors had to pass through every time they re-entered its building—and its panels were introduced with reminders that unattended bags would be "confiscated and destroyed" by guards on site, no questions asked.
Between those issues, an overstuffed panel schedule, and the summit venue's long walk from the SXSW downtown-Austin core, the resulting event was dampened by small and thinly spread crowds. There was nothing meek about the content, however. What the Online Harassment Summit lacked in headline-grabbing conflict, it made up for with compelling voices that saw tech, policy, and academic experts finding common ground on the subject of antagonistic and threatening online speech. At its best, the results included informed analysis, mountains of data, and calls to specific action—all while trying to balance both free and responsible speech with paradigms that looked beyond the United States' model.
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