Everyday on the internet, people – disproportionately women, people of color and queer people – are abused. How did we get here and what can we do about it?

He must be disappointed by that typo in the first line of the email. That was my first thought when the following landed in my inbox:

“Dear Olivia, What’s you preference: To be sodomized and left to anally bleed until you die or to get raped conventionally before getting your throat cut?”

It might sound shocking and threatening, but I didn’t feel shocked or threatened. This was just another day on the internet, where people – disproportionately women, people of color and queer people – are harassed, abused, bullied, intimidated and threatened. It’s what writer Umair Haque describes as a ceaseless flickering hum of low-level emotional violence.

The women abandoned to their online abusers Read more

At around the same time someone, I assume the same person, signed me up to a mailbot service, which meant I received thousands of unsolicited email newsletter sign-ups within a few hours. Thankfully Gmail’s spam filters learn quickly, but it took a 20 minutes of flagging messages to clean up my inbox – a mild irritation. Meanwhile on Twitter, someone else was sending me pornographic GIFs and asking whether penis size “really matters for a lady”; I blocked him, as I’m sure I will have to block many others in the future in a tedious game of whack-a-troll.

I would love to say that this is atypical, but it’s not. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that this feels entirely pedestrian, just your regular run-of-the-mill rape threats and dreary dick pics. For one of my colleagues, “normal” is dealing with racial slurs or having her profile photo edited to have “jew horns”. For a male colleague, it’s people telling him to commit suicide or saying they want his kids to die.

If we complain about these microaggressions, we’re either overreacting or feeding the trolls. But if we don’t speak up, we’re letting them get away with it. Paralysed by this dilemma, we fall back on swatting the antagonists away like flies and, perhaps as a coping strategy, telling ourselves that it’s normal.

Most of the time, the flies are few and far between. But you only have to look at the relentless campaigns of hate against public figures like Ghostbusters actor and comedian Leslie Jones, Olympic diver Tom Daley or games developer Zoe Quinn to see what happens when the flies form a swarm. It becomes overwhelming, exhausting and incredibly difficult for the individual – or the police – to make case-by-case judgements on what constitutes a credible threat.

“If you’re in the media you are familiar with how things work online, but for an average person these types of interactions could be terrifying,” said Whitney Phillips, author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.

So how did we get here? And what should we do about it?

Many cyberbullies are aggrieved middle-aged white men who feel like they weren’t given the fantasy life they were owed Bailey Poland, author of Haters

Determined bullies have always found ways to antagonize others, but digital tools have given them new powers. Fifty years ago if you wanted to wind up a co-worker you could write anonymous messages and leave them on his or her desk.

“You could tease that person, but there would be no archive and it couldn’t be amplified. It could potentially be upsetting but it wouldn’t be indexed in Google Search,” said Phillips. It’s the ability of Google search to index abuse or what she calls “ambivalent play” that changes the ethical stakes. Your online history follows you around, meaning those targeted struggle to move on and have a fresh start.

Trolling and cyberbullying have been part of the internet since its inception – a side effect of anonymity and unfettered free expression, both critical pillars of the web. Once restricted to niche forums and chatrooms with their own codes of conduct, ubiquitous social media has brought it into the mainstream.

“There used to be so few people occupying those [digital] spaces and the people who were were a lot more homogenous than what you see now,” said Phillips. “More homogenous” means more white, and more male.

“It isn’t just teenagers in their parents’ basements. A lot of them are otherwise very well adjusted normal adult men with wives and children and full-time jobs,” said Bailey Poland, author of Haters.

“Many of them fall into the camp of very aggrieved middle aged white men who feel like they weren’t given the fantasy life they were owed. They tend to take it out on people who are happy, successful or present in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable.”

That’s not to say that white men don’t get harassed online, but that harassment is more frequently directed at members of historically underrepresented populations whose voices have not always been privileged. “The people who have always had their voices taken seriously tend to be the antagonists,” said Phillips, arguing that it comes from a sense of disenfranchisement.

The Trump effect

It’s that same sense of disenfranchisement that propelled Donald Trump to the White House with a campaign that normalized identity-based antagonism.

“He says absurdly offensive degrading things about women and people of color and specific groups whether that’s Mexicans, Muslims, whatever. He says these terrible things and that normalizes hate speech in mainstream discourse. It’s so normal to open up CNN or any news app and see bigotry,” says Phillips.

“The tenor of discourse that Trump and his associates have been engaging in has emboldened some people to say ‘we are in charge now and we can say whatever we want’,” adds Kate Miltner, a PhD student at USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

Trump’s “locker room” comments about sexually harassing women are a reflection of the normalization of violence against women.

“Sexual threats and rape threats are a form of domination that has been used against women for all of time. It ties into seeing women as not fully human and having their value contingent on whether or not they are worthy of raping,” said Poland.

The media, in an effort to draw attention to the bigotry, ends up amplifying it. “Some publications might be trying to troll readers, but some are just calling attention to it. But inadvertently or not it ends up incentivizing more problematic behavior,” said Phillips.

This opens up the vexing question of whether or not to feed the trolls. “I’m wary of that framing as it comes with a victim-blaming undercurrent. The message is ‘if you don’t give them attention you won’t get harassed’,” said Phillips.

Poland suggests keeping a record of posts in case a situation escalates and then reporting the perpetrator where possible. Individuals should make up their minds about whether they respond, mute or ignore, following online safety guides like this one or this one.

Counter-meme

Phillips offers an alternative way to handle such trolls: by creating a countermeme. “Contribute to an active, explicit pushback against these behaviors as opposed to repeating them,” she said. “It’s about taking more control of that narrative, so that the antagonist is no longer the center of the universe.”

Miltner suggests the rest of the online community can help here. “Showing solidarity is important, asking how you can help is important. Basically trying to take a stand and say ‘this is not acceptable’.”

Phillips agrees: “The same behaviors that can marginalize and denigrate and traumatize can really bring a group together, making them feel good and pro-social.”

My paltry effort was to take a screengrab of the email and share it on Twitter with a pithy comment mocking the sender. It was not an act of fear or a cry for help, but an act of defiance: I am not intimidated by you and I am not alone. The post triggered messages of support and wonderful jokes from friends and acquaintances that reminded me of all of the lovely people on the internet.

Olivia Solon (@oliviasolon) It's like Sophie's Choice pic.twitter.com/4AfTcrRQjk

If we’re very generous, we might say that we’re still in the early stages of internet settlement and that we will all start to become more civilized. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and others might rally to create better tools for tackling the low-level abuse and funnelling real threats towards law enforcement.

It’s a start, but not a fix. The disproportionate harassment of women, people of color and queer people reflects underlying social, culturally embodied issues. These are problems that exist offline being brought to attention in new and imaginative ways.

“These problems have nothing to do with the internet, so the idea that we could have an internet solution is erroneous,” said Phillips. “We need to deal with and mitigate systemic racism and sexism. How do you get rid of rape culture? The fact that women tell themselves stories to justify the horrible treatment they receive speaks to the depth of the cultural issues that underpin the behavior.”

The free speech myth

The US and Silicon Valley in particular has a very specific libertarian view of free speech, typified by John Perry Barlow’s 20-year-old Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, which said: “We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.”

Attempts to clamp down on online harassment are frequently described as infringing on free speech, especially in the US. It’s just people expressing their opinions no matter how racist, sexist or unpalatable. And so society appeals to the constitutionally-enshrined right to protect the words of antagonists.

It’s certainly true that censorship is damaging to democracy, but the damage is taking place in the opposite direction. “When you cede the floor to the most violent, bigoted contributors that tends to marginalize and silence members of the group they are targeting,” said Phillips.

That leads to a reduction in the number of voices contributing to discourse, all in the name of free speech. A more robust understanding of free speech is about trying to cultivate and protect the greatest amount of speech from the most diverse groups of people. It’s about having more people talking, not fewer people shouting.

Or, as Phillips eloquently puts it: “Antagonism silences and that infringes people’s free speech far more significantly than telling some asshole to shut his mouth.”