Over half of Americans report targeted online harassment - ADL survey; The Jerusalem Post, June 28, 2023

 ZVIKA KLEIN, The Jerusalem Post; Over half of Americans report targeted online harassment - ADL survey

"A recent survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has revealed on Wednesday a troubling trend of online hate and harassment, affecting more than half of all Americans. The fifth annual survey found that 52 percent of respondents reported experiencing some form of online hate or harassment in their lifetimes, marking a significant increase from previous years.

The survey, which sampled 2,139 individuals across the United States, uncovered a surge in reports of hate and harassment over the past 12 months, affecting various demographic groups. Notably, the LGBT community, Black/African American individuals and Muslims experienced the highest increases in hate and harassment, with rates of 47 percent, 38 percent, and 38 percent, respectively.

Shockingly, transgender individuals faced the highest rate of harassment, with a staggering 76 percent reporting incidents of online abuse in their lifetimes. In the past year alone, 51 percent of transgender respondents experienced harassment, the highest among any reported demographic category."

Colorado bans doxing of public health workers amid rise in online harassment; The Washington Post, May 20, 2021

Meryl Kornfield, The Washington Post ; Colorado bans doxing of public health workers amid rise in online harassment

"Seeking to address the mounting online harassment endured by health workers across the state during the pandemic, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed a bill Tuesday making it illegal to post personal information about health workers, officials and their families that threatens their safety...

The law, which took effect immediately, makes doxing — or sharing a person’s private information such as an address or phone number — a misdemeanor. Violators could face up to 18 months in jail and a $5,000 fine.

Across the country, workers on the front lines of the pandemic have reported receiving threatening calls and vandalism at their workplaces and homes for being the messengers about masking and other public health precautions. Despite a marked rise in bullying of health-care workers globally, officials acknowledge rampant reports are only the “tip of the iceberg.”"

 

Kelly Marie Tran: I Won’t Be Marginalized by Online Harassment; The New York Times, August 21, 2018

Kelly Marie Tran, The New York Times; Kelly Marie Tran: I Won’t Be Marginalized by Online Harassment

"Editors’ note: The actress deleted her Instagram posts this summer in response to online harassment. Here she speaks out for the first time...

"I want to live in a world where children of color don’t spend their entire adolescence wishing to be white. I want to live in a world where women are not subjected to scrutiny for their appearance, or their actions, or their general existence. I want to live in a world where people of all races, religions, socioeconomic classes, sexual orientations, gender identities and abilities are seen as what they have always been: human beings.

This is the world I want to live in. And this is the world that I will continue to work toward.

These are the thoughts that run through my head every time I pick up a script or a screenplay or a book. I know the opportunity given to me is rare. I know that I now belong to a small group of privileged people who get to tell stories for a living, stories that are heard and seen and digested by a world that for so long has tasted only one thing. I know how important that is. And I am not giving up.

You might know me as Kelly.

I am the first woman of color to have a leading role in a “Star Wars” movie.

I am the first Asian woman to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair.

My real name is Loan. And I am just getting started."

The One Law That’s The Cause Of Everything Good And Terrible About The Internet; HuffPost, August 6, 2018

Paul Blumenthal, HuffPost; The One Law That’s The Cause Of Everything Good And Terrible About The Internet

"“We were living in an age where people were talking about the internet like it was a utopia. The problem with utopias is that they are really, for lack of a better word, lies,” Mary Anne Franks, the co-founder of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, told HuffPost. 

“What happens when Congress tells all these corporations, all these intermediaries, ahead of time that nothing’s ever going to happen to you?” said Franks, who is also a University of Miami law professor. “You’ve really got to ask what kind of corporation is going to spend the money or the resources or the time on developing anything like a robust response to harassment when they don’t have to...

“It’s a problem that they’re 10 years behind on,” Franks said. “This is the kind of thing that if you truly wanted to tackle the problem of online abuse you have to do it at the design stage, not on the backend.”

The problem was at the design stage. These companies knew that they would never be legally liable for any of that harassment."

Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer; Salon, August 5, 2017

Mark Peters, Salon; Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer

"The commercial success is an especially delicious rebuke to anyone who thinks diversity is killing Marvel. The issue of gender in comics is timelier than ever thanks to a depressing recent incident on Twitter, which should be the name of the Norse realm of the trolls. A group of female Marvel editors were recently blasted with online harassment just for posting a picture of them drinking milkshakes. This picture, no different from thousands posted online every day, somehow drew angry trolls out their holes, issuing rape threats and complaining about how women and SJWs are ruining comics. This burst of ugliness provoked the #makeminemilkshake hashtag, which catalyzed an outpouring of support.

You don’t have to be Heimdall the all-seeing to notice that female Thor is more important than ever in a world where women are treated like garbage, by garbage people, just for daring to work in the comics industry. So let the Odinson keep playing with his ax and keep that hammer right where it is, Marvel."

Black woman inundated with racist abuse while tweeting for @Ireland; Guardian, 8/22/16

Bonnie Malkin, Guardian; Black woman inundated with racist abuse while tweeting for @Ireland:

"A black British woman who was chosen to tweet from the @ireland account for a week has been subjected to a barrage of racist abuse, forcing her to take a break from Twitter.

Michelle Marie took over the account – which is curated by a different Twitter user in Ireland each week – on Monday. She introduced herself as a mother, blogger and plus-size model.

Originally from Oxford in England, she wrote she had settled in Ireland and “it has my heart”.

However, just hours after taking over the profile – which is followed by nearly 40,000 people – the abuse began."

The Rise of the Internet Fan Bully; New York Times, 8/12/16

Amanda Hess, New York Times; The Rise of the Internet Fan Bully:

"Normani Kordei, a member of the girl group on the rise Fifth Harmony, sat for a lighthearted Facebook Live interview earlier this month. Within a week, she had been chased off Twitter by a mob spewing racist insults.

“I’ve not just been cyber bullied, I’ve been racially cyber bullied with tweets and pictures so horrific and racially charged that I can’t subject myself any longer to the hate,” she wrote. Her account has been silent since.

Online harassment has become a depressingly common workplace hazard for people of color in the public eye. Last month, the “Ghostbusters” star Leslie Jones temporarily quit Twitter after weathering a deluge of racist abuse...

The incident illuminates some strange similarities between the bands of internet trolls stalking the web and the legions of online fans seeking to stir up some drama. They both know that the most hurtful online weaponry to wield against black women include images of apes, threats of lynching and a tossed-off N-word."

Judge compares offensive Facebook posts to football in sentencing Sydney man; Guardian, 7/28/16

Elle Hunt, Guardian; Judge compares offensive Facebook posts to football in sentencing Sydney man:

"Research from Our Watch and Plan International Australia found 70% of young Australian women aged between 15 and 19 believed online harassment and bullying to be endemic.

Siobhan McCann, the policy manager for Plan International Australia, said the majority of girls and young women received some sort of online abuse every day, but only one in three said they would report it.

“We wonder if this is because young women don’t feel supported by the legal system.

“We hope today’s small victory sends a message that abusing women in the digital space is just as legitimate a crime as abuse on the street or at home. And we hope trolls will take note that they can be charged and tried for it.”"

Banning Leslie Jones’s trolls won’t change a thing — hate is still the norm online; Washington Post, 7/20/16

Mikki Kendall, Washington Post; Banning Leslie Jones’s trolls won’t change a thing — hate is still the norm online:

"This is not just a matter of speech, despite the persistent notion that online harassment is easy to escape because in theory you can close the tab or turn off the computer. Online harassment spilled offline years ago. Harassers may imitate a deceased parent, contact employers in an attempt get a target fired or track someone down and drive them from their home. The last is often accomplished via SWATting, a tactic where a harasser files phony reports alleging a hostage situation or something similar so that police will in theory send the SWAT team into their target’s home.

Can we really claim that the trolls are outside the norm when the norm dismisses their behavior or even supports it on flimsy free speech grounds? After all, the people behind those keyboards sending hateful messages and imagery can vote. They can work on political campaigns; they can run for election. Ignoring bigots in our midst and failing to take them seriously can have a negative impact on everyone.

People like Yiannopoulos and his supporters are the symptom, but the real disease is the way that bigotry is being normalized as something harmless. It’s not. Some of the world’s darkest moments have happened because hate of “the other” spread like wildfire and stripped people of empathy, reason or basic human decency."

Polish media in UK shocked by post-Brexit hate crimes; BBC News, 6/28/16

BBC News; Polish media in UK shocked by post-Brexit hate crimes:

"Police are investigating several cases, including racist graffiti daubed on the Polish and Social Cultural Association in London, and cards with the words "Leave the EU, no more Polish vermin" being posted through the letter boxes of Polish families and distributed outside primary schools in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.

Anecdotal reports of such abuse have also appeared widely on social media in the UK.

"Had to issue a red card to the family of patient who were abusing a Polish nurse. They told her 'pack your bags as you will be deported soon'", posted @secret_nhs, an anonymous Twitter account purportedly written by an NHS manager."

Social Media, Where Sports Fans Congregate and Misogyny Runs Amok; New York Times, 4/28/16

Juliet Macur, New York Times; Social Media, Where Sports Fans Congregate and Misogyny Runs Amok:

"DiCaro said she recorded the video of the mean tweets with the hope that it would change some people’s minds about harassing others on social media. She has two teenage sons, and she wants them and the younger generation to know what’s acceptable — and what’s not.

How does this abuse end? DiCaro said there needed to be more diversity in sports media. She lamented that sports was still a man’s world, and would be at least for the near future, leaving the few women in it as targets for some men who don’t want them in their boys’ club.

“It’s sort of like separating a weak antelope from the pack,’’ she said. “I think guys recognize that.”"

Cassandra Clare Created a Fantasy Realm and Aims to Maintain Her Rule; New York Times, 4/23/16

Penelope Green, New York Times; Cassandra Clare Created a Fantasy Realm and Aims to Maintain Her Rule:

"The place Ms. Clare occupies in publishing — and the work she does to keep herself there — is emblematic of the burdens and boons fan culture bestows on so many fantasy authors. Deeply possessive of the characters Ms. Clare has created, the fans can turn on her for plot directions they don’t approve of, or for the ways in which the television show diverges from the books. (Ms. Clare has no role in the TV series.)

Fantitlement, as this phenomenon is known, has raised her fortunes while at times it has bedeviled her, as it has so many of her peers. Laura Miller, a books and culture columnist at Slate who has written about fan culture, likened Ms. Clare’s experiences to that of George R. R. Martin, the “Game of Thrones” author whose fans grew so angry at his publishing pace that some created a blog, “Finish the Book, George.”"

The dark side of Guardian comments; Guardian, 4/12/16

Becky Gardiner, Mahana Mansfield, Ian Anderson, Josh Holder, Daan Louter and Monica Ulmanu, Guardian; The dark side of Guardian comments:

"Comments allow readers to respond to an article instantly, asking questions, pointing out errors, giving new leads. At their best, comment threads are thoughtful, enlightening, funny: online communities where readers interact with journalists and others in ways that enrich the Guardian’s journalism.

But at their worst, they are something else entirely.

The Guardian was not the only news site to turn comments on, nor has it been the only one to find that some of what is written “below the line” is crude, bigoted or just vile. On all news sites where comments appear, too often things are said to journalists and other readers that would be unimaginable face to face – the Guardian is no exception.

New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.

Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.

And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men...

At the Guardian, we felt it was high time to examine the problem rather than turn away.

We decided to treat the 70m comments that have been left on the Guardian – and in particular the comments that have been blocked by our moderators – as a huge data set to be explored rather than a problem to be brushed under the carpet.

This is what we discovered."

He told me he’d “cut out my kids’ tongues”: The experience with online harassment I can’t forget; Salon.com, 3/13/16

Darlena Cunha, Salon.com; He told me he’d “cut out my kids’ tongues”: The experience with online harassment I can’t forget:

"According to the Pew Research Center, 26 percent of young women on the Internet have been stalked, and 23 percent have been physically threatened. Of all people who have experienced online harassment (40 percent of all Internet users), 26 percent did not know the real identity of the perpetrator. While there are currently cyberstalking laws, they are hard to enforce, and victims must know their harasser’s identity to take him to court. And in 2010, those laws didn’t yet exist at all. The police told me there was nothing they could do. With no other recourse, I started checking on my children two or three times a night, waiting for an attack that never happened."