Reclaim The Internet is a new UK government “public consultation” campaign claiming to engage the public in a debate about how to stop online misogyny. Previously, I discussed the campaign’s flagship study, which left a lot of questions unanswered, but did inconveniently find that the majority of supposedly “abusive” misogynist tweets were actually made by women (50% by women, 40% by men, 10% unknown).

I talked less about the Reclaim The Internet campaign itself, but warned it showed all the signs of being one of the many new feminist pushes for government Internet censorship. I also predicted that supporters of Reclaim The Internet would likely portray the predictable backlash against censorship as just more online misogyny, which would in turn be used as evidence to support their campaign.

Well that didn’t long. MP Jess Phillips, one of the central supporters of Reclaim The Internet, has recently claimed to have received thousands of supposed rape threats through Twitter. In response, she has not only condemned Twitter for “colluding” with her supposed abusers, but also expressed a desire to pursue criminal charges against those making the Tweets. In addition, Phillips has provided no real evidence of these tweets and basic research reveals that her claims are (at best) extremely exaggerated if not an outright attempt to deceive the public. Phillips’ actions should destroy any illusion that the UK government’s Reclaim The Internet campaign will have any respect for or understanding of free speech online.

MP Jess Phillips - childish, abrasive, snarky, feminist

First, some important background on Jess Phillips. Jess Phillips is a British Labour Party MP who (besides MP Yvette Cooper and a few other MPs) is a driving force behind the Reclaim The Internet campaign. Ella Whelan’s article “Jess Phillips is not my hero” gives a scathing overview of Phillips, who Whelan describes as a brash loud-mouth with no real constant political position.

I possibly have one point of disagreement with Whelan. Phillips has a constant feminist chip on her shoulder. This can be seen in her maiden speech, where Phillips not only repeats the debunked feminist gender wage gap myth, but asks MPs to declare they are feminists and heavily implies opposing her would be sexism:

“…should it not pass[…] I shall know, that like so many before me, I shouldn’t have bothered to speak up. Because after all, I’m just a girl.”

This attitude became evident again last October when Jess Phillips laughed at Phillip Davis when he proposed (@ 14:53:00) a parliamentary debate on men’s issues (higher suicide rate, academic under achievement, health, male domestic violence victims, etc) during the upcoming International Men’s Day. Davis pointed out that there were similar such debates on women’s issues not only on International Women’s Day, but also every month. It seemed only fair to allow a similar debate on men’s issues. However, Phillips was dismissive and childishly suggested the debate would only be allowed when there were an equal number of female MPs. Gleen Pole’s article explains the situation nicely:

“…we have a female politician in a position of power and privilege sniggering at men’s problems and opposing the discussions of men’s issue in Parliament on International Men’s Day, because there are more male MPs than female MPs.



It’s a ludicrous position to take. As Philip Davies rightly argued, there’s a very big difference between men raising issues and the raising of men’s issues.”

As both Davis and Pole explain, while men (and women) often raise issues in parliament, men’s issues (such as those listed by Davis) are actually rarely discussed.

Heequal provides a decent rundown of a lot of what followed. Basically, Phillips (like so many feminists put under the public spotlight) struggled to have her misandry cake (act as a bigot) and eat it too (not face public criticism for her bigotry). She continued to deride (if not outright mock) the idea of International Men’s Day. An interview between her and Davis shows Phillips waffling on whether the debate should be allowed as well as clumsy trying to belittle Davis’ request for a debate by describing it as “a sort of mealy-mouthed "well the girls get one”“ argument.

Phillips continued to behave embarrassingly childish and snarky for an MP, especially on her Twitter feed (Note: click on any screenshot to be taken to its source).

Jess Phillips plays the victim to turn the tables

What’s really important about all this is how Phillips ultimately managed to diffuse much of the criticism against her - she claimed she had received abuse online. This quickly turned her from a anti-male bigot into a feminist matyr-victim complete with her own hashtag:





Any criticism of Phillips (or even simply not supporting Phillips) could be framed as support for abuse of women. The situation also served as a good opportunity for reinforce feminist "right-think”:

Jess Phillips was perhaps at the height of her self-righteous damselling in her October 30th Mirror editorial:

“I cried because, it was a violent and nearly successful attempt to silence me. I have worked with rape victims for the last 5 years. I know sexual violence is not about sex but about power and control. These people wish to control me because I am a woman who speaks her mind. I know that writing this article and speaking about this will incite more comments attacking me. I will cry about them too.”

However, Phillips seemed unable to fully commit to playing the damsel in distress. She seemed wanted to have her victim cake (the political power of victimhood) and eat it too (not be seen as a weak shrinking violet). In a previous November 23th Guardian article she had stated she “doesn’t feel scared. At all”. Compare Phillips October 30th editorial to her November 1st interview on Sky News:

“The truth of the matter is that if any of these people were actually faced with me, they wouldn’t dare, they wouldn’t dare say these things,” she said.



“That’s why I’m not sitting, cowering in my home thinking that anyone who talks about raping me is actually going to do it.”



“I’m not scared. But they would never say this to my face, mainly because, actually, I am quite tough.”

It certainly doesn’t sounds like Phillips felt threatened or that the threats against her were credible. Despite this, the surprisingly large amount of media coverage was largely uncritical of the actual seriousness of the threats. There seemed to be no effort to independently verify Phillips’ claims. Many articles provided no examples of Phillips’ supposed threats beyond Phillips’ own claims. Articles that did include evidence only included the threadbare evidence that Phillips herself appears to have tweeted out - an incomplete screenshot of two posts from an unidentified Voat message board (though it was often mischaracterized as a Twitter or Reddit post):

This is it by the way. Phillips has made mention of an email from Germany where the sender allegedly hoped Phillips would come home to find her “sons hanging”. However, Phillips did not release the email (or even quote the exact wording). If the email actually exists, I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually read more like an impassioned criticism of Phillips’ perceived callousness toward the high male suicide rate (a chief criticism against Phillips) than a death threat. But again, we don’t even know if the email exists.

This screenshot of two Voat posts appears to be the only evidence of any threats toward Phillip regarding her opposition to a debate on International Men’s Day in 2015. The bottom post is cut off and it sounds like the Phillips herself didn’t actually find the posts (or necessarily see their source), but a friend emailed her the screenshot (seemingly on the night of Thursday Oct 29th according to her interview).

First, I doubt Jess Phillips is active on Voat, so it appears very unlikely these comments were actually directed at her. Much more likely it was on a message board where people were talking about her. Second, the two posts aren’t very nice, but neither is actually a clear threat, much as less a credible threat. The first message isn’t a threat, but an explanation of a threat the poster believes someone else should have made - it’s a hypothetical. The second message isn’t a threat, but a disturbing violent fantasy. There is no indication that individual will seriously attempt to do this.

If I really wanted to get conspiratorial, I would point out that Phillips’ name isn’t mentioned in the two Voat posts. Since Phillips didn’t release the source of the screenshot, I can’t verify whether or not the conversation is actually about Phillips. Phillips could have just screenshot two unrelated posts and passed them off as being about her. I have not been able to track down the posts on Voat and the users who made the posts appear no longer active.

Whether the posts are real or invented, Phillips reaction shows she has no sensible concept of what is an actual or credible threat. However, she seems to understand how to turn a flimsy pretext of receiving threats into significant political capital.

BACK TO THE PRESENT - Phillips’ new threat narrative: People are saying they DON’T want to rape her?

Now that I’ve established that Phillips has a major feminist chip on her shoulder and a history of playing the victim with flimsy allegations of online abuse, back to the matter at hand.

Jess Phillips was a major voice (notice the article also doesn’t mention more women tweet “slut” to women in the cited study) in the recent publicity push for the Reclaim The Internet campaign. However, she quickly alleged she was receiving online abuse in response to her support of the campaign:

Notice her language. She didn’t explicitly say these were 600 actual rape threats, but 600 “odd” Twitters notifications “talking about” her rape. What were they saying about her rape? That it is was bad? Were there 600 unique tweets? Were these retweets or likes?

Unfortunately, media coverage of Phillips supposed abuse has been just as obliging and unskeptical as it was in 2015. In many ways, this coverage seems even more conspiratorial. Many headlines will explicitly mention “rape threats” but strangely avoid the term or any mention of a direct threat of rape against Phillips in the rest of the article. Despite the supposed incredible number of “rape threats” on Twitter (which, as we’ll see, is easy to search through) most articles (again) do not provide any examples:

Labour MP Jess Phillips receives more than 600 rape threats in one night

MP Jess Phillips receives more than 600 rape threats after condemning online abuse

Labour MP Jess Phillips receives ‘600 rape threats in one night’

Female Labour MP is sent 600 rape threats in ONE NIGHT after launching a campaign to end sexist bullying online

British MP sent 600 rape threats in one night

MP Jess Phillips hit by more than 600 trolling tweets about rape in one night

All the articles seem to maintain the narrative that Phillips is being threatened despite Phillips’ shifty language about what is actually being written in these Tweets. Many of the articles inadvertently hint at what is really going on. The Daily Mail wrote:

“This time, she spoke out being barraged with responses after responding to a poster who announced “I wouldn’t even rape you”.”[EMPHASIS ADDED]

The Daily Mail is also the only source that seems to have (barely) made any effort to provide evidence of Phillips supposed threats. Notice that none are actually threats of rape (or anything else) toward Phillips. In fact, they are literally the opposite of threats!:

Phillips BBC interview (additional Youtube link) is very interesting. Although the title of the interview is “Labour MP Jess Phillips 'receives 5,000 abusive tweets’”, the low bar reads “Rape Threats to MP”. No actual examples of supposed threats are provided. The host does not challenge Phillips at all as the MP tries to explain away how (despite what the low bar says) people saying they won’t rape her is still significantly abusive:

Phillips: “Their level of discourse is saying they don’t want to rape me. As if raping is something that they do to someone they liked.”

Also the BBC interview shows Phillips really doesn’t even have her numbers straight:

“its about 5000 people, or 5000 notifications or mentions that I’ve got”

Well, which is it? 5000 tweets or 1 tweet that got liked/retweeted 4999 times? Did one person tweet something mildly offensive and then 4999 retweet it to condemn it? Seems important. If only there was same kinda of basic search we could do…oh wait!

Fact-Checking: Funny thing about the Internet Jess, people can search it

Hedley Quintana fact checked Phillips claim by accessing the Twitter API:

“It turned out that if we limit the search using the keywords @jessphillips and rape the obtain 1342 hits. I also tried the keywords @jessphillips and death and I obtained 12 hits.”

Hedley Quintana put this full results and methods Github as well as posting a video showing exactly how he did it. He even released another video showing headlines from major UK media outlets misrepresenting Phillips’ supposed Twitter abuse as well as explaining his methodology in even more detail.

However, if you are less technically minded, you can always just use Twitter’s own search function. Here is a link for a Twitter Search that looks for all mentions of tweets containing “rape” directed to @jessphillips from 2016-05-27 until 2016-05-31 (time period in question - but feel free to expand the search).

As you can see, most tweets appear to be claims that people would not rape Jesse Phillips, which seems to have snowballed into a running joke. The whole thing appears to have started (seemingly inadvertently) with popular anti-feminist/anti-SJW Youtuber Sargon of Akhad.

Sargon has also mocked Phillips reactions in a recent video.

Maybe there is a genuine (though I doubt credible) rape threat hidden somewhere in there. Maybe. Although, if that’s the case I wonder why it hasn’t been held up as an example. None of the rape threats I’ve seen appear threatening or even technically threats. “Not rape” does not appear to be a euphemism for “rape”. It appears people were not tweeting things like “I would not rape till you were bleeding” or “I would not rape you with a knife to your throat while your children watched”. Most people don’t even appear to saying they wouldn’t rape Phillips because she is ugly. Mostly people are just saying they wouldn’t rape her because rape is wrong and find it hilarious that some how Phillips considers this offensive.

On top of this a good portion of the tweets with the word “rape”, appear to be people simply talking about other people saying they wouldn’t rape Phillips

Maybe Twitter took down all the real rape threats?

Some may argue that Twitter possibly deleted the supposed rape threats. However, if Phillips was really dealing with thousands of rape threats, I find it unlikely Twitter could have deleted them all so quickly. Furthermore, you would imagine new ones would appear to take their place. In addition, the UK Stylist article specifically mentions:

“The Labour MP said she was sent around 5,000 abusive tweets in just 36 hours after launching the cross-party initiative Reclaim The Internet, which aims to tackle the misogynistic abuse women face on social media, last Thursday. Of those thousands of tweets, 600 were rape threats - all of which she was subjected to over the course of Sunday evening.



Twitter then responded to the MP’s attempt to report the abuse by stating that the tweets did not "violate” their rules, leading Phillips to brand the social media site as “not safe”.“ [EMPHASIS ADDED]

However, I imagine legitimate rape would threats qualify as "Violent threats” under Twitter rules of service. The worst insult MP Phillips is maybe getting is that people don’t find her sexually unattractive. It mostly seems like people are just having a laugh at a hyper-sensitive feminist politician.

Twitters supposed inaction has caused Phillips to publicly accuse Twitter of “colluding with [her] abusers”. An accusation that is not only ridiculous, but may have legal implications for Twitter.

Jess Phillips calls for criminal charges

The scariest thing isn’t that an elected official is grossly misrepresenting (if not outright lying) about the situation. The scariest thing isn’t that UK media appears to be actively colluding with Phillips to create her false narrative. The scariest thing isn’t that Phillips is trying to propose a standard where social media networks like Twitter are liable for the content of their users. The scariest thing is that Phillips has claimed she will pursue criminal charges in response to her non-threats. At the end of her BBC interview she stated:

“I’ve got to the stage now that I feel that legal action, be it civil or criminal, in some way, is the way to attack these people”

Rather than point out the obviously disturbing implications for free speech online, the BBC host strangely seems to actually suggest (if not encourage) Phillips take legal action.

By the way, if tweeting that you won’t rape someone is considered a criminal offense, Jess Phillips may have difficulty avoiding jail time for her previous statement that she would “knife Jeremy Corbin in the front”.

Conclusion: Phillips’ actions confirm worst suspicions about Reclaim The Internet

Anyone familiar with criticism of feminist politics will recognize Phillips’ actions as textbook “damselling”. This is when a female feminist uses (often supposed) threats toward them to both deflect legitimate criticism and gain political support. These threats often come from anonymous sources, where it is hard to verify the credibility, true intention or authenticity of the threat. Threats are often exaggerated, highly suspect and/or shown to be outright made-up. Furthermore, blame for threats from individuals will often be unfairly spread across a large group (if not the entire “patriarchy”) that may actually be unrelated to the source of the alleged (sometimes made up) threat. Indeed, Phillips did this in 2015, when she kinda did/kinda didn’t blame men’s rights activists for her (two not actual) anonymous “rape threats” in a Channel 4 news interview.

Phillips wasn’t the only MP to damsel for Reclaim The Internet and I doubt she will be the last. However, Phillips false threat narrative is especially disturbing because:

Phillips used a ridiculously low-standard for “threats” and “abuse”; she is either trying to deceive the public or has no sensible concept of what is a legitimate threat UK Media not only avoided seriously interrogating Phillips’ narrative, but seemed to be outright colluding with Phillips to maintain and spread it. Phillips suggests that social media companies can be held responsible for the content of their users Phillips says legal action is the proper, if not necessary, action against people saying possibly not nice (but not libelous or threatening) things about you on the Internet

As one of the driving forces beyond the Reclaim The Internet campaign, we can safely assume that Phillips’ feelings on what constitutes online abuse and how it should be dealt with will be reflected in whatever future action the campaign takes. Jokes, political decent or anything else feminists simply don’t like being labeled as misogyny and misogyny being labeled as illegal. This will likely be the end goal of Reclaim The Internet.

Endnotes:

This was surprisingly difficult to write because of the sheer number of sources available. I’m listing some sources of interest that I did not include in the main article. First and foremost, you should read Phillips’ June 1st 2016 editorial. It is crammed with self-righteous victimhood and subtle rhetorical tricks that attempt to stoke fear and belittle her critics/criticism against her: