Once a month, Leslie Mac braces herself to purge her Twitter handle from various lists. It's been a part of her routine for several years now after her first experience being bombarded with hateful messages through a list whose sole purpose seemed to be targeting other users.

On a Friday in May, just a few days before her scheduled cleansing, Mac saw a number of lists that wouldn't make the cut. Since her last purge, Mac, a social and political activist, was most recently added to a Twitter list entitled "Black Racists." She rattled off the names of a few more, with words like "idiots" and "SJWs" in the titles.

In a slow month, Mac said, she will get added to about four or five of these negative lists. During more politically charged times, it spikes to anywhere from 12 to 20 lists in a month.

Twitter lists allow users to create a curated public or private feed of tweets from just the users added to that list. For example, someone might create a list of comedians they follow or people who tweet about a topic they are interested in keeping up with.

But like many well-intentioned tools of the internet, some users have figured out how to use Twitter lists for more nefarious purposes. Half a dozen women interviewed for this article shared their experiences becoming targets of harassment after being added to lists or similar mechanisms.

Sometimes, the list names sound innocuous. Other times, they are outwardly hateful. Either way, these women now know the telltale signs they were added to a list that effectively places a bullseye on their accounts: a flood of peculiarly similar tweets, repeated hot-button phrases like "libtard" and commenters who have no followers in common with them.

"It sounds like some sort of puzzle, and it's really been such a disturbing thing to have all of these triggers that I'm always looking for," said Mac, who has hired people to help her manage the security of her online accounts. Mac said she now tries to provide a barrier between the harassers and her voice by posting on places like Patreon that require users to pay a small fee to access her work.

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Sydette Harry, an editor at the web browser company Mozilla, said she checks regularly for the signs she was added to a malicious list, something that happens "at least two to three times a week."

"If I end up on a list … and all I see is the first 30 to 40 people are my friends but specifically my friends of color, specifically my black women friends, and that person's account is less than two months old and they don't have any content, that's a bot or a hostile account. I don't even have to think about it," she said. "It's just part of my day now, which says something about my social media experience, which is at least once every other day I look through what lists I'm on."

Twitter says it's well aware of the issue. In 2017, its safety account shared that users would no longer be bothered with notifications when they've been added to lists. Two hours later, it reversed the decision, calling it a "misstep" after users responded with outrage and concern that they would no longer be able to keep tabs on the harmful lists to which they were added.

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In an emailed statement for this article, a Twitter spokesperson referenced the 2017 incident and said it "quickly worked to introduce notifications in the experience" following users' feedback.

"While we recognize that there is more work that can be done to make lists healthier, this was a first step and we continue to improve our service, rules and tools to keep people safe everyday," the spokesperson said.

Before blocking the list's creator to remove herself from a list, Mac said she investigates how that person found her page to begin with. Sometimes, she finds that one of her tweets was posted to a forum like 4chan or Reddit that has pointed abusers to her account. In those cases, she may decide that deleting the tweet entirely would be most effective to mute the abuse.

"It's natural to have people who don't agree with you on Twitter… it's when it's so clear that it's a proliferation and they're saying the same thing even when they're saying it in different ways and they're targeting a specific tweet" that it's coming from an outside platform, Mac said.

Since Twitter decided to keep notifications for lists intact, not much has changed to make the feature safer, users said. Twitter's own help pages aren't that useful for understanding how to get off of a list, according to users, who said they've cobbled together solutions from the internet or followed friends' advice.

Some have even created their own tools to try to block known harassers from discovering their profiles. An app called Block Together says it is "intended to help cope with harassment and abuse on Twitter" and uses lists toward that end. Users can share the lists of accounts they block so that others can subscribe and block those accounts from their own profiles. The Google Chrome plugin Twitter Block Chain similarly lets users block all of the people following a particular account.

Using these types of tools have been the only effective way to tune out the harassment for author Celeste Ng. Before discovering them, she said she tried a number of tactics to ward off abusive messages: ignoring them, responding with kindness and even donating $5 to an organization like the ACLU that she assumed would be counter to the abuser's values.

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"I think every time this happens I kind of develop a new strategy," said Ng, who added she was not aware of being placed on Twitter lists but has been targeted through pointed tweets that similarly direct abusers to her account. "That was all I could come up with before I turned to these technological tools and those are a lot more effective because it stops the messages before it gets to me."

Shireen Mitchell, an entrepreneur whose work has focused on tech and diversity, said the informal lists Ng described is a sort of workaround that makes it harder for targeted users to remove themselves. On a formal Twitter list, users can escape by blocking the creator. To get around this, some harassers will target others by tagging several handles in a tweet. This approach makes it more difficult for users to remove their names without having Twitter delete the message entirely.

Ng said the only other effective strategy she's found to ward off abuse has been wielding the power of her own following. Ng occasionally exposes the abuse she receives to her 112,000 followers on Twitter, in part to get the company's attention. Ng said she tries to be vocal about the topic "because I can afford to."

"I've heard from other writers with much smaller follower numbers that they're scared to talk about it," she said. When a user has a small number of followers, she added, "it's easier for the hate messages to just be like everything you see."