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."