Abuse of women on social media

It's always been bad, and now the sad trolls and bully boys have gone full-grown Nazi in greater numbers than ever before.

What is one to do? I've wrestled before with this question but couldn't decide on how to measure the importance of the online world, this seemingly inconsequential and ephemeral flood of chatter and noise. Then a living piece of shit became the president of the US, an act of consecration of obscenity and abuse that will never be forgotten and never forgiven of anyone who supported him, an act that opened the floodgates to hell.

Does it mean going after every idiot on YouTube or Twitter and typing "drop dead, nazi" after every turd they plant? There aren't enough nanoseconds in a year even if you did nothing else.

But what about the handful of personal blogs or columns I follow? Classicist Mary Beard's A don's life, dedicated to themes from ancient history, fell victim of the unbelievably piggish assault on her by Nassim Taleb, whose intellectual worthlessness is matched only by his ego. Trolls nest in the comment section, where interesting people used to post. I used to lurk; should I try harder, or at least give a sign of support?

The woman who writes the "Bitter Gertrude" blog (I recently linked to it) removed one post when a particularly insane troll went after it. This is an obscure blog with few comments or none on most entries and yet she suffers hundreds of attacks, and as usual each of those is disproportionately hateful, not merely oppositional. As Mary Beard writes, it's an endless litany of "rape you, fuck you, cunt" etc.

I used to ignore them same as I supposed the authors ignored them. I used to hope the authors knew somehow we others were there, invisible. The normal people, the fans, the friends.

But how would they know? If we others never say anything, how are they and the world to know? And if we let the imbalance persist and grow in favour of trolls, what does that say?

It pains me, it distresses me, it annoys me, it takes away from my time even more, to say something that should not need saying... but that thing I was always doing, that avoidance, that ignoring, that looking away to the point of staying away--that is not the answer, it was never the answer, and now it feels positively wrong.

The wisest moderator I know says that a good forum is robust to a single troll at a time, but once you have two they start to feed off each other. She recommends a fairly heavy-handed approach of blocking and deleting. Ignoring never works, we aren't seven years old. Third-party moderators may be needed for personal blogs so that the target of the abuse doesn't have to see it in order to delete it.

My own concern is of what will happen when this class of troll discovers LT. The razor-thin line that Tim draws, in what we are on pain of violating the TOS forbidden to call a consequence of his privilege, between "personal attacks" and "political discussion" relies on trolls eventually crossing the line to insult or threaten a particular named individual. This is easily gamed, and the current crop of online trolls are nothing if not good at gaming the letter of the law, to lob horrible abuse directed at all women (or all gay people, all Black people, you name it) and then cry "personal insult!" when someone calls them a bigot in return - and, with the TOS as written and Tim's positions as stated in Talk, be backed up by site policy.

>2 lorax:

One such is already on LT (and bombed this group as well before it went moderated or he was banned from it--not sure what the mechanism is). But there are others less incontinent than that example but spouting the same viciousness and bare lies with no restraint and no pushback from that quarter. But as you say, that "gaming" of the dry letter of the rules is so easy to do, and leaves untouched so much abuse the rules themselves appear to be sneering at the victims.

>3 LolaWalser: before it went moderated or he was banned

Interestingly, simply the installation of a moderator served to resolve the problem. The only action I've taken as the current moderator since appointed was to caution one over-enthusiastic author who found their way onto the site. I guess the first thing every classroom needs to maintain order is a teacher with a ruler. :)

I had to share this great quote from Laurie Penny:

The internet is an inverse Hydra with a hundred assholes: Put down one and two more pop up in his place to tell you your dead dad would be ashamed of you.

The whole piece is well worth reading: https://longreads.com/2018/03/28/who-does-she-think-she-is/

An article from 2017, published in the British Journal of Criminology, available in full:

Online Abuse of Feminists as An Emerging form of Violence Against Women and Girls

Regarding the pool of the respondents surveyed, note it's a UK-based sample with white women representing 88%. A more "unusual" feature is that only 54% of the total are heterosexual--presumably because non-heterosexual women (a smaller minority, in the general population, than 46%) are especially likely to express feminist values.

‘I am not a slapper’: Labour MP hits back at criticism of attire (Guardian)

A Labour frontbencher has shrugged off criticism over an outfit that showed part of her shoulder in the Commons as she spoke at the dispatch box.

Tracy Brabin reported that she received a series of insults over her choice of attire on Tuesday. Her remarks were in response to a Twitter user sharing a photograph of her wearing the outfit and asking: “Is this really appropriate attire for parliament?”

The shadow culture secretary and MP for Batley & Spen said she was “not a slag, hungover, a tart, about to breastfeed, a slapper, drunk or just been banged over a wheelie bin’”...

Priti Patel apologises to Yvette Cooper after Tory activist is jailed (Guardian)

He wrote: “We should have left {with} no deal on the 29th before the whore Yvette got her hands on to it and voted to revoke democracy. She will pay. I’m already organising … to hurt her. Amazing what crackheads will do for £100. I’m going to get her beat up.”