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Two years ago, Emer O’Toole logged on to Twitter and found she’d been swarmed with hateful messages.

They came at her by the hundreds, a small army of mostly men calling her names and threatening her. One user Photoshopped her face onto the image of a naked woman with Froot Loops coming out of her anus.

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While she was able to laugh most of it off, the sheer volume of the attack was overwhelming.

“It was a barrage of nonsensical, targeted harassment,” said O’Toole, a professor at Concordia University’s School of Irish Studies. “It made Twitter unusable for a week. There were hundreds of these people in my mentions. … It was just an intense, viral, misogynistic madness.”

O’Toole’s apparent transgression? She’d written an article about sexism in the dictionary. In particular, how sample sentences in the definitions cited in Oxford Dictionaries tended to reinforce stereotypes about women.

Hours after the article was published, they came after her. She noticed two types of users seemed particularly incensed: online gamers and white nationalists.