They face harassment including death threats and racist abuse. Why are social media sites and police unable or unwilling to tackle the problem?

For the past 16 months, Suzanne Fernandes has been targeted online with racial abuse, pornography and death threats. The two individuals she believes are responsible share many similarities: an interest in far-right politics, an ability to create multiple anonymous fake social media accounts, and past convictions for extreme internet harassment.

Top tech firms urged to step up online abuse fightback Read more

After making 126 crime reports to the British police and numerous reports to Twitter and Facebook, Fernandes feels destroyed and defeated. Both men, who cannot be named for legal reasons, are known to law enforcement agencies and social media companies as convicted social media aggressors, a fact that she believes makes a mockery of the promises of the big tech companies to take such abuse and threats seriously.



Fernandes, a youth worker in London, said: “It’s been a constant, targeted, harassment campaign. There have been threats to kill and rape me. Various accounts sent tweets saying I had 10 days to live and images of extreme pornography were sent to me. This has been the worst time of my life.”

Revelations about the continued activities of the two men comes as the police in England and Wales admit that the scale of harassment, threats and abuse online threatens to overwhelm them.

The sexualised and threatening abuse of Fernandes began when she challenged the racism of a member of the far right on social media – an attempt at so-called counter speech, which tech companies are encouraging across the globe to create a grassroots movement against hate speech on their platforms.

The Guardian wants to engage with readers, but how we do it needs to evolve Read more

But all it did for Fernandes was elicit violent threats. The abuse has drawn in her family, as one of the perpetrators obtained a picture of her son through Facebook and used it to create a fake account from which he sent lurid messages.

Who is responsible for fighting online abuse?

In multiple reports to the Metropolitan police and to Twitter and Facebook, Fernandes has produced evidence of how the men are abusing her, including links which reveal connections between one of her abusers and multiple anonymous social media accounts. Accounts are taken down when she reports them, only to be replaced by new ones, often within minutes.

The Met is investigating the harassment and threats to Fernandes. The force said both men were arrested on suspicion of malicious communication then released on police bail.

Fernandes is growing increasingly frustrated at how long the investigation is taking, and the lack of any effective action by Twitter. In a recent complaint to the social media platform about one of the men allegedly continuing with the abuse while on police bail, Twitter responded by recommending she mute the account, contact law enforcement or “reach out to a trusted individual”.

The latest threats to Fernandes include images of knives and crime scenes, and a warning to watch her back.

Reporting to the police has only led to more abuse. Images of Fernandes and her children were posted on a website hosted by WordPress in early March. The posting read: “She baits people on Twitter to troll her so she can make reports to the police.”

When she attempted to get the images taken down, she received the following response from WordPress, a US-based blogging and website content management company: “WordPress.com is in no position to arbitrate content disputes or make any form of legal judgment on allegations or claims, including defamation.”

Fernandes believes social media platforms need to be held legally accountable for the abuse they host.

“I believe the liability falls with Twitter and others: they should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting convicted trolls who have already been through the judicial system once,” she said. “There are so many reports that Twitter is combating trolls. I can testify that they are not, just on the evidence of this Met police investigation.”

‘Hate speech in droves’ in San Francisco

In San Francisco, Malkia Cyril logs on to Facebook every morning to manage the international and local pages for the Black Lives Matter group. Cyril, the executive director of the Center for Media Justice (CMJ), said it was an arduous task.

“It’s hate speech in droves. The number of horrific, threatening and just awful statements that are being made about black people is out of control,” Cyril said. “I spend hours every day deleting, banning and blocking the hate from our pages.”

Malkia Cyril. Photograph: Center for Media Justice

The comments posted on Black Lives Matter pages are typically a noxious stew of racism, sexism and homophobia. There are racist memes, images of Ku Klux Klan cross burnings, and misogynistic comments about female protesters. By the time Cyril returns to the pages the following day, a new batch of abuse is waiting. “It’s exhausting,” she said. “It takes an enormous toll.”

Cyril, whose work at the CMJ involves fighting for access to the internet for marginalised communities, believes the racism she deals with online reflects racist structures offline.

The Guardian recently revealed that staff at Facebook were reprimanded by Mark Zuckerberg for defacing Black Lives Matter slogans at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters. “The executives who are creating the policies [for social media platforms] are almost always white men, and those who are implementing the policies are 99% white,” she said. “The failure to have a diverse workforce in the tech industry results in policies that support and encourage racism and online bullying.”

After a meeting with representatives from Black Lives Matter, Facebook agreed to shield certain pages, which means flagged hate speech goes up the chain of command more quickly. “I do think that there are good people at Facebook who want to do good things,” Cyril said. “I just don’t think that they’re living in the same world that I am.”

A pattern repeated around the world

As the internet is borderless, so is the abuse. In Australia, Elinor Lloyd-Philipps, a Briton now based in Sydney, started receiving rape threats, harassment and abuse in response to her specialist blog about vintage underwear, the Nylon Swish. While she wryly admits that it was a bit of an oversight not to predict some would see this as titillation, nothing prepared her for the violent, sexualised threats she continues to receive.

“Every day I get messages on Instagram, Facebook, all across my social media – I get dick pics, I get ‘hey baby, how’re you going, do you want to do x, y or z’ every day. I just delete and block those people.”

The Guardian wants to engage with readers, but how we do it needs to evolve Read more

One man sent her about 180 anonymous messages on Tumblr every day for a month. When she blocked him, he created a new account, but the IP address was the same.

Screenshots of the messages make for difficult reading and included multiple rape threats, including one warning he would find her and rape her with wooden poles.

Lloyd-Philipps is able to laugh off the unsolicited sexual advances and imagery, but threats of rape and murder do bother her. Reports to law enforcement have got her nowhere. “The police don’t seem to want to get involved with anything on the internet, which is a little bit scary,” she said. “In the real world, if someone comes up to you and touches you inappropriately, yeah, you can go to the police. On the internet, if I ever complain and say; ‘This has happened, I’m sick of it’, people say; ‘You’re on the internet, what do you expect?’

“There’s no support for women at all, from the police or anyone else.”

DIY justice

When action is taken, it is often as much as a result of investigations by victims themselves, rather than by the tech companies and law enforcement.

Chlo Winfield, 18, from Bristol, was subjected to years of threats of sexual and physical violence from a young man she had met on social media when she was 13 and he was 16.

Initially, Winfield and the boy were friends, then became boyfriend and girlfriend. “He was my first boyfriend, we talked all the time on Facebook, and on Skype,” said Winfield.

But as the relationship developed, he became abusive and threatening. “He started calling me names, like bitch and slut,” she said. “He was watching everything I did and if I didn’t reply to him quickly enough he would lose his temper.” On an anonymous AskFM account linked to him, he sent hundreds of messages a day.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chlo Winfield, 18, who was harassed online by her ex-boyfriend for two years, pictured at home in Bristol. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian

The abuse was sexualised and threatening. “There were messages saying I was a whore and a slut. He accused me of having sex with other people.”

In one contact between them, he threatened to kill her and told her she deserved to be raped, and that all girls like her should be raped.

It was at that moment she went to the police. “They said it wasn’t harassment because I had been responding to his messages,” she said. “But I was insistent, I was in a bad state and I had my GCSEs coming up. I thought, ‘I have got to do something.’ I made a statement to the police and was video-recorded.”

It was down to Winfield’s uncle, who works in telecoms, to provide the evidence for the police in the form of an IP address, linked to the boy’s home town of Dudley, for the emails sent to her from the AskFM account. Winfield then discovered all his messages had been duplicated on to an email account she had used to set up her AskFM profile, but did not use frequently. She handed all the messages to the police.

“I was so determined something should be done, I handed them over and said: ‘Here you go.’”

Shaun Peace, 19, pleaded guilty to harassment in 2014 at Dudley magistrates’ court. He was given an 18-week prison sentence, suspended for 24 months. He has never contacted Winfield again.

Winfield now works to raise awareness of how online abuse is used as a weapon in domestic abuse. “The police kept saying to me: ‘Oh, just delete your account.’ But most people my age will live most of their life online. It should not be my responsibility to remove myself, it’s like I am being blamed.”