The day the first undercover video accusing Planned Parenthood of selling fetal organs was put online, I did what most political writers do when there's breaking news: I tweeted out relevant information. In that case, it was to clarify that the group releasing the video, the Center for Medical Progress, was not actually a medical organization but anti-abortion activists posing as medical professionals. I read more of the coverage, did some other work, and checked Twitter intermittently.

A few hours after sending out those initial tweets, the @ replies column of my TweetDeck went nuts. Tweet after tweet after tweet streamed in. I was a life-hating bloodthirsty ghoul; a soulless bitch; pro-dead-babies-incinerated-as-biohazardous-trash; a sad, degenerate monster; a fucking heartless beast; a human sewer; the female Hannibal; a soulless wino psychopath; an ignorant twat; a Caitlyn Jenner look-alike; an Obama taint-licker; a dumb, sniveling fuckwhistle; perhaps "some type of transgender"; nasty skank trash; and an elitist snot (that one came with a photo of dozens of dead children), among other pleasantries.

I'm no stranger to Twitter harassment and learned a long time ago that there's no point in engaging with people who hurl slurs at you; even taking jerks on Twitter seriously feeds into their false sense of their own importance, so it's best to use what writer Lindy West has called "imperious dismissal." I was on a working vacation near the beach, so I decided to close Twitter and sit outside. I tweeted that I wouldn't be responding because I was busying myself eating guacamole and drinking wine on a deck.

"I'd like to meet her at the Cape and shove the guacamole down her throat. Maybe they can 'harvest' her," came one response.

"Translation: I have sand in my vagina, I'm an abortion ghoul, & I'm getting shitfaced on box wine," came another.

"I just hope Jill Fullapoovic just keeps her legs together. Girl, DON'T REPRODUCE!"

"Were you discussing optimum means of harvesting and selling of baby parts while drinking your wine? Choke on it."

"Jill, Jill, Jill. So beautiful on the outside, so heinous and ugly on the inside. Shame."

"BITCH the baby is STILL MOVING after an abortion. I hope you choke o guacamole BITCH."

"You are the epitome of Satan. In fact, I think you are Satan."

"monsters are to be hunted... To extinction."

"Pure evil on par with ISIS and you're an enabler. Live with it hag."

I had been Twitchied.

Twitchy may be one of the most powerful political platforms online, but its role as an organized harassment tool is almost never discussed. Founded in 2012 by conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, the site has half a dozen editors who troll Twitter for content to post; each post consists of a tweet or series of tweets along with some brief and often outraged commentary. Malkin sold Twitchy to Salem Media, a for-profit Christian company in 2013, but the religiosity of its new owners has not shifted its acidic content. (Malkin and several current Twitchy editors did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment, and Salem Media did not return emails and phone calls requesting comment.)

Twitchy is not the most aesthetically pleasing site, nor is it the most sophisticated. The site uses headlines that read like poor Upworthy imitations ("Ouch! Brit Hume just nutshell-nailed Hillary Clinton with 3 words; She won't like it, but we LOVE it") and illustrates them with the kind of "funny" photos your unhinged uncle might include as attachments to his mass emails, meant to highlight the absurdity of whoever the site is mocking (a picture of Nicolas Cage making a crazy face overlaid with the words "YOU DON'T SAY" is a common one).

But despite appearances, Twitchy is popular. According to Quantcast, Twitchy reaches nearly 2 million unique visitors a month. That's significantly more than many well-known conservative sites, including the Free Beacon, which reaches 641.5K, and it's twice as many as media darlings The Awl and The Hairpin. Twitchy's Twitter account boasts 190,000 followers.

While Twitchy's content is tweet aggregation, its purpose seems to be filling insatiable reader rage. Many of the tweets posted to Twitchy are put on there seemingly for the express purpose of demonstrating how stupid or evil Twitchy believes the tweeter to be (although the site occasionally posts tweets from allies, cheering them on for shutting down enemies). The Twitchy team embeds the tweets into the posts, making it easy for their users to click through and engage with the tweeter directly.

And "engage" they do.

"They sent hordes and hordes of people to my Twitter feed, [their readers] called Penn, it was like a nightmare," Anthea Butler, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose tweets about race and religion have been posted to Twitchy several times, told Cosmopolitan.com. "You see it on the web, but when it's directed at you, it's a whole different thing. I'm an academic. When people are calling me 'nigger' and 'bitch' and 'look at you, you're just a fat slag,' it's all about your physiotype. I got a lot of 'you're dumb' and 'I don't know why Penn would hire you because you shouldn't be an Ivy League professor.' I'm a very strong person, and although I did not lose faith in myself, I lost faith in humanity."

Twitchy, Butler says, is not an equal-opportunity attacker: Going after liberals seems to be a part of their mission, but they also tend to single out women and people of color. She created a Tumblr showcasing some of the Twitter attacks she has received; much if it, she says, came immediately after Twitchy posted her tweets, and much of it is racist, sexist or both.

One recent afternoon, most of the people negatively singled out by name and photo on Twitchy's front page were women: Hillary Clinton, Mia Farrow, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Nancy Pelosi, Wendy Davis, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, though Barack Obama and Joe Biden each got a mention as well. The folks being applauded were mostly white men (actor Adam Baldwin, conservative Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol). Many women say when they are put on Twitchy, the responses are sexualized and sexist; for people of color, a Twitchy post means a waterfall of racism.

"I know that they're coming after me because my Twitter feed would suddenly fill up with half-literate screeching and aborted fetus pictures and people trying to call me bad things but all afraid to actually use dirty words," said Amanda Marcotte, a feminist writer for Slate and Raw Story and a regular Twitchy target. "I'd check Twitchy and they'd have some picture they thought looked scandalous, usually a picture they pulled off Facebook that they disapprove of because I look like I'm having fun in it, with lurid accusations that I'm some sort of horrid, slutty, callous feminist."

Twitchy also sets the language of the harassment through the words editors choose for their posts. The arcane insult "ghoul" is their standard descriptor for anything related to abortion rights; the day the first Planned Parenthood video came out, I was called a "ghoul" via Twitter 28 times (a week later, after another Twitchy post of my tweets, "ghoul" appeared in my mentions 54 times in 48 hours). The same day Twitchy picked up a tweet about the Planned Parenthood video with the term "Lady Hannibal Lector [sic]"and embedded my tweets in another post, 15 different Hannibal Lecter references popped up in my replies. The posts stoke reader anger with lines like "prepare to fume" and accusations that political opponents are "monstrous," "twisted," and "ghastly." Subtle (and not-so-subtle) sexism creeps in too. One recent post refers to me as "sweetie" and asks, "What has Cosmopolitan and Guardian columnist Jill Filipovic's feminist panties in a twist this time?" Within a few minutes, my Twitter mentions were full of tweets calling me "sugar," "bitch," "the Bride of Satan," "harlot," and "old maid."

But the power of Twitchy isn't just Twitter annoyance. The site is part of a broad and influential network of far-right media, including talk radio, blogs, and cable television. In a recent paper from Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, veteran reporter Jackie Calmes details the scope, depth, and impact of the hyper-conservative media web of which Twitchy is a part: It forces Republican politicians to take radical stances that are both out of step with most of the American public and make it virtually impossible for them to actually govern. The result is an increasingly conservative agenda, including moves to defund family planning programs, dozens of attempts to repeal Obama's health care law, vocal opposition to a plan that would have allowed children of unauthorized immigrants to avoid deportation, and the political gridlock that comes with digging into extremism and refusing to compromise.

"All the social media, Facebook, all this stuff has had a huge impact, in that there's a group of people out there for whom everything is immediate," recently retired Republican Rep. Tom Latham told Calmes. "It isn't necessarily verified as being true; there's a lot of opinion stated as fact. And they [conservative media] can arouse a lot of people just instantaneously."

Twitchy also facilitates a sustained campaign to wear down progressive writers, to make the "social" aspect of social media nearly unusable for them, and, often, to threaten their livelihoods.

"This is the Internet-ized version of what has been a huge part of the anti-feminist movement from the beginning," Marcotte said. "This need to zero in on individual women and gawk at them and put all your sexual insecurities out on them has real roots in the abortion clinic protesting movement, where they can show up and find women they know for a fact are having sex and then yell at them. The Internet has allowed somebody to do that from their desks, and that's frustrating to say the least."

Marcotte no longer looks at her Twitter mentions at all — she's deleted that column from Tweetdeck, she says, because "it's a garbage disposal now."

"While intellectually I understand these are a bunch of nimrods and idiots who are literally being pointed in a direction and flung like a bunch of flying monkeys at it, it's still overwhelming sometimes," she said. "But I realized this is not about — in any reasonable measure was this about political engagement or debate or discourse or anything. It was just literally harassment. There was no other value to it. It was meant as harassment, because surely the people at Twitchy know what they're doing."

The people at Twitchy work to maintain a level of plausible deniability, and the site is often characterized as "mocking" liberals. But sometimes, the Twitchy team slips, and it's clear they know exactly how abusive their platform can be. When Slate published an article about the conservative media sites last year and defined getting Twitchied as "the often days-long onslaught of Twitter attention (and, sometimes, abuse) that journalists get after being featured on the site," the Twitchy team's response was to laugh (or, more accurately, "snort" and "snicker"). When one journalist was quoted in the article as saying, "What's not fun is the avalanche of hate it immediately brings to your Twitter page, often forcing you to sign off for the next 24–48 hours," Twitchy's response was, "And is he back for more?" When that same journalist tweeted his concern about getting Twitchied again, they added, "Don't worry. We are sure it will happen again soon enough."

Twitchy's terms of use disallow content that is "fraudulent, unlawful, threatening, abusive, harassing, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, offensive, pornographic, profane, sexually explicit or indecent," but those terms don't seem to be enforced. Some comments do appear to get removed, but many harassing, abusive, and profane ones stay up. A recent one, for example, suggested that the man who killed Cecil the Lion "shot the wrong Cecil(e)," a reference to Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards. Another says, "FEMINISTS have morphed into VICIOUS-MAN-HATING-BABY KILLING-BITCHES, period." Another suggests that liberal journalist Sally Kohn kill herself.

And the readers get the message they should take their abuse directly to the person being Twitchied. "Got blocked on Twitter right after I posted to her feed," one Twitchy reader commented on a post that included my tweets. "She has blocked hundreds. gonna be a busy evening for her. Stop by and say hi to this b i t c h."

Twitchy writers are careful to mention your employer whenever they post about you, and when Twitchy readers take to Twitter, they often try to contact your job to brand you a troublemaker or try to get you fired, either by tweeting at your employer, or taking the extra step of sending an email or making a phone call.

"Basically what they're trying to do is destroy you, mentally, physically, and economically," Butler said, adding that the University of Pennsylvania received an onslaught of hate mail and demands for her firing from Twitchy readers when she was singled out on the site. "They don't want you to live."

Part of the problem, those who have been Twitchied say, is that social media harassment and amped-to-the-max right-wing rhetoric are so standard now that a platform dedicated to combining the two feels like a foregone conclusion. But some who have been Twitchied say there's value in emphasizing just how intentional Twitchy harassment campaigns are. Highlighting the issue might either shame Twitchy into stopping, or at least push both law enforcement and platforms like Twitter to take action.

One sorely needed fix "is teaching people what this is and what they can do to alleviate it," Butler said. "You have to realize there are organizations trolling Twitter looking for things that they can write stupid articles about. Especially for women and women of color, we need to really be attentive when people start making real threats. Law enforcement needs to be better equipped to deal with this stuff. Look what happened with GamerGate — they were cutting off people's livelihoods. Where did GamerGate learn this shit from? Twitchy."

Butler says Twitter also has a role. Twitter's terms of service disallow threats and some forms of harassment, but the kind of engagement Twitchy promotes — an onslaught of rude, aggressive, and sometimes disgusting tweets from dozens if not hundreds of users — doesn't on its face break the rules. If an individual threatens you, he or she might get booted, and you can report a credible threat to the police (although law enforcement are notoriously bad at handling threats made over social media). But if you get called a ghoul 86 times, a Nazi 32 times, and receive half a dozen bloody fetus photos in a little over a week, that kind of volume of hateful and aggressive tweets sure feels like harassment, but it doesn't get anyone removed from Twitter — certainly not Twitchy itself. And journalists and commentators who have been Twitchied know that writing about the site will only invite a torrent on new abuse.

"When you write about them, get ready," Butler said. "They're coming for you."

Follow Jill on Twitter.

Jill Filipovic senior political writer Jill Filipovic is a contributing writer for cosmopolitan.com.

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