It was somewhere between the calls to repeal the 19th Amendment and the declarations that I was a traitor who belonged in Guantanamo Bay that the trolls started to wear me down.
Several days before the onslaught began, I posted a dry Twitter video debunking a conspiratorial narrative that was gaining prominence among Trump supporters. The next week, while sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office, my iPhone grew hot as it processed a stream of tweets and direct messages telling me “Islam was right about women,” criticizing the size of my breasts, my chin dimple, and the symmetry of my face. According to the trolls, I was an “affluent white female liberal,” or “AWFL,” and part of a CIA psyop. The guest room that has served as my office since March, where I filmed the video, was actually a basement in Langley, they said. Next year, I would be “dealt with in the streets.” One tweet read chillingly: “I’d fix her.” When it’s happening to you, online abuse feels like a tornado of thousands of insects that, when swatted, will simply get angrier, or dirt that will get kicked up if you struggle.
I sent hundreds of reports to Twitter during the weeks I was targeted, all in vain. How could the artificial intelligence assisting with content moderation understand that the pictures of empty egg cartons were not nudges to go to the grocery store, but taunts meant to suggest that, as one of my abusers put it, “you birth babies, we build bridges,” and that my birthing years were dwindling?
The abuse I experienced—and my near total lack of recourse—is not unique. In fact, on the online misogyny scale, my experience wasn’t even particularly bad. I did not get any rape threats. Unlike more than 668,000 unwitting women, no one—to my knowledge, anyway—created deep fake pornography of me. I was not the subject of an involved sexualized disinformation campaign, the likes of which Vice President Kamala Harris and Representatives Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar have endured.
But all of this is terrifyingly ubiquitous, and its impact on society is sprawling. Just before the United States saw its first woman vice president, treasury secretary, director of national intelligence, and more women and women of color serving in Congress than ever before, these figures were also being targeted for sex-based harassment meant to silence them. Over a two-month period in late 2020, I led a research team monitoring the social media mentions of 13 prominent politicians, including Harris, Ocasio-Cortez, and Omar. We found more than 336,000 instances of gendered and sexualized abuse posted by over 190,000 users. These widespread campaigns represent just a sliver of the abuse that women in public life deal with on a daily basis in the internet era.
Over half of the research subjects were also targeted with gendered and sexualized disinformation, a subset of online abuse that uses false or misleading sex-based narratives against women, often with some degree of coordination. These campaigns typically aim to deter women from participating in the public sphere. One such narrative suggested that several targets were secretly transgender. It implied not only that transgender individuals are inherently deceptive, but that this deception is responsible for the power and influence that women like Harris, Ocasio-Cortez, or New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern hold. Women of color were subject to compounded attacks, playing to two of America’s greatest weaknesses: its endemic racism and misogyny.
The social media platforms, for their part, have not created infrastructures that support women enduring harassment and disinformation campaigns. Instead, they have created environments to cater to the needs and challenges that white, cisgender men face. They may as well adopt my abusers’ refrain— “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Platforms like Facebook and Twitter force women to report individual instances of harassment and disinformation, only to have them denied or ignored, despite the very real harm they inflict on victims’ lives and reputations. While platforms have improved at detecting some blatant gendered abuse—think of the top five profanities related to female body parts—they have been caught flat-footed at the burgeoning malign creativity that abusers employ. Harassers recognize that certain words and phrases might trigger platforms’ detection mechanisms, and so they use coded language, iterative, context-based visual and textual memes, and other tactics to avoid automated removal. The egg carton meme I received is just one example.
A more notable example of malign creativity is the sexualized disinformation campaign against Vice President Harris during the 2020 election. She was targeted with various coded, derogatory nicknames, slogans, and visuals that shapeshifted to avoid moderation; the social media platforms could not keep up with the changes fast enough to quash the demeaning, spurious content. We found more than 260,000 instances of such abuse—over 78 percent of all the data we collected—in the two months we monitored conversations about her on Twitter, Reddit, Gab, 4chan, 8kun, and Parler.
The effects of these campaigns are broad, impacting women themselves, the tone of their engagement in public life, and the functioning of representative democracy. Women interviewed as part of our study described the campaigns against them as “a tsunami,” “terrorism,” and like “someone had put me in a dryer and … left it on high for two days.” One interviewee noted that when she is the subject of online harassment, she disengages and self-censors. “You don’t feel safe to continue speaking,” she says, “so you don’t speak.” This is an impediment to women’s participation in a variety of fields for which public engagement is part of the job description. Further, when women see that even their most powerful and successful counterparts are forced to wade through vile online misogyny, it makes them question whether publishing, speaking out, or running for office is worth the burden. It is time to reverse this trend by employing creativity and technological prowess to make a pariah of online misogyny.
Like the rest of society in the post #MeToo era, social media platforms must decisively make the shift toward believing women. Rather than relying on AI, which doesn’t capture the nuance of many taunts, and one-off reports, which don’t communicate the full user experience, platforms must transition to incident-based report systems. This would allow targets to highlight the inciting piece of content that led to their abuse, such as a tacit pile-on instruction from a high-follower account. It would also allow platforms to continually update the classifiers that help them identify abusive content, making it increasingly less likely that women in public life are forced to endure it as a cost of their participation.
Meanwhile, Congress should reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and include provisions against online gender-based harassment. The 2019 VAWA Reauthorization Act never received a vote in the Senate, leaving its crucial protections for victims of gender-based violence lapsed. When the new Congress considers VAWA reauthorization, lawmakers should add provisions to support targets of online gender-based harassment, including budgetary allocations to build law enforcement awareness about sexist threats online. Congress also needs to set an example, not only by calling out gender-based abuse and harassment when they see or experience it, but also by not engaging in it themselves including by not sharing gendered disinformation or slurs. Members of the House of Representatives are already prohibited from posting “visual misrepresentations of other people, including but not limited to deep fake technology,” and may not “disparage” other Members, including through ad hominem attacks in official communications. But given the widespread nature of attacks against women in politics and the downstream effect they have on recruitment to the political fold, Congress must develop more detailed standards for decorum around gender issues.
This problem requires action at lower levels, too; organizations should develop support policies for employees and affiliates such as freelancers facing online harassment and abuse. For many public-facing industries, including the media, academia, think tanks, and government, engagement on social media is critical to both brand and individual success. Many organizations have policies relating to affiliates’ use of such technologies, but far fewer have support mechanisms for those undergoing online abuse as a result of their work-related online engagement. Employers should consider providing mental health services, support for affiliates’ legal fees and other expenses, such as anti-doxxing service subscriptions. They should also outline clear mechanisms for targets to report such campaigns against them to official communications and human resources staff.
As I have documented and written about the gendered harassment to which I and others have been subject, more has come my way. This work will likely generate some too. But we must keep speaking up; women deserve to run for office, do their jobs, and express their opinions without facing abusers aiming to detract from their prowess, expertise, or ability, while social media platforms turn a blind eye. Yes, this is one of social media’s many “hard problems,” but it is one we must address to build a world that is more equitable, more representative, and more just.
WIRED Opinion publishes articles by outside contributors representing a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here, and see our submission guidelines here. Submit an op-ed at [email protected].
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